Lark's entry bottles are its closest to fair

Six Lark bottles are on the shelf, and every one of them sits above its flavour-crowd, the ten whiskies the model rates nearest each on taste. That is no shock for a small-batch Tasmanian distillery with Lark's standing, and these are, bottle for bottle, serious drams. But the range of the premiums is wide, and it runs in a clean line from the entry bottles, which sit a little over their peers, to the cask-strength flagship, which sits at more than two and a half times its crowd. Where you buy on that line matters more than usual.

Two bottles anchor the affordable end. The No.151 Fire Trail is the closest to fair in the whole range: at $169 against a crowd of $140 it sits about $29 over, roughly 21%. It carries no tasting notes of its own in the data, so I will keep to what the model reads, a lightly peated and gently sherried profile, and say nothing more about the glass than that. The Symphony is the other near-the-mark bottle and the one I would reach for first. A blended malt rather than a single malt, it drinks charred and sweet, with honey and a dried-fruit depth over a thread of wood smoke. At $147 against a crowd of $118 it sits about $29 over, roughly 25%. Those two are the sensible Larks: real distillery character without the full Lark toll. For a first Lark, or a bottle to pour for friends who have never had Tasmanian whisky, either of them does the job without asking you to gamble a lot of money on the house style.