Lindores The Fife Exclusive
Tawny Port Single Cask | 59.4% ABV
Score: 8/10
Something Special.
TL;DR
Lindores have finally cracked that nut - this is meandering joyfulness.
The Tower of Babylon
When I’m not neck deep in professional misery, or staring into space in search of whisky notes, I’m often found watching films. It’s my off switch. Sometimes it’s long-form series based content, but mostly it’s feature films.
One of my favourite films in the past 10 years has been ”Arrival”, starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner. I watched it the year it came out and most years since. For those not au fait, the film follows linguist Louise Banks as she’s tasked with establishing communication with one of many alien ships that have appeared around the world, floating ominously above the Earth’s surface.
The film is a beautiful, haunting, discussion-led cinematic masterpiece that asks as many questions as it answers. It centres around some big themes - power, love, parenthood, fear of the unknown, connection, trust, doubt, deception, hope and many others, and despite the overall downbeat vibe, I find it has a really positive effect on me each time I watch it.
Only very recently did I watch the credits to the bitter end, probably due to stroking the hairy bullet, who spends most evenings with us on the sofa, snoring. At the end of the credits a wee sentence appears stating that this film was inspired by the book “Stories of Your Life and Others” by Ted Chiang.
Having spent the better part of four months working through Ian Rankin’s Rebus series, I’ve been looking for something different to read at night. Remembering this book, I bought it in preparation for the next time John Rebus saves the world in the last few pages, having spent the preceding pages procrastinating.
“Stories of Your Life and Others” is a compilation of short stories, opening with “Tower of Babylon”. Not knowing what I was getting into, this wee story captured me, and I urge you to read it. Skip to the review if you haven’t - spoiler alert!
This story follows a chap called Hillalum, as he makes his way to a tower so tall as to not be able to see the top of it from the ground. His task is to puncture through the vault of heaven and see what’s on the other side. For centuries has this tower of brick been laid, with the upper level inhabitants never having seen the surface on account of being born on the tower, and as Hillalum approaches the top, four months of climbing later, he worries that his mining of this cap will release a deluge of water, the stuff that’s held for rain and storms, and they’ll all drown.
Having successfully mined through the cap, he proceeds inside to uncover what’s behind it, mining as they go, until eventually they do pierce a water reservoir and become trapped inside. When the protection put in place to shutter the hole they’d made is activated with this water surge, Hillalam decides to go with the flow and see where the source of the water goes, only to find that, upon breaching through, he’s back at the base of the tower, looking up at its unfathomable height.
Having spent the past two years of my life trudging up a seemingly endless tower of my own, hacking through the granite like vault with promise of untold treasures behind, and wading through the resultant water, struggling for breath, only to find that I’m back where I first started…I can say with not a little bit of meekness, I feel similar to Hillalum.
“what does it all mean?”
It’s probably a resonant story for a lot of us, made more special because of the way the story is told with beautiful, poetic prose. I really enjoyed it and, despite the suspension of disbelief to accept that the earth is flat, and between the ground and the vault above, the sun, moon and stars all float about in that void, it’s stuck with me.
Life is like that sometimes, but Hillalum didn’t complain, nor did he give up. He just accepted that this was the way it is - a futile endeavour - and made his way to tell others not to bother either. Wikipedia likens the Tower of Babylon story as akin to a cylinder, whereby the end and the beginning wrap around next to one another, even if we can’t see it.
An endless scrolling tapestry that never ends or begins. Yahweh, the deity in the story, wasn’t enraged at the tower’s construction and the human’s attempt to reach heaven through earthly means in the first place, because He made it impossible for humans to reach it through this cyclical discovery.
Anyway, in some strange way whisky feels the same. Cyclical, enduring, impossible at times, yet rewarding most of the time. I’m betting some whisky producers feel like they’ve walked up the Tower of Babylon a few times, only to find they’re back where they began. Others might feel like they’re still going up it, passing through the clouds on the way to the vault of heaven.
Lindores Abbey Distillery is one such place, I reckon. Still pushing their cart, filled with construction materials and hammers and pineapples, looking out of the terraces at the people getting smaller below and wondering when they’ll reach the top.
Review
Cask No. 191086 | Australian Tawny | 411 bottles | 56.4% ABV
£70 - seems to be out of stock everywhere.
I’ve never fully connected with Lindores, despite trying a lot of their gear, but last year at Fife Whisky Festival we tried a few things from the under-the-table section that lit our collective faces up.
The Distillery Cask Ruby Port that I ended up reviewing a few months or so after the festival, didn’t continue to hold such a tight grip it seems, as once I returned home and explored it, sans whisky atmosphere, it was very good, rather than spectacular.
This year I spent most of my festival session talking, but the drams I did try were all super good - a lot from Fragrant Drops, a few Daftmill sweeties, some very interesting stuff from Unkiltered Spirits, a new Independent bottler, and of course the usuals - Glasgow, Ardna and Lindores.
Murray Stevenson, UK Sales Manager for Lindores Abbey Distillery, posted on his Instahoot before this year’s festival a bottle that we would get to try at the festival, a Fife Exclusive similar to one which we tried in 2024. On the day I made a beeline but found it a bit difficult. I’d just finished some grain from Fragrant Drops and it didn’t seem to sit alongside that very well. I plodded down to the shop to buy one anyway, knowing that it might very well be worth a try outside of this heady environment.
As I waited in the queue I found a friendly face and we got chatting about what we’d seen so far. I mentioned Fragrant Drops, who were selling at the table anyway, but the Lindores was what I was after. I said I’d just tried it and wasn’t overly keen, and his frown appeared. He said “ok…worth £70?” And I said no. That was that.
Not 5 minutes later I found Seve at Daftmill and his first question was if I’d picked up a Lindores yet. I said I wasn’t sure I wanted to pay £70 for it. He then gave me a look and commanded me to go get it. Which I did, because when Seve speaks we listen.
I’m ever so thankful that I did.
Score: 8/10
Something Special.
TL;DR
Lindores have finally cracked that nut - this is meandering joyfulness.
Nose
Bit of steak pie!? Mint. Cedar. PVA. Raisins. Peppery cotton. Green. Basil and cucumber. Soil. Treacle toffee with raisins. Star Anise. Caramel and polythene. Oak. Midnight petrichor. Gritters in winter. Salty. Icy. Sweet and sour sauce. Jammy. Strawberries. Hoisin. Silage on the wind, distant.
Water welcomes bready, soily, pencils, minty.
Palate
Big, bold, bright red fruits. Bit of buttery richness - popcorn. Oily toffee. Jammy - strawberries and cream. Salty. Sandy. Hoisin again - umami. Cedarwoods. Toffee but laced with salt. Match striker, just. Tannin-y. Bit sharp - unripe raspberry or a yoghurt or both. Firework whilst eating a kiwi fruit.
Water brings oak, like an oaked Sauvignon. Sweetness is up. Pencils. Bit of farm.
The Dregs
Visceral in the best way possible, this isn’t a whisky to pull punches. Big, bold, forward, in your face, bright, loud and exactly what I love in whisky. It’s vibrant, like a red neon sign. But there’s something deeper, more velvety about this as well. Robust perhaps.
It’s massively fruity. A fruit punch. In the face. But second sniffs bring oven chips. Or steak pies. Or cucumber. Then big treacle toffee, with raisins embedded. It’s a shapeshifter. On the palate it’s the same deal, massive at the start and then revealing more interesting stuff.
I never gravitate to the water because I bask in the eye-popping nature of cask strength whisky. It makes me tingle and feel alive. Yet this one, despite not displaying any real heat or overt spice, laps up the water to reveal even more glorious flavours. Oak appears in pencils and burnished skirting boards. The toffee cranks up, the tarter fruits too - raspberries with yoghurt.
Thinking back to the Lindores I’ve tried so far, I’ve never fully swooned over their releases because I’ve felt like they were almost - almost there, almost complete. Missing something that takes it from a very good to a superb. The STR was missing loads of things - depth, grip, gravity. The bourbon Casks of Lindores was robust but plateaued quickly. The sherry cask releases have been a bit blooters for me - over smooshed and the Lindores spirit masked by sherry overload.
The Ruby Port, as mentioned, didn’t keep that fizz of excitement I found at Fife last year, but still kept the bright, tropical youthful Lindores spirit intact, but lost pace quickly. It didn’t have the variance that keeps me coming back to a bottle of whisky.
This is not any of that. It’s got the blitz of youth, no doubt. But it has composure enough to deliver lots of cool things. There’s a wee bit of dirt in there, earthy and grounding. There’s sours, sweets and savouries and even salties. It comes massively supercharged in the bottle so takes water well, not rounding anything off as is typical for watery fun. It keeps the character but dials down the brightness a touch.
For all that and more, £70 was commanded and rings true for what’s typical for whisky in this niche of exciterville; a very good price for this amount of action. Congratulations Lindores, on an excellent release. 411 bottles of this only, and by the looks of it, not available online anymore. Which is a shame as I’d like another! Hey ho - I’ve too much else to be stashing stuff, so will cradle this until it’s gone, and thank Seve each time for making sure I nabbed one.
Score: 8/10
Tried this? Share your thoughts in the comments below. DC
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