At Craigellachie the value stops at the entry bottle

Here is the way to read the numbers that follow. Each bottle gets set beside the ten whiskies the model rates nearest it on flavour, and I take the middle price of those ten as the going rate for that style this week. Call it the neighbourhood. It is not a verdict on what the whisky is worth, just what the drams that taste most like it are asking right now. A bottle can sit under its neighbourhood, level with it, or over.

The entry Craigellachie, the 13, sits under. It is $111 against the roughly $134 its ten nearest cost, so about 17% below the going rate for its style, and it is the only one of the three that undercuts its room. It is also the one I would actually drink. The reviews reach for a rich, caramelled sweetness, citrus and grapefruit peel, a thread of tropical fruit through the middle. That tropical lean is the distillery's own signature doing the work rather than a cask trick laid over the top. A thirteen-year-old single malt, a little over a hundred dollars, tagged below the whiskies it sits next to. If someone wants one Craigellachie in the house, this is the whole answer, and it has been for a while.

Then the climb begins. The 19 is $376, about 8% over the roughly $348 of its neighbourhood. On the page that is a small premium, and the whisky backs it up: crisp and toasted, pineapple and a dried-fruit sweetness, a chocolate note underneath. The catch is not the 8%. It is that the ten whiskies the model lines up against the 19 are a loose fit, so the figure is better read as a signal than a precise verdict. Take it as "priced about where its company sits", not as a guarantee. At nearly four times the price of the 13 for six more years in oak, the step up is for someone who wants the older Craigellachie specifically, not for anyone chasing value.

The 23 is where the arithmetic leaves the whisky behind. It is $800 against a neighbourhood of about $358, which is roughly 124% over, better than double what comparable drams are asking. The glass is genuinely good. Spice and ripe dried fruit, a wisp of peat smoke, maple sweetness, a silky weight the years clearly bought. I would not call it a bad whisky. I would say the model reads its gap over the room as one of the widest on the shelf, and because its peer set is a loose one, that gap is a signal rather than a precise figure. Either way the direction is not in doubt. This is a trophy tag, bought by people who want a twenty-three-year-old Craigellachie on the shelf and are not counting the difference.

None of this is a knock on the distillery. Craigellachie makes a distinctive, old-fashioned, meaty-then-fruity malt, and the 13 is one of the quiet value buys in Speyside precisely because it delivers that character without asking a premium for it. What the range does, like most, is save its surcharges for the bottles it can sell on age. The 13 is priced like a whisky. The 23 is priced like an occasion.

So, buying. For drinking and for value, the 13 at $111 is the clear call, under its neighbourhood and showing the house style at its most likeable. If you want the older, crisper expression and the price is not the point, the 19 at $376 is tagged close to its room, with the caveat that its company is a loose match. The 23 at $800 is a trophy purchase, bought for the age and the occasion rather than the sums, because the sums do not help you here.

Buy the whisky at the bottom of the range. The two above it are buying something other than what is in the glass.