Famous Grouse Gold Reserve 12 Year Old

The reviewed bottle is 95% full, was opened 11 months ago, and has been preserved with inert gas for the last 9 months. This 12 yo blended Scotch includes malts from Macallan and Highland Park

Nose: pretty wine flavours, an attractive light sweet peat and smoke, delicious barley-malt flavours, probably from the Highland Park, and some very noticeable wheat grain flavour, a hint of anise; a very nice blended whisky nose

Taste: very robust flavours, especially for a 40% ABV blended Scotch; on the palate, the peat flavours get the upper hand over the wine flavours and the grain flavours, but it's all still there; there is lots of anise flavour on the palate which wasn't as noticeable in the nose

Finish: this is a rather long finish, and with this bottle I like the finish better than the palate; the wine flavours prominently return late, moving into the end of the finish

Balance: there is a good sweet/dry balance here, with strong flavours of both sweet and dry

I had had a couple of tastes of Famous Grouse Gold Reserve 12 YO with my friend @JeffC which I would have rated at at least 90 pts. That motivated me to want a bottle for myself. This particular bottle doesn't impress me as much as did Jeff's bottle, but it is still a very solid blended Scotch, with LOTS of flavour. This bottle doesn't have the same quality of balance of flavours on the palate as did my prior samples. This bottle has much stronger anise flavour than did those prior samples. In the early weeks of this bottle open, I found the anise flavours to be overwhelming everything else. Eleven months after bottle opening, that anise flavour has subsided significantly. I quite like both the nose and the finish on this Gold Grouse 12

Summary comment: this is a very nice blended Scotch, but this particular bottle is a bit more strongly anise-flavoured than I would prefer. If you love the anise flavours, then go for it. If you don't love the anise flavours you will still probably find this good, though perhaps not great

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