[Islay] Bunnahabhain 12 Years - Two Months After Opening

Bunnahabhain 12 keeps showing up on my YouTube feed with breathless praise attached. Not one or two clips, more like three or four the algorithm decided I needed to watch. The bottle I’d opened two months back and shelved because it didn’t grab me kept coming to mind. A handful of bottles have passed through since, so my palate may have shifted, and two months of air in the bottle should count for something. Worth another pour.

Two Months Of Mostly Sitting There

First crack got a 3.2 from me. Not undrinkable, just no pull toward the next dram. Too many things in the same price band that I liked more. So up on the shelf it went, and in the two months since I’ve poured Bunnahabhain maybe two or three times. None of those for me. Friends who happen to like Bunnahabhain dropped by, I poured them a glass each. My own hand never reached for the bottle.

Felt a little guilty about it. Nothing premium, but a bottle in this price band that I’d basically ignored for two months. The friends loved it. “This is actually really good,” and “It’s Islay but it goes down easy, you just keep sipping” - that kind of reaction. Watching the same whisky split opinions that hard made me want to revisit it. The YouTube clips pushing it as an Islay starter sealed the decision.

What The Second Pour Looked Like

Poured into a Copita, rested ten minutes, sipped slow. Compared notes side by side with what I’d written the first time. Short version: it got better. The catch is that the direction it got better in still isn’t where my taste lives.

Nose

The opening is brighter now. Two months ago salt and sea air led; this time a kind of brightness arrives first. Not the citrus-driven brightness from Glenmorangie 16 Nectar d’Or or Royal Salute 21 - heavier than that, with its own signature. A thin layer of sherry drifts in, more like dried fruit at a distance than a dense sherry blast.

Behind that, a faint coastal note follows. Not peat, but the seaside atmosphere is there. Hard to say if it’s really climbing out of the glass or my brain is filling in “Islay, so I should smell the sea.” Either way it’s not absent. Malt sits warmly underneath.

Palate

Salt. That’s the first hit. Sweetness follows, then a quick run of spice. Once the spice clears, malt sweetness lingers harder, and the 46.3% ABV holds a quiet body under all of it.

The sweetness isn’t my kind of sweet. If I had to slot it, salted caramel - except rougher than caramel and not quite brown sugar either. Tannin barely registers, and the harsh saline edge from two months ago has softened.

Finish

This is the good part. The bits that bothered me on the nose and palate clear out by the time the finish arrives. A pleasant malty length stretches out with a touch of smoke trailing behind. Something like roasted salt - a layer that adds complexity rather than the saline edge from the palate.

Follow it down and the salinity itself stays planted on the tongue until the next sip. Not the long-pulling peat closure from Laphroaig or Lagavulin, but a clean malt-driven send-off.

Still Not For Me

Rating goes to 3.6. Up 0.4 from the original 3.2. Credit where credit is due, it grew on me. Still not buying another bottle though.

Friends around me love it, YouTubers stack praise on it, and none of that translates directly to my mouth. Two months later, that’s the lesson again. The salt-meets-sweet axis itself sits outside my taste. The brightness, the salt, the malt - they all show up, but each in its own corner without fully blending. I can follow the logic of why my friends light up at it, but the glass empties and nothing tugs me to pour another. That’s what decides it.

The ABV is one thing I do respect. 46.3%, non-chill-filtered, no added colour. As a build, that’s well above the floor. Coming off a stretch of 40% sherry bottles, the density of flavour here is noticeably tighter. The shape that strength makes is just not the shape I’m chasing.

If I have a similar amount to spend on something in this band, I’d rather pick up another bottle of Wild Turkey Rare Breed. Same money, much closer to my palate, and one pour pulls the next one out of the bottle. That last part matters more to me than anything else.

The bottle goes back on the shelf. Friends drop by, friends get a pour. Maybe another two months brings out something new. Whatever it turns out to be, no second follow-up post coming.

총평: ★★★★★ ★★★★★ 3.6점