Glen Scotia Victoriana
Official Bottling | 54.2% ABV
Score: 7/10
Very Good Indeed.
TL;DR
In 2022’s equation of price x experience x availability, the maths make sense
When Is The Next Best Thing Better Than The Best Thing?
It’s the whisky that’s pined for. It’s the bottle to have in your stash, in your “investment” portfolio or just to flash up on the ol’ Instahoot to show that you’re cool, too. Better still, snap a selfie in front of your groaning shelved, multiple bottle deep horde of “S” emblazoned bottles, because you never know, someone might think you’re telling porkies about your devotion. The eternal struggle of the whisky class of 2022 appears to be the availability of the whisky tout de suite: Springbank. And, in what’s looking like a further sucker punch, anything that’s produced by the neighbouring Glengyle distillery too.
What a time to be alive, when certain whisky can’t be found to drink because a select few people have decided it’s worth a lot more undrunk. Think about that for a second - the loosener of lips, the melter of ice, the coupler of the decoupled - whisky - is not to be found anywhere it’s usually found (on shelves) because a growing group of fungibly finance focused philistines have decided that they can make some quick bucks by leveraging glass vessels filled with barley water, that just so happens to be suffering from a good dose of scarcity. Oh the travesty of not having any whisky to drink. But wait, don’t fret! Look over here! For if you care to unburden yourself of FOMO, popularity shackles or whatever else gets your motor going about the Springdrought of ‘22, you’ll see that there’s more whisky around than there ever has been. Really!
I’ve not heard about a lot of things, because I don’t exist in every sphere where things are spoken. You don’t know what you don’t know, and I didn’t know there was a thing in whiskyville called “the Campbeltown funk”. It wasn’t until I was knee deep in whisky that I first heard the term, and it was (again) off the back of an online video review. The Campbeltown funk? Turns out it's a smell and taste signature that’s exclusive to a region of the world where only three distilleries operate. Three small little places that go about creating whisky in their own way, using their own methods and existing as they (almost) always have - producing great whisky to the maximum capacity of their facilities. But the amount of whisky produced (exhibiting that very unique signature) turns out to be far too little for the insatiable demand that is being asked of them. Hence the befuddling scenes currently playing out in London like a middle-aged, slightly greying Street Fighter. A prominent whisky celeb thinks the culprits might be whisky mules catering to their overlord’s whims. Whisky mules!
Look, Springbank is good, ok? There, I said it. I like the 10 year old, but that’s only because it’s the only bottle I’ve ever been able to find and/or afford. I’ve tried little samples of some other Springbank variations and those were good, too. But… just good. Liking something is not the same as loving something, and when it comes to Campbeltown funks, I seem to be marching to a different beat. What do you do when the “best” is not around? Naturally you look for the next best, and in Campbeltown that is increasingly purported to be Kilkerran. But that too is becoming Springbanksy in its elusiveness, so what then - the next best of the next best? We’re approaching Inception levels of layers here, but bear with me, for the best twice removed is, in my eyes, the better of them all.
Glen Scotia - the third nipple of Campbeltown. I bought a bottle of the 15 because Ralfy told me to. I tried it early in my whisky journey and thought it strange and weird and way too hot, man. I was blowin’ steam before I’d swallowed that first sip, and oh boy if it wasn’t strange. If this is Campbeltown funk, I’m leaving the club on account of bad reverb. However, just because something is alien to you, it doesn’t mean it’s bad, and so over the next week or two, I kept coming back to that 15 and slowly adapting to these new flavours and smells. Soon I was finding this “challenging” whisky more alluring than the other, more pedestrian stuff I had bought, and that’s when I stumbled upon the hushed one-word notes being snuck under doors of many stoic whisky goers: Victoriana.
“The distillery dates from 1832, and is now known as Glen Scotia. It is reputed to be haunted by the ghost of a former proprietor who drowned himself in Campbeltown Loch after being cheated out of £40,000 in a business venture. Traditionally the stills at Glen Scotia were left unpolished to keep them cooler, and the proximity of the Gulf Stream means that maintaining a supply of cold water for distilling has frequently been a problem.”
What could be a term used for niche kink catering to spicy 19th Century historians, this steampunker is instead a core release from Glen Scotia that features - dun dun dun - no age statement. Oh heavens, my gigglemug - a whisky that people enjoy that doesn’t have digits on the label? Stand aside, for we're about to have ourselves a collie shangle. That’s right folks, the Glen Scotia Victoriana is a non-age stated whisky presented at cask strength ABV and is, going by the number of times it’s stamped upon every facet of box and bottle, unequivocally, very much probably, non-chill filtered. Seriously guys, we get it. Just on the bottle it appears four times and what a tall, slender green glass bottle of gold foiled ambiguity it is. If I saw this on a shelf next to other bottles, I’d likely pass by because the green glass doesn’t show me the glowing amber held within. It doesn’t divulge the contents at all because it’s quite hard to read the label. I’m not a big fan of the “balanced pencil” bottle design because it seems really precarious, even if it fits nicely in the hand when pouring; but to make it green too? Double whammy. We’re not here to talk about that anyway; it’s what’s inside this bottle that excites me, but before I get to the good bit, I think a word or two needs to be said about “the good old days”.
Taking distilleries that have been built in the past decade aside, and indeed all the wondrous stuff they are producing, there’s not a bottle of whisky touched that isn’t some shadow of its former self, according to someone. That bottle of Glencadam 15 - not what it was. The Ben Nevis 10 - not what it used to be. The GlenDronach 12 - well take it from me on this one, it very much isn’t what it very recently was. The phrase “not as good as it was” has become more frequently used than hand sanitiser and it would alarm me more, if it wasn’t for those aforementioned newly built distilleries, like Ardnamurchan. The repeated drones of “tired casks” and “rejuvenated oak” are now part of commonly used whisky parlance in reference to a lot of the veterans of the distilling industry, and I for one am getting a bit miffed about not being around when alert casks and OG oak were favoured. The Glen Scotia Victoriana, even though it’s a NAS whisky, and even though it’s using goodness knows what cask makeup (because Glen Scotia don’t tell us the specifics), is also a victim of this “better before” tale of woe. Allegedly the 2015 bottling, presented at 51.5% was “far superior” to the now 54.2% bottling. “What’s in 2.7%” I hear you shout, in a withering, energy depleted wail of “who cares”. The honest answer is, I have no idea; the Victoriana is a batch produced whisky, like all whiskies actually, so I’ll never know unless I stumble upon a 2015 bottling at auction (and am willing to pay the premium, which I’m not) or exchange one in a back alley deal (which I’ve already done hard time for, and I’m never going back, man). So, like all whisky that I have access to in the here and now, I can only assess what I can try. Luckily for us, the 54.2% version of Victoriana is a stoater.
Review
No Age Statement, 54.2% NCF Natural Colour
£65 and widely available
The cask strength of Victoriana, depending on your position on the whisky scale of palate conditioning, will either be cough-inducing “bloody hells” or life affirming magnificence, when you try it neat. It was the former for me for a while, but it’s the latter for me now - I’ve been drinking cask strength whisky long enough that my body is able to withstand the onslaught of flavour and make it out the other side relatively intact and, in a recent turn of events, sometimes I prefer NOT to dilute my cask strength whisky. But as Peter Parker was once told, with great power comes great flavour and the Victoriana delivers this, both smell and taste, in bucket loads.
The colour of the whisky is burnt amber and it’s robust, oily and textured, clinging to the glass like Dulux one-coat. One can quite easily nose a small pour of this whisky all evening and feel like the time has been spent wisely, such is the thicket of flavour presented. What’s more, it’s identifiable as Glen Scotia - those marine-like coastal notes and opulent creamy creme brulee seams can be mined in all of the expressions from the distillery (that I’ve tried) - even in their phenomenal value Double Cask option, of which I have a particular fondness. The Victoriana seems to take the Glen Scotia formula and crank it up to eleventy - what is it about the combination of casks that makes this particular whisky this potently enjoyable? This very question is the fulcrum that causes the more passionate among us to get riled up - we don’t know what makes Victoriana so good, because no-one is willing, or able, to tell us. We can but ruminate; some have made “educated” guesses, which are possibly thinly veiled regurgitations of what the folk who made it “might” have told them. Other than those insider secrets we, the mere mortals, can only look upon that green bottle and thank the whisky gods for giving us the chance to experience a Campbeltown flavour tour de force that doesn’t cost the earth. Or asks us to stand in lines stretching around many blocks in the Edinburgh mizzle. Or wrestle in the gutter beside a Ferrari. Off we go then, for its whisky we're here for, not the ramblings of Dougie Bloody Crystal.
Nose
A strong smokey saltiness wafts out the glass as it warms up. It smells really richly inviting. Polished wood and the aroma of freshly sawed cedar combine to form a rather lovely vision of wooden rocking chairs inside ticking clock home libraries. After a bit of time, a cola note appears but the biggest character is that of salted caramel, and what a delicious, mouth watering prospect it is. Fresh fruit but with salted peanuts embedded in there too.
Palate
Waves of heated prickly spice followed by some leather armchairs and almonds greet you. There’s wood in here and it’s not oak, but cedar again. There’s a very alluring flavour that draws me in, but I can’t seem to identify it - it tastes, for want of a better term, delicious. A mouth coating oiliness and a richness of body that fills the whole palate forces me to sit and deconstruct it. Little zingy pops of citrus flash and linger long after the dram is down. It’s a nicely balanced sweet sour combo of misty-eyed opulence. The salted caramel notes permeate the whole mouth and are exacerbated with a drop or two of water - tamping down that heat and smoothing off the splintered wooden edges to make it potently decadent. Enjoyed neat, this is a full sensory experience. With a few drops of water it’s a dram to sit all evening and ponder the trajectory of humankind.
The Dregs
It's gorgeous whisky. No matter what the mood I find myself in, with a wee pour of Victoriana the world and all its troubles fade away into a hushed reverence, and the whisky becomes the spectacle. To pick this apart is to enjoy whisky as an experience, not an accompanying beverage. But the question remains: is it worth the price being asked for it? Despite falling under £70 this whisky is still pricey, comparatively speaking. There are many age-stated whiskies out there to be had in this monetary region, and many deliver excellent experiences. Glen Scotia 15 is one such bottle, which offers similar, if not slightly less impactful smell and taste, costing me £46 only a year ago. However, it doesn’t cost that today, now commanding the same price as the Victoriana. The asking price for Glen Scotia overall is, unfortunately, increasing rapidly. The 18 year old is £86 and the next core age statement, the 25 year old, is £500. For Victoriana however, this whisky has remained the same price throughout. When I first bought a bottle in July 2021, it cost me £65, with two other bottles purchased immediately after tasting, each costing £58.72. As a whisky to taste and smell in isolation, blind and deaf to outside influences and price hikes, Victoriana is surely superb value then?
Well…is it worth £65? Here’s a further example. In the year of price hiking, gouging and ludicrous value expectations, the Nc’nean Huntress 2022 was released into the wild just as I was writing this review. At first I thought it must have been a single cask offering or maybe a fancy cask used for maturation, such was the rather high asking price. Instead it’s revealed to be a fairly standard ex-red wine, ex-bourbon casked vatting of (using the dive-down stats on their website) 4 year old whisky, but non-age stated in the presentation. Yes it’s a small batch yeast experiment, partly using yeasts typically deployed in rum production, but priced at £85 it’s quite a jump more expensive than the Victoriana. I like and appreciate that the Huntress is from a new distillery and that Nc’Nean are organic, environmentally aware and are doing good things. But when it comes to pricing for whisky, in this delicate era of rising costs of living and an energy crisis to boot, a quirky yeast deployment is an irrelevant selling point to me. I don’t need to have smelled or tasted the Huntress to know that £85 is a lot of money for any whisky. To command that price for what is very young whisky - one year older than the legal requirement for Scotch Whisky - regardless of experiments or distillery processes or bottle design, is outside my acceptable comfort zone. Furthermore, to pay such a lofty premium for Nc’Nean Huntress when there’s such highly regarded, well reviewed whiskies for far less money, is more an exercise in vanity than it is whisky-seeking experience: Instahoot points, and not much else.
The Glen Scotia distillery has been around for ages, literally. The whisky that makes up Victoriana is at least 10 years old, but longer matured whisky is also used in the vatting, making for a hugely flavourful whisky. Compared to the Nc’nean then, from a purely comparative position of sub-£100, non-age stated whiskies to purchase, does the Victoriana seem like good value? Whisky should be all about the smell and taste experience, tied closely to what it costs to obtain that experience. Now, more than ever, the whisky enthusiast demographic are scrutinising every single aspect of all whisky for what the intrinsic value is, for them. I’m looking for a unique experience at a price that is commensurate to how impactful the experience is likely to be. I did my homework and saw clearly that Victoriana is historically an exceptional smell and taste experience.
What’s more, in the eyes of those buying up all the whisky in the Campbeltown area for auction fodder, Glen Scotia is not on their radar - the leveraging factor is not there, for some reason. That Victoriana can be found in relative abundance without paying 4x the RRP or frantically refreshing auction sites at time-up, well that’s the whole point here. Chasing whisky to not drink it, is about as worthy an experience as robbing a bank to use the money as wallpaper. And who’d do that? Similarly, buying whisky with nuanced production tweaks for huge premiums, is about as worthy an experience as buying speedy boarding at the airport - you might be first in your flight to sit in the freshly vacated cramped aeroplane seat, but that seat is pretty much the same as all the others, and you’re all arriving at the destination at the same time, having had the same experience. There’s a balance to be struck and I think that the Victoriana hits it pretty squarely.
Despite the lighter approach to this review (because whisky is meant to be fun, right?), I have huge reverence for Glen Scotia, even more so having read a bit about the history of the “wee toon”. The name “Victoriana '' is a celebration of the Victorian heritage of Campbeltown, once considered the Whisky Capital of the World during the Victorian era, and home to 35 producing distilleries throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries. The Victorian era was one of prosperity, of promise for the future through technological advancement and the Industrial Revolution, followed by one of the biggest decimations, not just in Campbeltown whisky history, but in human history. The Great War ravaged societies and Campbeltown was not immune. In part due to the legacy of the Great War, the Great Depression, American prohibition hitting hard on exports and overproduction of spirit, all but three Campbeltown distilleries remained by 1933. Glen Scotia was sporadically operational from then until 2015, when the Loch Lomond Group (LLG) bought the distillery and, with heavy investment, began to turn it into the award winning underdog you see before you today. I’m really happy LLG resurrected this place, because I love the Victoriana; it speaks to the human journey throughout the ages, from the distillery boom in Victorian era Campbeltown, through world wars and into the modern era, Glen Scotia has endured relatively intact.
I’d happily pay just to luxuriate in the sepia toned vision of a steam powered, bronze cast, edison bulbed, World’s Fair spectacle of Victoriana and, at £65 in 2022, the equation of price x experience represents, in this haggard auld git’s opinion, tremendous value for money.
Score: 7/10
Tried this? Share your thoughts in the comments below. DC
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