The 17 Year Old was for many years the bottle that Old Pulteney drinkers pointed to when they wanted to convert a sceptic. It sat above the 12 in the old core range and below the rare older releases, and it leaned harder on Spanish oak than anything else in the everyday line-up. The result was a Pulteney with the weight of a Speyside sherry monster but with the saline finish that only Wick seems to manage.
It came in the heavy, bulbous bottle the distillery used before its more recent rebrand — the shape borrowed from the wash still's boil ball, which was always Pulteney's most photogenic piece of kit. Bottled at 46% and not chill-filtered, the 17 had enough texture to drink slowly and enough cask influence to stand up to whatever else was on the shelf.
What made it work was balance. Sherry casks can flatten a distillery's character if the underlying spirit is too light, but Pulteney's oily new-make takes the wood without disappearing into it. At seventeen years there was just enough time for the dried fruit and walnut notes to come forward without the coastal signature being lost. It picked up trophies — including Best Single Malt in the World at the World Whisky Awards — and deserved them.
The 17 was eventually retired in the line restructure that brought in the 15 and 18, and back-bar bottles have grown harder to find. If one turns up at a fair price, it is one of the better arguments for sherry-cask Highland whisky in the last twenty years.
