The Bowmore 25 has been a fixture of the upper end of the core range for many years and is one of the most quietly admired older Islay malts. By 25 years, the distillery's restrained peat has retreated almost entirely into the background, and what remains is the famous Bowmore tropical fruit — the mango and passion-fruit character that older bottlings from the distillery have cultivated as a kind of unofficial signature.
This release is bottled at 43% ABV from a marriage of bourbon and oloroso sherry casks, matured at least in part in the No.1 Vaults, the seafront warehouse that has stood beneath Loch Indaal since the eighteenth century.
The nose is the headline: ripe mango, beeswax, dark chocolate and dried fig, with peat reduced to a wisp of woodsmoke. The palate carries that fruit forward into oloroso raisin, dark cherry and mocha, the smoke now a gentle structural note rather than a flavour in its own right. The finish is very long, fruity and quietly smoky, drying slowly into polished oak.
It is an expensive bottle, and the 43% strength will frustrate cask-strength purists, but as a demonstration of what extended maturation does to Bowmore spirit it remains exemplary.
