A forty-year-old Bowmore is not a whisky one meets often. The distillery, founded in 1779, has released forty-year-olds at intervals over the decades, usually in very small numbers and always at prices that place them firmly in the rarefied category of auction-house lots and private cellars. The examples that do circulate are almost always drawn from casks that spent their working life in the No. 1 Vaults, the distillery's celebrated below-sea-level warehouse on the edge of Loch Indaal.
At forty years the spirit has been worked on by the oak for longer than most whiskies ever will be, and yet — in the best examples — the distillate still holds its own. This is the enduring surprise of aged Bowmore: the delicate fruit esters that the stillhouse has always produced in abundance continue to carry the whisky even as the peat smoke has all but disappeared into the background. What remains is a tropical, waxen, lightly saline expression of Islay that bears only the faintest family resemblance to the ten-year-old on the shelf downstairs.
These bottles are bought for keeping as often as drinking, and those who do open them tend to do so with ceremony. Water is unnecessary and usually unwelcome; the natural cask strength has drifted down close to bottling strength on its own over the decades, and the oak has done most of the integration work for you.
Whether a forty-year-old Bowmore is worth its asking price is a question each buyer must answer in their own currency. As a drinking experience, however, it stands among the quieter pleasures in Scotch whisky — a whisky that has outlived the warehouses of its own youth and still has something gracious to say.
