Haig Dimple 12yo
1970s Blend | 40% ABV
Score: 6/10
Good stuff.
TL;DR
Old but simple
This isn’t the much-derided David Beckham whisky, but a long-lost relative sharing the same name.
It’s an old blend from the 1970s, purchased at auction. Like the Beckham marketing tactic, this liquid has a trick up its sleeve. It sits in a novelty bottle, a strange shape with three sides and concave ‘dimples’ in each one. What relevance does that have to anything? Almost none!
Whisky geeks love to love old blends. Yet the marketing—which hinges on a patented shape and repeats the name of said shape in a label on the bottle, in case you didn’t notice—of Haig “Dimple” is exactly the kind of thing which is loathed by contemporary whisky commentators, and the antithesis of the ‘old fashioned’ whisky which we tend to consider more ‘authentic.’
The bottle has been open for three days as of writing. At this point, the same note prevails on the nose as on the first neck pour. It’s not that fragile, in spite of its age. This note is always a combination for me, it’s both sour apple skin and dustiness. They’re intrinsically linked, I have no idea why. Perhaps I could call it “sour dust”.
The note is one I get very often in old whisky. I am being a touch heretical here—I really do just mean ‘old’. This whisky has had 12 years of ageing in cask, and another ca.50 years in a bottle. Obviously, the bottle atmosphere can’t do that much to the whisky, although it probably does some subtle rounding and cardboardification. I suppose it is possible then that the sour apple note is coming from the original distillate, which would put this spirit in line with other oldies. The other oldies I’ve only had from samples, and they pretty consistently turn out this sour dusty flavour as long as the casks aren’t too active. But those other oldies are rather more prestigious than this little blend: they’ve been single malts, like a 30yo Bunnahabhain I once had.
That sour dusty note is always going to please me. Partly, I’m susceptible like most humans to the associations of venerable age, and this is a definite ‘old’ note. On the other hand, it’s an intrinsically pleasing, intriguing flavour. It’s neither sweet nor particularly savoury, and it puts one in mind of a shed surrounded by vintage tractors, or other such photogenic grime.
What else am I getting here? In spite of a veritable stamp of age, this isn’t tremendously complex. The flavour is dominated by the sour dust, but there’s also a little diluted caramel happening. It’s mildly sweet, and can be detected when one backs one’s nose away from the glass a little. That really is all there is to the nose. In fairness, that’s more than one would ever get from most contemporary blended scotch.
The palate offers no surprises either. The development is reasonably sweet, though not offensively so, rounded, and just on the edge of being insipid. I presume this is because of the 40% ABV. Perhaps it’s possible that the actual strength of this bottle has reduced if the closure failed, though I doubt it. I think it is just a fairly well-blended, rounded-out spirit that has been subjected to fire-department treatment to make the margins meet.
After a second or so, that apple-dust returns on the palate, which is nice and consistent. Then, exactly like the nose, there’s another soft caramel note that lingers for just a handful of seconds. No “long, lingering finish… wait! I’m still tasting it!” here.
What’s odd about this bottling is the fact that its overwhelming tasting note is something that normally would engender dewy eyes and a nostalgia fest, a transcendental experience of “enveloping cardboard”. But it takes that flavour profile and spreads it rather thinly.
It’s nice—it’s even very nice. But the flavour alone doesn’t really invite an in-depth interrogation of flavour, simply because there are only two notes to pay attention to, or at least two that I can detect anyway. I think that’s fine. I sometimes worry that one can lose track of the basics when tracking down unique and odd experiences. We agonise over finding each and every tasting note—a kind of olfactory stamp collecting—as if the score of a whisky is directly proportional to the number of things happening in the liquid.
Of course, this is often the case: the most complex whiskies are those most likely to make us stop and think. At some point, though, those many notes must actually harmonise and make sense. I could throw together the world’s most complex risotto consisting of beef stock, jam, musk, brown crab meat, peated whisky, peanut butter, menthol, and sauerkraut, and it would induce vomiting—horrible, but undeniably complex.
Complexity doesn’t always mean quality in food and drink. Unlike in cooking, in whisky (or wine, or beer, or rum) the base ingredients are intrinsically restrictive. Complexity, in alcoholic drinks, usually does amount to quality for two reasons. Firstly, it is difficult to achieve and is therefore correlated with drink-makers who know what they are doing and aren’t motivated by quantity. Secondly, because of the limited raw materials, it’s very unlikely to go off the rails and get anywhere near my disgusting hypothetical risotto mentioned above. On that point, it’s telling that the most divisive whiskies involve odd casks like red wine and port. Aren’t these whiskies the closest thing one gets to cooking, the integration of very different ingredients—where there is far more to go wrong?
There is nothing wrong with this whisky. It is both simple and clearly old, agèd even. In our expectations of drinks, the word “youthful” shouldn’t always be yoked to “simplicity.” Neither should the word “mature” be equated with “complexity.”
Review
Haig Dimple 12yo, 1970s bottling, 40% ABV
£20-40 at auction (£23 plus fees paid)
Nose
Caramel. Sour apple skin. Dust.
Palate
More of the same! A fusty toffee apple, if you will.
The Dregs
This is a paradoxical dram: authentic and naff, mature and simplistic. For that, it’s rather likeable.
Score: 6/10
Tried this? Share your thoughts in the comments below. AB
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