Glenrothes 11yo
Alistair Walker Infrequent Flyers | 59.1% ABV
Darker is better, right?
I thought “The Glenrothes” was a distillery in Glenrothes, Fife. There we have it. Stupid Doog.
I’ve only ever known of one Glenrothes, and it’s the town we used to avoid as yoofs, except if we wanted to run the gauntlet — the hard folk lived in Glenrothes, and, being wee wimps, we stayed away. A semi-gridified road network surrounds the bustling residential zones, bashed unapologetically against a growing tech zone, where dreams are hard won.
Amazon once had its main warehouse here, positioned to take advantage of the wide artery of roads slicing neatly through the centre, but Glenrothes was originally created to support the local mining industry, like a lot of the wee places in Fife. Again like a lot of wee places in Fife, it has been reluctantly modernised whilst keeping a foot firmly in the past in attitudes and outlooks — although, to be fair, I’ve not been there in quite a while. Maybe it’s now the modern mecca of progressive thinking.
A lot of heavy industry is clumped along vast straight roads in Glenrothes, connected by a spaghetti of interchanges. You feel like you’re on a perpetual approach road; you always seem to be joining a roundabout. Glenrothes is known as the administrative capital of Fife with hubs of Police, Transit, Council and Commerce stationed here. If there was an overarching sentiment for this place, it would be bald coldness — it’s a resolutely concrete place. Diageo have situated their main bottling plant and a vast array of warehouses on a giant site just to the east, in nearby Leven.
The cold feeling I had for Glenrothes continued even after I began looking more closely at whisky. I neglected to register the word “Speyside” written clearly on the label of “Whisky Maker’s Cut - Soleo Collection” in my growing horde, and I only lowered those eyebrows to an inquisitive frown when I took the grenade-shaped bottle out to the garden in the summer of 2021 to photograph it. Reading the small text at the bottom of the label, it dawned eventually upon my Neanderthal brain that there was another place called “Rothes”.
Well, it turns out that where this whisky is made isn’t where the hard folk fight and a steady river of cutting fluid flows but rather up in the Speyside whisky region! The town of Glenrothes in Fife was given the “glen” prefix to avoid confusion.
The 48.8% ABV of the Maker’s Cut and its amusingly girthy bottle notwithstanding (you need long fingers to securely grip this bottle properly), I didn’t really take a shine to this whisky. I drammed it down to almost one third remaining and still felt oddly unmoved by it. My overall impression was that of generic spicy red fruit — I have looked for notes in the wee notebook I kept before moving to the digital world of note keeping, but nothing is found. It seems this wee rotund red bottle left little impact. However, I also need to remember that in the summer of 2021, I’d only been properly interested in whisky for a matter of months.
I tried again in April 2022, when my brother-in-law brought a bottle of The Glenrothes 10yo to our Strontian hideout — a yellow and black-labelled beauty. As far as presentation goes, I really like the stubby wee bottle and its simple labelling. This expression too was from the “Soleo” collection named in reference to the process of sun-drying the grapes that are used to make the sherry which is then casked and matured before being decanted, allowing the barley distillate to be filled in its place which is then also matured before being decanted to give us the 10-year-old Soleo Collection from The Glenrothes Distillery, Rothes. A bit of a tedious link there, but that’s the truth of it, your honour.
I wasn’t taken with the 10yo either, sorry to say. It was a bit weak and a bit meh and a bit blah — but then, I’d been enjoying quite a lot of higher ABV stuff shortly before it. This, by the way, was during the holiday in which I rinsed my father-in-law’s 21-year-old Bunnahabhain from Adelphi that he’d brought along for all of us to enjoy. I certainly did enjoy it. That was, after snapping the cork off and pushing the flakes of cork that remained into the bottle, then panicking about the fact that this expensive whisky now had hunners of wee bits of cork floating around in it, then straining it through a flour sieve (because necessity is the mother of incorrect utensils), then decanting it back into the now-cleaned bottle…and then relieving the bottle of all its contents before anyone else had a chance to ask why there was cork floating in the whisky. Aye, it was a good holiday, sure enough.
So I’d had two mediocre drams from the Rothes stills. But when I started seeking and destroying the Alistair Walker Whisky Company’s Infrequent Flyers range, the thought of another boring bottle didn’t dissuade me from picking up not just one, but two of these Glenrothes beauties. I looked at the independently bottled whisky and thought, “I have to try that!” One simple reason flashed across my pea-brain: the colour of the whisky inside.
I was still in a bit of a sherry intro phase after enjoying the gateway Glengoyne and following up with bottles from Glenfarclas, Aberlour, and GlenDronach; I was chasing the same cinnamon, Christmas cake thread that Dumgoyne had revealed to me. So when I saw how dark this whisky was, and at a not inconsequential 59.1% ABV, together with a lovely aquamarine label attached, I just had to have it. And I also had to have a backup, for when I definitely loved it and drained the contents dry after a week.
The opening dram from the first bottle was a wake-up call. I didn’t know it fully yet, but I was on the downwards slope of sherry and the upwards crawl of bourbon-matured whisky. The label details the whisky as being a PX Sherry Finish, yet all the info I’ve found online points to it being fully matured in a PX puncheon — a word to Alistair reveals not much more other than it was finished in PX for 9 months. Regardless, it’s amongst the two darkest whiskies I’ve ever seen (the other being a Miltonduff from the same indie bottler). Whisky is for drinking, so I opened this up, and one flavour note assaulted my nose, face, ears, and eyes: raisins.
Review
Alistair Walker Infrequent Flyers Glenrothes 11yo, Cask 6343
PX cask finish, 59.1% ABV
paid £80
Raisins, raisins, raisins. I must have poured perhaps 5 or 6 drams before I started including a sample of it for those already receiving other samples — as a way to share this quite remarkable experience. To have a liquid that was nigh-on 60% deliver such a colossal face whack of those wee dried grapes — but in a soft, approachable way — was unique to me. The nose: packet of raisins. The palate: packet of raisins.
When I was maybe 8 or 9 years of age, my Gran would drag us from her wee flat in Oxgangs Avenue, where she’d bided for almost 30 years at that point, to the nearby upper-echelon hotspot of Edinburgh called Morningside. On the high street in Morningside was a shop that sold dry goods: pasta, oats, rice, lentils, split peas, you name it. But the concept of this shop was that of the recent resurgence: plastic-free shopping. You’d take your own container to the shop, weigh it, scoop what you want into said container, weigh it again, and pay for what you’ve scooped. There were big barrels of porridge oats beside muesli lined up along the floor with clear acrylic split-semi-circle lids that flapped open to reveal the plentiful reserve of sustenance inside. A giant bakelite trowel buried inside the powdery grains that had to be dug out for use. There were vats full of dried fruits, bombay mix, or cornflakes. It was quite a place, but that sort of shop was common back then, likely before either health and safety got involved, or unhinged psychos started burying sharps or other shite in those very deep buckets of food. Ah, the halcyon days when trust was bestowed upon the public.
Well, I say all that to say this: the nose of this whisky took me right back to that place, where the oaty, veggie, dark fruit smell permeated every facet of the shop. I can even remember the colour of the barrels, which by the way were made from cardboard-like postal tubes, but half a metre in diameter: faded teal. The fluorescent lighting hummed loud against a pin-drop silent ambience, and a despondent expression hovered above the sharply pressed tunic of the shopkeeper. There might, or might not, have been a tartan trim to that tunic — I can’t recall. Isn’t that fantastic, though, to suddenly have thrust upon my waking thoughts a vivid memory that has sat, undisturbed, for decades, only to be released by the smell of whisky? Memory brought back to life through boiled barley.
The bottle of The Glenrothes remained thus: a memory jogger for raisin-filled Gran jaunts. I could say it was one dimensional, but to be honest, I don’t think I ever analysed the bottle enough whenever I did decant a wee dram into my glass. I simply luxuriated in the magnificence of memory and fruity decadence. Soon enough the bottle was riding quite low, owing to my sharing and occasional self-sampling, and in a moment not that long ago, I decided that I would soon try and shift onto the second bottle sitting in my cupboard. It wasn’t worth keeping at the expense of something else that could ignite my senses in a different way.
Christmas day arrived and went, along with the opening of the Dornoch SRV5 and Scapa 12 — both quite light drams — and the Glen Scotia Callander single cask bottle I had in reserve, too. Yet something was calling at me throughout the short holiday (which I was leaning into quite heavily). I looked up at my illuminated super-shelves one evening and wondered what was shouting. It couldn’t have been the entire shelf of Ardnamurchan, for I’d just concluded my Ardnageddon piece and was happy to choose other drams for a while. It wasn’t the Cadenhead’s Warehouse Tasting bottles, for those were too…bright. It was darkness I craved, and the only bottle on that upper shelf that stood alone in the darkness was that of The Glenrothes.
And wouldn’t you know, this time — through the more critical contracting cataracts of Dougie Crystal’s wibbling eyeballs — there was more to be found.
Nose
Raisins. Dark fruit berries. Long stewed apples — apple juice. Ginger spice. Chocolate covered raisins. Non-alcoholic Christmas pudding.
Palate
Strawberry syrup. Newspaper print. Gingerbread and ginger snaps. Raisins, dark fruits, milk chocolate raisins, gingerbread and spice, Christmas pud. Dates. Those apples appear in a glazed apple upside down cake. Some biscuits — bashed up digestives on the base of a chocolate ganache tart.
The Dregs
That time of year demands a certain dram, as has been decreed by most whisky exciters. I missed out on last year’s seasonal shifts because I was too busy cramming glass bottles of whisky into my stash to notice. Dark nights and dreary weather suit deep, richly coloured whiskies, especially those of a sherried persuasion. I’m not a sherry-matured whisky seeker, but sometimes my face just wants something to satiate my dark inner desires, and for me this bottle was the perfect companion for the period between Christmas and the moment I realised I had to resume work in the morning. Cosy nights spent with socks inside woolly slippers, watching The Green Mile for the millionth time and still crying when John Coffey rides the lightning — The Glenrothes was there to convert those sad tears into happy tears.
It is richly fruity, darkly fruity: raisins and dates. It’s sweet, robust and plentiful in the flavour department. It coats your entire head in an oily film of tangy sweetness. But there’s a beautiful little tartness in the stewed apples and warmed apple juice. There’s the gum-shredding old school gingersnaps and a lot of Christmas pudding to be found, too. Water tames the heat and brings out the fruits further, amplifying what was already a dense wall of glossy cake.
As 2023 kicks off and my attitudes towards whisky shift subtly in the sniper direction — rather than the blunderbuss direction of 2021 — I can’t help but think that shifting the unopened backup bottle of this whisky would be a mistake. I am a lover of the sensory experiences whisky can deliver so magnificently, and knowing that the spring and summer will arrive before I’m ready for it, and that my whisky drinking will inevitably shift to lighter, zingier drams, the same too will happen as autumn and winter arrive — no doubt before I’m ready. At that point, when the lights are switched on in the evening and the boiler is reluctantly reengaged, I’ll turn to my whisky stash and seek out a dark dram that can warm my insides and offset the gloom of short days and cold feet. At that point I’ll think of The Glenrothes, the open bottle of which, by that point for sure, will be depleted, and I’ll rue the day I passed the other bottle on. I’m also betting that in 11 months’ time, when the Christmas pudding is being served up and I’m thinking about what dram to drink once the majestic blue-flaming flourish has petered out, that The Glenrothes 11yo from the Alistair Walker Whisky Company will fit the bill like brandy butter fits Christmas pudding. That is to say, beautifully.
Was this worth £80 then? Would I pay £80 knowing what this whisky delivers in smell and taste? I have to say that I would. It’s not the most complex of whiskies, and it doesn’t flitter from this to that and back again like the Abbey Whisky Benromach (which was similar in cost). It opens up with time and water to reveal more of the same — yet undeniably delicious — notes of dark fruits and spice. This is a quartet rather than an orchestra. It’s a bit rich, financially, to pay so much and find such a restricted experience, but for what it is and what it delivers, there’s no doubting the quality and worth. It’s a 7 because, despite me really enjoying it now, it isn’t “something special”, as dictated by our scoring. It is very good indeed, though. I want to see how it fares in a year’s time when my palate has developed for another 12 months — it might very well become an 8, or it might drop to a 6. That’s the beauty of whisky and spending the time working on your ability to smell and taste.
Regardless, I’m not letting go of the unopened bottle, even if it’s £80 that could be used to find (possibly several) new smell and taste experiences. I’ll take the hit and not think twice about cracking that seal next winter, and I’ll luxuriate once more in the dark fruit frenzy that follows.
Score: 7/10
Tried this? Share your thoughts in the comments below. DC