Macbeth Act 2 Isle of Jura 17 Year

Tasting Notes

Dave Broom's Tasting Note

"A thin flame rises from damp wood. The smell of wet wool and a sodden autumn’s bracken. Seed cake crumbs fleck the thin rags. A sharp profile in cold moonlight, the smoke clings to the sallow flesh. There can be no mercy."

Distillery

Originally written by Evan for a blog post relating to KWM's 2020 Whisky Calendar.

The Isle of Jura Distillery is the only distillery on the Isle of Jura (yes, I did read my previous sentence and no, I am not going to change it). The distillery site was originally founded in 1810 when it started its life under the name Small Isles Distillery. While it operated for most of the 19th century, it was shut down in 1901 and mostly dismantled. Jura Distillery was finally rebuilt and revived six decades later in 1963 when whisky production on the site started once more.

The distillery may not receive the amount of love from consumers that it should, currently. It is owned by Whyte and Mackay/Emperador and while the company does try to put focus on the Jura label, it is overshadowed by another brand in their portfolio. That is Dalmore Distillery, which has more of a following (and a lot more pretension in my opinion). It could be worse, though: Have you heard of Fettercairn or Tamnavulin? In Alberta, we just started to receive official bottlings from these two distilleries, but not much effort has been put into making them household names at this point.

While Jura whisky has a fanbase, the label and lineup have been a little scattershot and schizophrenic over the past decade or more. For years, it was tough to figure out what kind of whisky you were going to be getting from a lineup that carried both unpeated, lightly peated, and heavily peated whisky. I know they were trying to brand their peated styles with the mysterious names of ‘Superstition’ and ‘Prophecy’, but telling what was peaty and what was not in their range could be difficult for consumers.

The Jura brand was relaunched in 2018, though you can still find some of the older bottlings on shelves. The new range might not be much better for consumer understanding.