A celebratory purchase long in the making, my first (perhaps only) ever bottle of Johnny Walker Blue Label is a bit of a transcendent experience in whisky tasting for me; it’s been something that brought with it an almost fabled legacy of awe behind the glass curtain in the liquor store’s “specialty products” section that I’ve spent a long time waiting to try. Well now, here it is: The vesche that most bars charge almost $30 per ounce for, the fancy big blue.
Johnny Walker Blue Label
Cardhu Distillery
Aberlour, Scotland
$249.99
Nose - Malty, brown sugar, with a subtle oak smoke and undercurrent brine. A whisper of peat peeks in as well, along with orange citrus, honey with black licorice.
Body - The feel as it first circles around is full bodied and oily before the classic scotch smoke hits and I pick out dark chocolate, a very subtle note of hazelnut, and floral tones.
Finish - Powerful, full and rounded, the finish here seems like a mouthful of glass marbles that burn the tongue with cooling vapors.
Thoughts - The Johnny Blue is by far the most expensive bottle of whisky I’ve ever bought in my life by more than a 2x increment. It was a huge step into a hobby that I prefer to keep at distance, and I must admit, I find the actual tasting experience of Blue Label to be utterly underwhelming. It’s the same story you hear anywhere else that writes or talks about whisky and reviewing the product: Johnny Blue is a mantle piece, a kind of rite of passage for the whisky enthusiast; More a token of admittance into the mad cult wherein your brothers and sisters all worship the god whose iconic interpretation was Dionysius, known beyond with many more names whose revelries are all celebrant to the same: the elixir of profundity, the distilled spirit.
I think Johnny Blue is something that is intriguing, beguiling, and mythic in stature based on the price point alone, but if you are to analyze it as a glass of whisky next to any other scotch, I would be hard pressed to put it above a Glenlevit 12, Glenmorangie, or even Dalmore 10. I think a big part of it’s downfall is the fact that it is a bastard scotch, a blend of single malts of varying age and home, with that quality and, for the price, quantity. The presentation of the bottle is immaculate, and the packaging is likely a $50 cut of the $250 pricepoint (as of February, 2023, though it has been here a very long time) but if someone were to tell me this was a sip worth two-hundred per bottle, I’d tell them to get out of town and bring me back two bottles of Ardbeg 10 with half a Benjamin in change. I wish it could be better, but as it stands, the Blue Label will be a special treat I pull out on very rare occasions, not for myself but for the delight of good company to have a chance to say, “oh yeah, I tried that. It wasn’t so great” if they aren’t deep into tasting hard liquor, and for the rest, a “Wow, that’s incredible!” While coughing and wincing a tear from their eye.
3/10, a pricey ticket to the cool kids club, but the club is a stale empty bookstore with only encyclopedias and a single print from Palahniuk buried in the corner.