Hello hello hello my dearest friends and readers! It’s been a long time, one of my longest pauses in review thus far I think. It’s unfortunate, but I simply haven’t had the capital to spend on picking up new bottles to talk about! That all changed recently as I have started up working on a few personal and freelance projects, one project in particular gave me my first ever actually what I deserved paycheck, with both parties satisfied in the end product. To celebrate my break-out debut freelance bit, I picked up one of the nicest bottles I could find on my way up north to a friend’s house for the weekend; While it wasn’t among the $300+ bottles behind the glass, it still stands as the most expensive bottle of whiskey I’ve ever owned, and I’m quite eager to tell you about it.
Jura 18 Single Malt Scotch Whisky
Craighouse, Isle of Jura, Scotland
$130.00
44% / 88 Proof
Nose - Notes of tanned leather and brass, subtle hickory and peat smoke with a splash of brine and big breaths of sweet fruits, white grapes, and cinnamon.
Palette - The palette is initially incredibly mellow and smooth, vibrant white wine astringency and graped notes colliding with cinnamon and mixed wild berries coming in volumes before being eaten alive by a cascade of spice and sugary sweet-tooth heat.
Finish - Fiery hot at first with a quickly melting sensation of complex moods. A tinge of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, citrus zest, and peppery cigar smoke lay in harmony with lighter, fruitier blossoms along the edge of the tongue.
Thoughts - Jura 18 comes in as a suprisingly complex bottle with a lot of variables to offer. It reminds me a lot of my current favorite flavor of music, Jazz Rap, with it’s smooth and varied delivery of flavors and tones erupting with a medley of odds and ends, aromas and sensations whose piquancy denotes the extreme characteristics that can come from a whisky that is aged 18 years. Jura 18 provides what I would describe as an almost “ying-yang” presentation of the extremes of which flavors can go. Never before have I enjoyed a bottle that has such a mellow and sensational palette that turns to such a vibrant and explosive finish.
While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend running out to cop the bottle off of ever shelf you can find - you can certainly find a bottle just as intriguing and $40 less in the Lagavulin 16 - I’d say that I am quite pleased with the pick up and happy to have it on hand. As my first foray in to $120+ bottles, it was honestly a bit of a let down, for which I am unsure of it being either a fantastic built up expectation of “$100+” bottles being other-worldly, or if my palette simply still has room to grow. I’ll be hanging onto this bottle for a long time and taking on dram samples at a time, so perhaps time will tell, and I may revisit this review in the future.
6.5/10
Vibrant, extreme, complex, but perhaps over-priced.