leanston, meanston, deanston

Better do this whisky post before the bottle disappears - a very real danger as it's the only one in the cupboard at the moment. The brief glory days of immediately post-birthday (supplemented by the Christmas backlog) have long since been whittled away and we're into the long dark teatime of the soul that precedes Christmas 2025 and hopefully a bit of a bump in the stocks.

Anyway, this is Deanston, not one that you see in supermarkets a lot, although I seem to remember Marks & Spencer used to sell it. I happened to see it on the spesh for about £25 on Amazon a while back so I decided to snap it up; I mean, why not, right?

Deanston distillery is located a few miles west of Dunblane, fairly southerly as Highland distilleries go though not as far south as Glengoyne. It's a fairly young distillery, being opened in 1965, but inhabits a set of buildings with an interesting history which were used as a cotton mill for around 200 years before being re-purposed for whisky production. 

This is the entry-level Virgin Oak expression, the name referencing the year or so the whisky spends in new oak casks which have never before held any spirit. This alone would not qualify the spirit to be called Scotch whisky, as it must first be matured for at least three years in casks that have previously held some other spirit; in this case American bourbon. So you might say, well, this whole Virgin Oak thing sounds like a bit of a gimmick then, and I'd say, yes, you may be right there. In their defence it is bottled at a beefy 46.3% which represents some commitment to delivering a bit of oomph at the cost of wringing out a bit of extra profit. It would be easy enough, after all, to just dilute the whole thing down to the standard 40% and squeeze out roughly an extra bottle for every seven or so bottles at 46.3%, so respect to them for not doing that. They also make a big thing on the packaging of it being non-chill-filtered, and there are no cryptic messages in foreign languages which denote the inclusion of extra colouring. There is, as it happens, a slightly complex relationship between chill-filtering and the bottling strength of your whisky which I won't attempt to explain but which you can read about here.

All that don't amount to a hill of beans if your whisky tastes like donkey ass, though, in fact slightly more concentrated donkey ass might even be a bad thing. No worries on that particular score, though. I mean it's not especially startling, adhering to the present-day standard of being a no-age-statement whisky sitting below the 12-year-old which they are thereby able to charge more money for and which I don't deem myself able to afford what with having kids to feed and all that malarkey.

But, to be fair, there's nothing wrong with it, any more than there's anything wrong with a whole host of unpeated Highland and Speyside whiskies that I'd struggle to tell apart in a blind taste test. I'd put this in the top half of the imaginary chart, because it's got some nice dried-fruit spiciness going on. A sploosh of water doesn't hurt here, especially since the higher bottling strength means it won't damp the aforementioned oomph down too much.