Label 5 is not a name anyone chases. It is the French-owned blend that turns up on the bottom shelf, built to be poured into a mixer and forgotten, and most weeks there is nothing to say about it. This week there is one small thing, and it runs against the grain of almost every other distillery on the shelf.
The bottle the model can read cleanly, the Premium Reserve 12-year-old, is priced at just about what it is worth. At $68 it sits roughly 3% over the $66 its ten closest neighbours fetch, which in this trade counts as fair. The brand median lands at $68 too, so the dearest bottle Label 5 makes is also the one asking an honest number. On a shelf where famous names pile premium on premium, a budget blend that charges about what its company charges is quietly the more interesting story.
It is a decent drop for the money, too. Soft and easy, a wisp of smoke, banana and apple, barley sugar and toffee. Nobody is going to build a cabinet around it, but as the bottle you keep for a weeknight pour or a highball it does the job and does not overcharge for it. The age statement, rare at this price, is a genuine point in its favour.
The two Classic Black bottles are the everyday end of the range, $57 for the standard size and $72 for the litre, and they taste the part: walnut and toffee, a bit of charred fruit, orange and ginger. Here I have to be straight about a limit. The model's read on where those two sit against their neighbours is unreliable this week, so I am not going to pin a value verdict on either. The tickets are the tickets. What the bottles are worth relative to their company is a number I would not stand behind right now, and it is better to say so than to guess.
So the buying advice is short, which suits the brand. If you want a cheap, honest blend with a 12-year age statement, the Premium Reserve at $68 is the pick, priced about right and better than it needs to be at the money. The Classic Black at $57 does what a bottom-shelf blend is meant to do and costs accordingly; just do not expect me to tell you it is a bargain or a rip, because this week the numbers will not carry that claim either way.
Most of the shelf is a lesson in what names cost. Label 5 is the rare corner where the one bottle we can read is priced like it has nothing to prove.
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