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SMWS Glen Spey 9yo Deep Impact Dram

80.18 2020 Release | 62.2% ABV

A punt sometimes pays off.

It’s a matter of intent when I think about why I buy whisky. Do I want to have my mind blown, or am I happy with the broadening of my palate?

Maybe I’ve heard good things and want to see what all the fuss is about. Perhaps I think I’ll discover a banger and somehow uncover a previously unspoken seam of delicious drams that people have missed due to chasing the bigger boys. Or, like when I placed a bid in the auction for this bottle, I fancied the look of it and nothing more.

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society is that place who demand memberships in return for access to their stuff, and even though I really enjoyed my time with Wally’s bottle of SMWS 38.28 Caperdonich, it wasn’t enough to get me to part with £65 for the membership. It still holds a bit of an exclusive club vibe and, with pictures showing their different bottles stretching from floor to ceiling, the overwhelming choice of SMWS almost puts me off. How could I possibly find a banger among that lot through chance alone?

The draw of the club is the ability to go to their premises and try all these bottles to work out, using their system of colours, codes and label descriptors, what whisky sits in your wheelhouse. Every bottle comes with its own name to somehow, in a brief few choice of words, sum up what the whisky is inside. Lively as a Ferret and Lost in a World of Afternoons are prime examples of the effectiveness of this system being wholly dependent on the customer having an active imagination: Lost in a World of Afternoons for someone like Bob the amateur stamp collector doesn’t sound too enticing a whisky, to me anyway. A world of afternoons sat in a dimly-lit cosy room beside a large window as it rains outside, cocooned within a stupendously cosy yet supportive armchair sounds pretty fantastic.

As the latest auction drew to a close, and, having been outbid on all my Ardnamurchan low-balls again, I scanned the dying embers of the unpopular bottles. A lot of 80s Bell’s kicking about. A few Ardmores from Tesco that always sit in the auction for the duration at £15, because you can get it in Tesco without all this faff of commissions and collections. Why people bother doing that is beyond me. My usual strategy when scanning an auction is to check for bottles I fancy, in order each time - Ardnamurchan, Glen Garioch, Cadenhead’s Warehouse Tasting, Cadenhead’s shop bottles and any shop exclusives of distilleries I’ve enjoyed. If all that fails, I just peruse the pages from cheapest to most expensive and see what looks interesting. This time I typed in SMWS to see what they had in the sub-£50 bidding level, after the bell had been rung – this particular auction ends at some point after 7pm on the last day, running until bids cease long enough for two minutes to pass without a bid being placed - and despite there being some interesting things, I was drawn to one because of its bottle name: Deep Impact Dram.

Lively as a Ferret might take a bit of time to fire the brain up and resolve a picture of what a ferret looks like when its lively, but Deep Impact Dram is easier: Either visions of an apocalypse, with a meteor hitting earth and gargantuan tsunami waves as Elijah Wood rasps up a hill on his scrambler motorcycle with girlfriend clinging on for grim life, literally. Or it brings to mind an experience that will have a deep impact on you. Either way, I was interested. But zooming in on the helpful paragraph to describe the whisky flavours sold it to me: “Lots of biscuity, toffee sweetness - which mingles on the reduced palate with tannic wood and warm spice to create a memorably deep impact.”

A bit more research showed an expanded set of notes that made me a bit excited to try this stuff:

“The nose was a biscuit assortment (custard creams, chocolate bourbons, party rings) – which then deepened to include toffee, treacle sponge and burnt caramel – plus subtle notes of baked apples, elderflower and rosewater. The palate had vanilla and honeyed porridge sweetness, floral and green apple hints – but its spicy heat, liquorice and tannic wood left powerful but pleasant impressions. The reduced nose discovered citrusy and buttery notes; banana and coconut chips and balsamic strawberries. On the reduced palate the spice and bitterness, attenuated by sweetness, made a memorably deep impact – candied lemon peel, dark chocolate ginger biscuits, orange marmalade and cinnamon custard.”

Being a 9 year old whisky from Society Cask No: 80.18, a refill ex-bourbon hogshead with an outturn of 216 bottles from the Speyside region, this wouldn’t normally be something I would be drawn to. However, the purple cap is the same as the 25 year old Caperdonich from Wally, and the purple colouring system is, from lightest purple to darkest, “Young & Spritely”, “Sweet, mellow & fruity” and “Spicy & Sweet” - all stuff that sounds great to me. This 80.18, or cask 18 bottled by SMWS of Glen Spey distillery, going by the code references, falls into the “Sweet, mellow & fruity” band, I think - it doesn’t say and I can’t gauge what lightness of purple the cap actually is.

I won the auction at £42 pre-fees, totalling an eventual £47. Googling I can see that the price for this from SMWS before it was sold out, was £48.40 - after membership fee of course. I collected it from the auction warehouse a few days later in Perth, brought it home and opened it immediately. We were having dinner guests over and I wanted to see if it was worth offering to them. Would it leave a Deep Impact on me? Or would it be a waste of £47?


Review

SMWS 80.18 Glen Spey 9yo, Deep Impact Dram, 2011 vintage, bottled 2020, 62.2% ABV
£47 paid at auction (£48.49 retail, SMWS membership required)

Nose

Digestive biscuits. Salty, buttery, malted biscuits. Honey, toffee and wood. Leafy citrus fruit. Banoffee pie and sand. 

With water, malty. Honey, sweet, purple fruits and soy sauce on sesame toast.

Palate

Wave of intense flavour. The colours russet and vivid purple spring to mind. With water, it’s absolutely delicious. Jammy Dodgers, marshmallows dipped in molten milk chocolate drizzled with natural honey. There's freshly sawn oak, spice and pepper. Roasting coffee and Lyons Toffee Pops.

The Dregs

It’s as hot as a meteor to start. 62.2% is no joke, and it has the power to overwhelm if you’re not used to this level of ABV. I’m slowly turning into a wooden cask, so it was manageable but still quite edgy. Loads of big bold notes of digestive biscuits - salty, malty, buttery and crumbly. Fantastic. The usual suspects of yum-yum - honey, toffee and even a banoffee pie in there make me smile. When water is added the nose continues with this theme, reduced slightly in powerful potency obviously, but there’s even a curve ball of more umami-type stuff there to keep things interesting - soy sauce.

The palate is at once overpowering and I find, when whisky hits my receptors at this level of alcohol, I can only process what’s happening through the medium of colour - so I saw lots of dark, desaturated red/brown (or russet) and then a direct switch to bright, vivid purple. The palate remains like this, even after multiple sips. Tamping it down with a big drip of cool water opens it up beautifully to reveal sweet, red fruits and biscuity notes - Jammy Dodgers. It’s got it all here too - woods, coffee and honey in abundance.

It’s safe to say that I really enjoyed this whisky. I wouldn’t have actively gone for it - Speyside is not my region. Glen Spey isn’t a distillery I seek out and even if I did, I doubt I’d have looked to SMWS for the answer - I don’t know the codes, I don’t think to look out the codes and the prospect of paying a lot of money for a dud, or something that doesn’t work for me, is too much to take a risk. Yet here I did, and it paid off. Maybe I need to be more willing to take a chance, and accept that SMWS likely don’t bottle stuff that isn’t worthy of being bottled.

I’m astounded by how close the notes on the bottle and website are to my experience. It’s exactly what it says it is, and that’s reassuring. The same went for the Caperdonich - that matched closely too. Two out of two means I’m now more actively looking at SMWS when it comes to auctions and putting a bit of confidence behind what they write on the front. I still won't pay the entry fee to get access to SMWS, but I know a few who already have memberships, some waning, some waxing, that I could tap into if I really did want a specific bottle. Really worthy of being sought out, even if it’s just for a delicious whack of Toffee Pops and Jammy Dodgers.

Score: 7/10

Tried this? Share your thoughts in the comments below. DC

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