Highland Park has released its third 50 Year Old whisky, and it’s priced at £20,000 ($27,434 USD). The Edrington-owned Scotch brand last released a bottling in 2018.
Limited to 274 bottles, the new Highland Park 50 Year Old is made from nine refill casks laid down in 1968. The casks were combined in 2008 and re-racked into first-fill Sherry-seasoned casks. The bottlings were created using the traditional solera system, which takes a small quantity of whisky produced from a previous batch and marries it together with the new liquid. After 12 years of maturation, one cask was chosen and a small quantity of the last 50-year-old from the distillery was added.
“This 50-year-old whisky is one of our oldest and rarest releases and I’m very proud to have been a part of its journey,” said Gordon Motion, Highland Park’s master whisky maker. “The whisky is spectacular, when I sampled the whisky from the re-racked casks, the whisky it contained – aged for a little over 50 years – had absorbed the rich Sherried flavours of dried fruit and sweet toffee from its final first-fill cask maturation, but still retained all the delicate fragrance and flavours driven by the original refill casks.
“I introduced a small quantity of this cask to some of our 2018 batch of 50 Year Old, which I’d held back specifically for this purpose, to create a further layer of depth and complexity. As the 2018 50 Year Old also contains some of our 2010 batch of 50 Year Old – our first in the series – this approach allows me to maintain the core DNA of our oldest Highland Park whisky through each extremely limited batch release.”
The Scotch delivers notes of black cherries, muscovado sugar, peaches soaked in alcohol, dark chocolate, exotic spices, candied orange peel, roasted oak, ripe apricots, espresso coffee, and light peat smoke.
The single malt is presented in a handmade wooden box made from walnut and comes with a book that tells the story behind the whisky. The Whisky comes in an embossed heavyweight glass bottle featuring a Norse-inspired design.
Bottled at 43.8% ABV, The 2020 release of Highland Park 50 Year Old is available from specialist retailers globally, with a limited number of bottles available from the distillery and online shop beginning in March 2021.
I wish I could afford to taste this Scotch— It sounds divine with notes of black cherries and peaches and I am intrigued by how few bottles were made. And how old it is. The presentation in the wooden box is beautiful. Your description of it all has made it come to life!
You’d think just 50 year old scotch would be enough of a selling point but for almost 30k apparently not. I love Highland Park but now I’m just sad I will never, ever, ever get to try this.