Hibiki 12
I've been reacquainting myself with my whisky shelf recently after a few years of hyper focusing on wine and not really touching the amber stuff. I've been a whisky drinker for a long time and was briefly the whisky buyer for a bar in south Manchester a lifetime ago, but I don't actually know all that much about the stuff beyond knowing what I tend to like. When I was getting into wine I found that writing reviews for myself was a very good way of learning more about it and enjoying what I was drinking a little bit more intentionally, so I'm hoping to get something similar out of writing about whisky. We'll see how it goes.
Hibiki 12 was one of the first whiskies I really fell in love with, and this specific bottle was bought for my by my mum for my 30th birthday. Shortly afterwards I quit drinking for a few years and so didn't touch it, and then it was discontinued and became incredibly expensive. The result is that I've been rationing it for a long time, because I know that once it's gone I'll never have it again. It's probably five years since I last tasted this. But now that I'm staring down the barrel of 40 in a few weeks, I'm realising that I should just let myself enjoy things rather than holding on to them.
Bottled: I believe 2013, based on the bottle code (Z4HK3)
Cask Type: A blend of 30 malts from Yamazaki and Hakushu whiskies aged in American, Spanish, and Mizunara Oak, including plum brandy barrels.
Stated Age: 12 Years, with the oldest malts in the blend being aged for more than 30 years.
Strength: 43%
Price Paid: N/A - a birthday gift from my mum in 2016
Served: Neat in a Glencairn. No resting before drinking but enjoyed over about 20 minutes.
Nose: Sweet and fruity, like rich marmalade and plums. It smells full, warm, and round.
Palette: Spiced fruits, cloves, sweet honey, a ribbon of vanilla that I guess comes from the oak. A gentle, slow-motion eruption of flavour.
Finish: Long and lingering, candied apple and tannins gripping your gums (can you tell most of my tasting experience is in wine?)
I remember loving the flavours but feeling that this was quite a "sharp" dram. It seems that a decade of oxidisation and maceration in the bottle has worked some magic here and mellowed it out significantly. This is a beautifully rounded whisky now. It has absolutely no edge to it, just a gentle warming hug in the mouth. You almost wouldn't know it's got a percentage. There's a ton of sweetness in here, and the texture reminds me of an Old Fashioned that's been made with syrup rather than brown sugar. It's silky smooth in the mouth.
This is entirely unlike the sorts of whiskies I usually drink these days - I'm a peat fiend, generally - but it's one of the first whiskies I properly enjoyed when I was first getting into the stuff, and I'm delighted to say that it's still a very tasty dram. I'm really going to enjoy finishing off the bottle now that I've allowed myself to reopen it.
At this stage I have so little knowledge about what I'm drinking that I don't really know how different woods impact a whisky, but the presence of Mizunara here - which I understand is a fairly uncommon wood to use and is mostly found in Japanese whiskies, being a Japanese wood - makes me want to learn more about that specifically.
Would I pay upwards of £500 for a bottle of this now when I know it was around £70 back when I was gifted it? Absolutely not. But at the time of writing this I've just read the news that Hibiki 12 is finally coming back to travel retail this year, and if the new version is anywhere near as good as this then I'll be ecstatic to see it return. Hopefully the 17 will also make a return, since I never got a chance to try it back in the day.
Which brings me to a score. I have a real hatred of rating scales that don't actually use the full scale, especially when anything under 50 basically means the same thing. At that point, why do you have 50 points there to play with?
So I guess if I'm going to review things I need to figure out how to score them, and I haven't done that yet. For the time being I'm just going to go with Yum, Yuck, or Meh, and this is very much a Yum. Maybe a Yum+.