At Tamdhu the sherry gets dearer faster than it gets better

Only one rung is priced near its neighbours, and it is the bottom one. The Tamdhu shelf sits around $238, but that figure is a trick of the top end — the two dearest bottles drag the middle so high it tells you almost nothing about what a sensible Tamdhu costs. Look rung by rung instead and the range splits cleanly into the one you buy and the three you admire from a safe distance.

One thing the model is clear about: this is a single-note distillery, and that is meant as a compliment. Across every bottle the same character leads, a sherried, dried-fruit sweetness with the Speyside softness underneath. You are not choosing between styles as you climb, the way you might at a house that splits its casks. You are choosing how much of one style to pay for. It makes the price ladder unusually easy to read, and unusually unforgiving, because there is nowhere for a weaker bottle to hide behind a different flavour.

The 12 is the whole case for the distillery. At $126 it runs about 8% over the roughly $117 its ten nearest cost, which, for a fully sherry-matured single malt with an age statement, is close enough to fair to count as a win. It drinks like Tamdhu wants you to remember it: citrus and bright fruit over a rich, sherried base, cinnamon and a note of chocolate rounding it off. Nothing about it feels thin or hurried. This is a proper sherried Speysider at a price that does not make you flinch, and if someone wanted one Tamdhu in the house the conversation would start and end here.

Step up to the 15 and the arithmetic changes faster than the whisky does. It is $202 against roughly $128 for its neighbours, about 58% over. The glass is recognisably a bigger, older cousin of the 12: molasses and orange peel, a herbal, slightly oily weight, a green edge, the sherry deeper and drier. It is a good whisky. The trouble is the step from the 12. You are paying roughly another seventy-six dollars, and more than half again over its own room, for three more years and a touch more depth. Some drinkers will want exactly that extra weight and will not mind the stretch. Most will taste the 12 and the 15 side by side and struggle to call the gap worth it.

Above the 15 the ladder leaves the realm of value entirely. The 18 is $274 against roughly $125 for its neighbours, about 119% over, and the Cigar Malt is $290 against roughly $117, about 148% over. On price alone, each is more than double the company it keeps. I will not tell you what either one tastes of, because no review I trust describes these two bottles, and guessing at a flavour is exactly the sort of thing this channel exists not to do. What I can tell you is where the model files them: squarely in the same sherried, dried-fruit family as the rest of the range, which is to say they are more Tamdhu, priced like trophies. The age and the name are doing the work here, not a jump in what the whisky delivers.

So the shape of the range is a steep one. The 12 sits a hair over its room. The 15 more than doubles that premium. The 18 and the Cigar Malt double it again. The sherried character the distillery is known for is present all the way up, which is the point: you are not buying a different style as you climb, you are buying the same style with a bigger number on the box. That is a fair thing to want, now and then, for a gift or an occasion. It is not a value proposition, and the range does not pretend otherwise once you read it rung by rung.

It is worth being clear about what the neighbourhood figure is measuring, because the 18 and Cigar Malt numbers look almost punitive. The model is not setting one Tamdhu against another. It is setting each bottle against the ten across the whole shelf it reads as closest in character, and for these heavily sherried malts that company trades a good deal lower than two hundred and seventy-odd dollars. So the gap is this bottle against the nearest thing you could buy instead, and on that test the top of the Tamdhu range is dear.

So, buying. For drinking and for value, the 12 at $126 is the clear and easy call: a genuine sherried Speysider, barely over its room, and the one bottle here I would happily recommend without a caveat. If you specifically want more age and more weight and have decided the stretch is yours to make, the 15 at $202 is the one to stretch to, knowing it asks well over half again over its neighbours for the privilege. The 18 at $274 and the Cigar Malt at $290 are occasion purchases, bought for the age statement and the shelf presence rather than the sums, which do not work in your favour and are not trying to.

Buy the sherry. Just buy it at the rung where you are paying for the whisky and not for the ladder.