This Port Ellen 1983 is a joint bottling of the Silver Seal label with their Dutch distributor Whiskybase. Fifty bottles as a joint bottling, the rest with a regular Silver Seal label. Update: a couple of bottles are bottled for The Auld Alliance bar in Singapore.

There’s a surprising amount of Port Ellen 1983 releases at 55,5% these days. The Whiskyman, Old Bothwell and now Silver Seal. These same bottlers had similar or shared casks before, so it’s not impossible that it’s all the same stuff.

Port Ellen 28 yo 1983 (55,5%, Silver Seal & Whiskybase 2011, cask S1462, 60 btl.)

Nose: very good or at least exactly how I like my Port Ellen: sophisticated and subtle with bits of everything. Sharper notes (camphor, coal, wet wool) balanced by rounder elements (green banana, apple, vanilla). Lemon and mint. Pepper. Leather. Very much in line with the PE 1983’s mentioned before. Mouth: starting on briny notes, peat and soot. Iodine. Returns slightly towards creamier notes but the sharpness never goes away. Finish: very long, with peat and liquorice.

Could this be a shared cask? Yes, possibly, or else it’s a similarly high quality neighbour cask of the one(s) we reviewed before. Recommended, although it stretches the boundaries of whisky capitalism once again: € 245, € 275 or € 300 depending on who you buy it from.

Score: 92/100