jura sell

By way of a tribute to the late Iain Banks, here's a belated look at a couple of bottles of whisky I acquired around Christmas and New Year. As it happens they're both from the same distillery, Jura (as previously featured here).

Firstly, Elixir. This is a 12-year-old whisky matured in a combination of bourbon and sherry casks. A good deep sniff gives you the usual Christmas cake-y stuff you'd expect from a sherry-cask-matured whisky, plus some darker stuff like bicycle inner tubes and licorice. Have a sip and it's sweeter than you expected, but at the same time not as rich and heavy as you might have expected; there also seem to be some bananas in it that you might not have noticed when you sniffed it. It's a bit richer than the standard 10-year-old, but there's no hint of peat here whereas there is just a suspicion with the standard one. It's very moreish, but perhaps not massively different from some of the standard sherried Speysiders like the Glenfarclas.

Secondly, Superstition. This one is labelled as "lightly peated" and it's noticeably different - much more of a creosoted fence and magic markers smell to it, and when you drink it it's simultaneously lighter (in that there seems to be less sherry in it) and heavier (in that it's got the fizz on the tongue from the peat). It's not Bowmore or Laphroaig levels of peatiness, but it's definitely there, and more so than in the standard 10-year-old.

There is a "heavily peated" variety called Prophecy, but I haven't tried that one yet. With that caveat in mind I'm going to say that the Superstition is my favourite of the ones I've tried so far.