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Scotch Whisky Review: Highland Park 56 Year Old

Highland Park 56 is the oldest and rarest single malt to come out of the distillery on Orkney. Phil Dwyer was lucky enough to try it.

OVERALL RATING

9
$53,500
  • Phil Dwyer is a freelance whisky writer and consultant with over a decade of experience in whisky retail and online whisky education. Best known for hosting Whisky Wednesday on YouTube, he is dedicated to making whisky accessible and enjoyable by cutting through jargon and complexity.
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Tasting Notes

About:

An impressively aged single cask from Highland Park. Aged for forty years in a refill sherry cask and then transferred into a first fill sherry American oak puncheon for the final 16 years, this single cask yielded only 170 bottles for the whole world. The transfer of this liquid into the puncheon is an amazing showcase of quality vs purpose when it comes down to casks. We all love a first fill barrel of anything, but sometimes they can be very overpowering and you can lose elements of distillery character that are really important to the longevity of your distillery. The liquid that preceded this was transferred into a European oak sherry cask, giving it a deeper, more chocolate and raisin driven flavour. The movement of this whisky into a sherry cask made of American oak for the last 16 years of its life has produced this lighter, more floral, extremely complex liquid that has a lot to say. I’ve been sitting with this liquid for two hours at this point and it keeps giving me things that I wasn’t expecting.
Appearance:
Caramel Sauce
Nose:
Fresh cotton, jasmine and waxy fruit. A word used to describe this has been ‘ethereal’ and you certainly get that with this super floral approach to the flavour. There’s a floral soap quality to this which makes me think about grapefruit, lily flowers, rose water and freshly sawn wood.

You don’t get the classic notes of coffee, honey and chocolate that we see in standard Highland Park whiskies; this is much more these treble driven, higher register aromas. There are notes of mango, grapefruit and red apple dominating it.
Palate:
A wonderfully sweet start, almost brown sugar to the tongue and then you start to feel the weight and age of this whisky. It isn’t a tannic, oak dominant flavour but you start to pick up on increments of flavour in two different types of cask over nearly six decades.

More of those mango and papaya notes, a little hint of something spicy like coriander and chilli flakes. The earthier notes dominate the rest of the taste as you move this around your mouth – vanilla pod, herbal tea, Lillet Blanc, pine and lemon oil.
Finish:
Surprisingly fresh. It’s grassy, sweet, a little bitter with notes of white vermouth, more coriander and very gentle, fizzing oak notes that swell all around your tongue. It feels like a pulsating sensation that gives you brown sugar, red apples, pineapple, freshly cut grass, gentle wood notes, olive oil and tangy grapefruit.
Comments:
As a Highland Park fan, this is the exact opposite of what I thought it would be. It’s delicate, light, extremely complex and shows another style of what Highland Park can be with laser focused cask management of older liquids. It’s an honour to have tasted this and still has me thinking about those herbal bitter notes working against luscious sweet, bright fruit.

Editor’s Note: This whiskey was either bought as a sample by The Whiskey Wash or provided to us as a review sample by the party behind it. Per our editorial policies, this in no way influenced the outcome of this review.

Phil Dwyer

Phil Dwyer is a freelance whisky writer and consultant. With a decade of experience in whisky retail and nearly as long running Whisky Wednesday on YouTube, Phil is dedicated to sharing his knowledge and enthusiasm with fellow whisky lovers. His goal is to make whisky accessible and enjoyable, dispelling the jargon and complexity that can sometimes surround the spirit. In addition to his online presence, Phil managed The Whisky Shop Manchester, where he curated an impressive selection of some of the finest drams available.

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