Water turns a one-dimensional oceanic peat show into a well-balanced orchestra of peat and oak and caramelized malt. Overall: First, I highly recommend water with this. The same notes appear on the tongue, improving the overall balance of the malt (unless you just love seaweed). With Water: A few drops of water temper the peat, releasing notes of salted caramel and vanilla. A hint of citrus creeps in as the peat fades, along with sweet Key lime. A light malt sweetness pervades, but is just sweet enough to balance the salt/peat.įinish: Of medium length. Some tongue burn is followed by salty peat with notes of black pepper.
After a rest in the glass, one can pick out notes of sandalwood, vanilla, and caramel, although they are faint. Reminds me of expanses of brown seaweed slowly aging (rotting) on a sea spray-buffeted beach. Briny and heavily suggestive of the sea (not smoke). It’s quite reasonably priced, at $50 – $60, which is the new $40, didn’t you know? Superstition is Jura’s house malt but heavily peated (although the bottle says “lightly” peated, I would lump it in with fully peated malts like Laphroaig and Talisker) and aged in ex-bourbon casks. The NAS market is, certainly, one where the buyer must beware. In fact, when Compass Box recently tried to flip the system and release an NAS blend with the age of all of the components prominently displayed, it was slapped with threats of litigation. Any old profit-driven distillery ( cough) with an eye towards gouging the current spike in whisky popularity could release an $80 bottling of primarily young malt without any kind of legal backlash. It’s a laudable goal, but fraught with potential for abuse.
With an NAS expression, a distillery doesn’t have to try to sell something that has a price befitting its average age of, say, 15 years with a label that (by law) only reveals the youngest malt in the vatting – perhaps 5 years. Along with Ardbeg Uigeadail and Aberlour A’Bunadh, Superstition stands for the original intention of the category: to expand the ability of master blenders to release malts that showcase what’s best about a brand by allowing them to use young malt for intensity and fresh fruit and floral notes, and older malt for balance and depth. Jura Superstition was one of the first wave of NAS malts: whiskies created by combining a single distillery’s output from several different ages without revealing the ages on the bottle.
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