The Glen Train – September 18 2023

Welcome to Season 9! While we always start off a new season with a solid Scotch tasting, sometimes we have a theme in mind and sometimes we find ourselves reverse-engineering a theme from a lineup Claude has put together. Such is the case for our inaugural tasting of this season of the Kelowna Scotch & Fine Spirits Society in which we present a group of Glens, a whole train of them!

Now by way of trivia, Glen is an anglicisation of the Gaelic word "gleann", which is a long, narrow, glacial valley (as opposed to a "strath", which is a wider, flat-bottomed river floodplain). Furthermore, in Gaelic the feature type comes before its name, and so we have dozens of distilleries named after glens of all sorts. Most of these reside in the Speyside or Highland regions (with two very notable exceptions), which gives you a clue about the flavour profiles of some of this events whiskies. While there is no smoke to be found here, there is a wide range of profiles, from bold and brash, to refined and delicate, aged in sherry, wine and bourbon. Definitely something for everyone here.

The whiskies:

1. The Whisky Agency 2009 Glen Garioch (12 years old)
2. Glenfarclas Family Cask 1998-2021 (~23 years old)
3. Whiskybase 1996 Glentauchers (24 years old)
4. Gordon & MacPhail 2008 Glen Elgin  (13 years old)
5. Gordon & MacPhail 2009 Glendullan Cote Rotie Finished (12 years old)
6. Glenallachie 2007 -2021 Single PX Puncheon selected by COOP Western Canada (14 years old)