Glenmorangie The Quinta Ruban 14 is $147 at Dan Murphy's this week. Across roughly 25 standard drinks in the bottle that comes to about $5.79 a pour, which lands a dram at home just under a pint at the pub — about $13 for near enough two standard drinks, so about $6.28 each. Not a small bottle, then, but cheap by the pour for a full-strength whisky.
Here is the shape of it. At $147, the Quinta Ruban sits above what the drinkers of the bottles closest to it would pay for it. It is a bottle priced for its own fans: it fits them, and asks a bit more of everyone else.
What the nearest drinkers would pay
One figure, said plainly: this is what the drinkers of the bottles nearest the Quinta Ruban would pay for it, each starting from what they already pay for their own. Across those drinkers the answers run from $81 to $133.
The one who would go highest is a Mortlach The Wee Witchie 12 drinker, at about $133 — 78% of what their own bottle costs them. They mark the Glenmorangie down mostly for its wine-cask fruit and for being the stronger pour. Turn it around and a Quinta Ruban drinker rates the Mortlach at about 84% of their own bottle, docking it for that same wine-cask fruit and for not coming from the Highlands. At $147, this week's price sits a touch above the top of that $81-to-$133 range. Priced, in other words, for the people already in the room.
What it is, and how it drinks
This 14 year old picks up where the old 12 left off, adding two more years in port casks at the same price. The nose comes on slowly: marzipan first, then fresh apple and pear, milk chocolate, red berries, candied ginger and praline. The palate turns fruity and spiced — soft gingerbread, molasses cake, cherry pie, spiced plums, almond nougat and dark chocolate, with a faint thread of pipe tobacco running under it. It lifts again on a finish of hazelnut, spice and cigar wrapper. Understated, but it does not stay quiet.
Two to stand in its place
Mortlach The Wee Witchie 12, which usually sells around $170. Think baked apricots warmed through with ginger, then black pepper, a good deal of milk chocolate and a herbal edge, closing on chocolate ginger. To a Quinta Ruban drinker it gives about 84% of what the Glenmorangie does, for 116% of its price.
Glengoyne 15, around $162. The image here is vintage-car leather and toffee, with vanilla and ginger over the top, raisins and hazelnuts underneath, and cocoa powder on a spicy finish. To a Quinta Ruban drinker it also gives about 84% of what the Glenmorangie does, for 110% of its price.
Both of those cost a little more per standard drink than the Glenmorangie, and both sit a shade over a pint at the pub where the Quinta Ruban sits under it. Close company, a different cask story in each glass.
Who it's for
If the Quinta Ruban is already your bottle, there is an easy yes: at $147 this week nothing above unseats it, and that slow port-cask fruit is the whole reason you reach for it. Stay where you are.
If you drink the Mortlach, you would put the Quinta Ruban around $133 — so a swap asks a little extra for fruit you may not have gone looking for. Worth a glass as a change of pace rather than a new regular.
If Glengoyne 15 is your sherry-led pour, the two land within a hair of each other on what they deliver, and the choice is simply port fruit against sherry weight. Either way you are well served.
And for anyone new to all three: the Quinta Ruban is the gentlest door in, fruit-forward and easy to follow, for under a pint a pour. Start here and work outward.
None recorded.
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