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Emirates East Mall Wines & Spirits
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Nobody told me to do it. That’s important to establish upfront. There was no brief, no commission, no wellness framework guiding me toward a week of nothing but Islay whisky. It was, in the loosest possible sense, a personal choice — which is what I’ll be telling my liver if it ever asks.
The premise was simple enough: seven days, five bottles, one island’s worth of smoke, salt, and whatever it is Islay actually puts in the Atlantic air that makes everything taste like a shipwreck you’d actually want to revisit. No wine. No beer. No last-minute Scotch-adjacent concessions. Just Islay, start to finish.
The line-up wasn’t random. I’d been circling around a comparison for months — the question of what separates Bruichladdich’s almost wilful restraint from Lagavulin’s full-throated insistence. Two distilleries, both Islay, both exceptional, separated by about twelve miles of coastline and a philosophical chasm wide enough to sail a ferry through. Bowmore sat in the middle, as it always has — the compromise candidate, which is underselling it considerably.
I started with the Bruichladdich The Classic Laddie. No age statement, unpeated, a whisky that makes a point of being distinctly un-Islay in the conventional sense. The first pour on a Sunday evening was almost disorienting — floral, coastal, something like brioche left near an open window. I kept reaching for the peat that wasn’t there. By the second glass, I’d stopped looking for it.
Day two brought the Bruichladdich Islay Barley — a single vintage expression, and the one that properly rewired my thinking. The barley is grown on the island itself, which shouldn’t make a difference you can actually taste, except it obviously does. There’s a grassiness to it, something agricultural and almost raw, underneath the familiar Laddie elegance. It tastes like it belongs somewhere specific, which is either terroir or marketing and I genuinely can’t tell you which.
Wednesday was always going to be the pivot. I’d saved the Lagavulin 8yr for midweek on purpose, on the theory that I’d need something decisive after two days of Bruichladdich’s more considered pleasures. It was decisive. The 8-year is peat first, second, and third — assertive in a way that doesn’t quite ask permission. Lagavulin’s house character is smoke-forward without being brutal, and the youth here adds a ragged energy the 16-year doesn’t have. It’s less polished. I liked it more than I expected to.
By day three I had stopped checking the clock before pouring. I’m not sure if that’s a warning sign or a milestone. Possibly both.
The Lagavulin 11yr — aged in ex-bourbon casks — arrived on Thursday and brought a sweetness that softened the smoke without domesticating it. Vanilla, a little caramel, the same medicinal undertow. If the 8-year is the distillery at full volume, this is the same song played with the windows shut. Still unmistakably Lagavulin. Still not for the uncommitted.
I saved the Bowmore 12yr for Friday. A deliberate choice. Bowmore is the oldest distillery on the island and it carries that weight — there’s a gravity to it, a slightly heathery, slightly briny complexity that the newer expressions from both Bruichladdich and Lagavulin don’t quite have. The peat is present but measured. The fruit — peach, a little dried apricot — surfaces through it. It was exactly the right way to end the week: not a confrontation, not a revelation, just a very good whisky behaving like one.
So what happened? Honestly, less drama than the premise implied. What the week actually produced was a recalibration — an understanding that Islay isn’t one thing, that the smoke and iodine shorthand flattens an island that’s been doing something far more nuanced for a long time. Bruichladdich is asking different questions than Lagavulin. Bowmore sits somewhere older than both of them, quietly making its point.
I’d do it again. I’d probably start with the 8-year.
