Only the Dalmore 12 is tagged under its neighbours

The yardstick, so the numbers make sense. Every bottle is stood next to the ten drams the model judges nearest it on flavour, and the middle price of those ten is the going rate for that style this week. I will call it the neighbourhood. It says what comparable whiskies are asking, not what any one bottle is secretly worth.

Start with the 12, because it is the good news. It is $149 against the roughly $164 its ten nearest cost, so about 9% under the going rate for its style. For a bottle that leans as heavily on its brand as Dalmore does, a sub-neighbourhood tag is a small surprise. The whisky is the house in miniature: oloroso sherry front and centre, barley sugar and toffee, a soft, sweet weight to it. This is the one to buy if you want to know what Dalmore is about without opening the account. A twelve-year-old Highland malt, richly sherried, tagged a little under its room. That is a fair deal by any reading.

Now the Cigar Malt, which makes the opposite case about as loudly as a bottle can. It is $231 against a neighbourhood of about $115, which is roughly 101%, give or take, over the going rate. Call it double. The glass is not the problem: oloroso and a cabernet-cask richness, caramel, ripe orange, the kind of big sherried profile the Cigar Malt is built to deliver. The problem is the tag. The ten whiskies the model lines up against it are a loose fit, so read the gap as a signal rather than a precise figure, but even a loose read lands it at roughly twice what its company asks. You are paying for a no-age-statement sherry bomb with a famous name and a reputation as a cigar companion, not for anything the years put in the cask.

The 18 tells the same story one rung up. It is $536 against about $273, so roughly 96% over, again close to double. It is a lovely whisky on paper, oloroso and honey, ginger and orange with a faint curl of smoke, and it has the age the Cigar Malt lacks. It also carries a loose peer set, so the 96% is a signal and not a verdict. Signal or not, the shape is clear: an eighteen-year-old Dalmore asks about twice what comparable eighteens are asking, and most of that premium is the stag on the label rather than the liquid behind it.

There is a fourth Dalmore on the shelf, the twenty-one-year-old, but it sits so far above its room that the model cannot read it cleanly, so I have left it out of the comparison this week rather than quote a number I do not trust.

None of this is a case against Dalmore as a distillery. It makes one of the most consistent heavily-sherried styles in the Highlands, and the 12 proves the house can be bought at a sensible price. What the range does is reserve its real surcharges for the bottles it can sell on prestige: the Cigar Malt on its cult status, the 18 and the older twenty-one on their age and their collectors. The further up the range you go, the more of the price is the idea of Dalmore and the less of it is the whisky.

So, buying. For drinking and for value, the 12 at $149 is the clear call, under its neighbourhood and showing the sherried house style in full. The Cigar Malt at $231 is for someone who specifically wants that big no-age sherry hit and has made peace with paying roughly double its room for it. The 18 at $536 is a collector's eighteen, bought for the age and the name rather than the arithmetic, which does not work in its favour. And the twenty-one, at the top, is a trophy, priced beyond anything the model can usefully compare it to.

If you have had Dalmore on a shelf as a someday bottle, make it the 12. It is the only one here tagged like a whisky rather than a status symbol.