Same smoke, wildly different tags: the Islands shelf

What separates them is the tag. And on this shelf the tags do not agree with one another.

The middle of the Islands shelf sits around $110 a bottle this week. That number hides a lot. Sit each bottle beside the ten whiskies the model rates closest to it, near enough the same make-up and character, and a split falls out. The younger, cheaper island malts are priced about where their neighbours sit. A couple of the dearer ones have wandered a long way north of theirs.

Start with the one that jumps off the page. Talisker Port Ruighe asks $149. The bottles the engine parks nearest it sit around a $69 median. That is the widest daylight between a ticket and its own neighbourhood anywhere on the Islands shelf, and it is not close. The port-cask finish is doing real work in the glass — Talisker's peppery coastal smoke wrapped in dark, jammy fruit, oak and a smear of honey. A finish laid down in old wine casks is not free. The bottle is good. The question the tag asks, and does not answer, is whether that wine-cask polish is really worth double what the room around it costs.

Then the one I would put in a newcomer's hand. Highland Park 12 is $109, and for once ticket and model shake hands. It sits about where its own jury of neighbours reckons it should, with those peers clustered nearer $86. Orkney's peat is the gentle sort, more coastal drift than bonfire, with a cereal sweetness holding it up. This is the Islands house style with the volume turned down two notches. It is priced like a bottle that has nothing to prove, which, after all these years, it hasn't.

The honest money sits lower still. Isle of Skye 8 is $64 against neighbours around $56 — a soft, toffee-sweet, lightly smoky pour that will not frighten anyone taking their first run at peat. Johnnie Walker Double Black is $76, and here is the small surprise: it comes in under the $80 its neighbours run, and under its own dearer Johnnie Walker siblings too. Charred oak, vanilla, a sweet edge and more smoke than the standard Black Label carries. Neither bottle is chasing a collector. Both drink a good deal better than their tag suggests they should.

Climb back up and the gaps reopen, though never as violently as the Port Ruighe's. Isle of Raasay is $122 against a room nearer $100. It is a young, peppery, milk-sweet peated malt from a distillery still barely out of its first casks, so some of that premium is simply the cost of new. Fair enough. Johnnie Walker 18 is the dearest of the six at $179, its neighbours around $150. That one carries more of its weight: a properly sherried blend, dried fruit and soft spice over old oak, the kind of dram that reads as a present rather than a Tuesday pour. You are still paying up for it, but there is something in the glass answering back.

It helps to remember what "Islands" actually corrals. This is not one place but a scattered handful, tied together mostly by what they are not. Orkney in the far north, Skye and Raasay off the west, Jura across the sound from Islay, and the newer names still filling their first warehouses. They get grouped because none of them is Islay and all of them catch weather off the Atlantic. The house style, in as much as there is one, is that maritime edge: smoke, but the softer, saltier kind, with more room for sweetness and orchard fruit underneath than Islay usually allows. Line six of them up and the family resemblance is genuine. So, unfortunately for the shopper, is the spread in what they cost. A bottle that tastes like its neighbour can be priced a world apart from it, and that is the whole reason to check before you reach.

So, sorted by what you actually want.

New to island whisky and keeping half an eye on the money: Isle of Skye 8 at $64, or the Double Black at $76 if you would trade a few dollars for more smoke. Either is a soft landing. One bottle to keep on the shelf and reach for without thinking: Highland Park 12 at $109 is the steady, honest pick, priced like it means it. Buying a gift and wanting the label to speak first: the sherried Johnnie Walker 18 at $179 looks the part and, unusually for a bottle at that price, backs it up.

The one to sit with a moment is the Talisker Port Ruighe. Lovely whisky. At $149 you are paying a heavy premium over everything the model shelves next to it, so buy it because you have tasted the port-cask style and want more of it — not because the shelf is telling you it is a bargain. It isn't. It is telling you the opposite, quite loudly.