SN2014

dramming.com/2014/08/…

Whisky Advocate recently (and silently, as in their wont) posted tons of new whiskies on their online buying guide—all the ones from the Fall 2014 issue. The Supernova 2014 is in there:

whiskyadvocate.com/ratings-reviews/…

To cut the suspense: Dave Broom reviewed it and called it "a great Arbeg" with a score of 91. They also call it the "committee bottling." I don't know if that really means anything these days. I understand that it used to, but that was before I was into the sweet, sweet peat.

And Whisky Advocate is the only place I've seen a price quoted ($160), not that I've looked too hard.

I dunno...

Ardbeg seems to be getting rather gimmicky these days...

The Ardbeg hoopla seem to by typically gimmicky, but I don't think this bottle itself gimmicky—at least not if you consider it as nothing more than the return of the popular Supernova line. I suppose it might be gimmicky if you consider the very idea of super-peated whisky to be a gimmick.

I think you we gotta ignore whatever space station hoopla they pump out around a release like this. And where does that hoopla actually go, anyway? I hear about it secondhand on boards like this, but I've rarely been confronted with Ardbeg's marketing stuff firsthand. What do they do—send spammy email? Splash ads across magazine pages? Billboards? I live under a rock.

Ardbeg took a different road than most distillers when it came to their old stock. They blended their old stock into regular offerings and upped the quality.

For instance, a 10 year Ardbeg from 2007 has some 17 year in it. That earned them some royal customers. And then the company came upon a fork in the road once the older reserves ran out: to save up some new stuff for another 16+ years old, or . . . to come up with a new strategy.

I'd wager Ardbeg did the latter and this involves the so-called "gimmicks" we all grumble about, along with some very well made younger stock.

It's worth pointing out that an (ancient) 17 year old Ardbeg now sells for a great deal of money ($570 to be exact on Whisky Exchange). If Ardbeg had saved up some of its 15+ stock to release in a few years, that stock of older whisky could indeed sell at around $275 per bottle considering what the 15 year Highland Park series (Norse gods) are selling for. The main difference there is that Highland Park has an abundance of older stock and Ardbeg assumedly does not.

So .. . Ardbeg might even be able to sell, say, a 15 year for up to $300. Beyond that, I just can't imagine it selling too well, unless Committee was stamped on the bottle and only a little was released at any one time. Then higher prices could be charged. As for this latest bottling, I must confess that I bought a bottle of the SN2014. Shame on me. I fell for the gimmickery,

Will I open my bottle any time soon? Doubtful. But either way, Ardbeg wins and we all know who owns Ardbeg. LVMH. You can trust a big conglomerate to come up with fancy advertising gimmicks. It runs in their blue blood, just as it does with royals, which are a different kind of corporation, a much older variety. So-called "royals" had flawless advertising campaigns in the Middle Ages, convincing their subjects that they were directly in touch with God and had a divine right to rule. If only their subjects had known the truth: they were in fact in touch with (in the debt of) nonhuman intradimensional beings of great power, though certainly not with angels or God. . . .

The same can be said for the folks who run the world's largest and most powerful corporations today, many of whom are "royals." Some things never change, except for angles of the advertising campaigns . . . but those will come round full circle soon enough. Why change the ones that worked so well for so long? In fact, they are warming up on the back burners of banking, commerce & government even as we dote over our favorite whiskies.

Who knows? Maybe right around the same time the world become embroiled in a war against "outerspace aliens" Ardbeg will pull an ace out of its sleeve and combine gimmickery with actual old stock. What would the distiller call a new 17 year old bottle?

I've got it: "The Holy Grail." Maybe it would be packaged in the shape of a humble carpenter's cup made of imitation titanium (shiny metallic-looking plastic) with an illustration on the box of a brave knight fighting an alien. Okay, now I've gone too far. If I were a royal, or even a mere billionaire, I'd have a case or two of Ardbeg 17's in the deep dark recesses of my cavernous basement, along with a case of Lagavulin Feis Ille's from 2012 on. . . . How strange it is that while the Lagavulin 16's were going down slightly in quality the Feis Ille's and Distiller's Editions got better, at least in 2012, which was quite an auspicious year indeed.

So rigmorole, is that a yes or a no on the spammy email?

:)

No spammy email to me, I'm happy to report. Then again, I'm not a committee member, although I would like to be. I wouldn't mind emails from Ardbeg. In fact, I would like them.

I think people object to the conceptual based hype that Ardbeg uses, such as the World Cup, space whisky, etc. I rather like their Alligator campaign even though it didn't make me laugh or smile. Their advertisements never play in America but they are classy in my estimation. Very well done.

Personally, I don't like using the world cup theme to sell single malt scotch. When I drink scotch whisky, I want to be reminded of all things Scottish, Gaelic, Islay, old world, etc.

I can understand why Islay natives and the Scottish get sick of that kind of thing since they are probably exposed to it, and they also associate with oldsters that might not seem slick and modern like many of the under 40-somethings aspire to be.

The Scottish live there and were exposed to it all their lives. To an American in Oregon, it's nostalgic, especially since I have some Scottish heritage that I am pretty much isolated from culturally. I'm also depressed at the thought of a huge multinational conglomerate owning Ardbeg distillery, but I must confess that the board of said ginormous corporation, to its credit, has hired some top notch distillers and managers from Islay to "do their thing" with Ardbeg. So that is gratifying.

I am following the transition to Scotttish independence very closely. I think that Scottish pride in whisky making has helped to get the world's support for Scottish independence. I support it, certainly. Sadly, as the world becomes more controlled by corporations, countries like Scotland will gain independence and citizens will believe they truly are independent when in reality the world is become enslaved by huge banks and corporations on a wholesale level, even in places like Brazil, which figured into the latest Ardbeg Day offering. I think that the world cup is being used by quite a few huge corporations in all sorts of ways to push globalism.

High profile billion dollar football teams are also indirectly serving as inertia for turning over the reigns of sovereign nations and peoples to global control by an even smaller minority of rulers, many of whom are so numb to the lives of normal people that they are literally sociopathic (uncaring for the fates of the bulk of humanity) by comparison. When sociopaths control the planet, dire things become a way of life. Yes, the wars, disasters that ensue might seem unavoidable but many of them are not. Many of them are actually allowed to happen and even created to "manage" the human race like a commodity--specifically that of "two legged cows."

I bought my bottle of SN2014 because I've heard tremendous things about the SN2010. One of my friends, who knows a great deal about scotch, loved it. I'm interested to hear if this latest offering measures up. I did not try the 2010 so I will value his insights.

The dudes over at straightbourbon.com say that Ardbeg's going to release Supernova annually from now on. I haven't seen that anywhere else. Does anyone here know more? (I refuse to join yet another forum, so I'm not wading in over there.)

straightbourbon.com/forums/showthread.php/…

Annual releases would be pretty sweet. I'm almost surely not splashing out for one this year, but I'd like to get a crack at it sometime in future. And if it comes out every year, the craze to hoard and collect might be lessened. Maybe that'd give us a better chance of buying it at a (relatively) reasonable price and drinking it. Maybe.