At Dewar's even the cheap bottles run over their room

The measure first. Each bottle is set beside the ten whiskies the model rates nearest it on flavour, and the middle price of those ten is the going rate for the style this week. I will call it the neighbourhood. Every Dewar's on the shelf is tagged over its neighbourhood, from a little over at the bottom to a quarter over near the top. That is unusual for a value blend, and it is the thread running through the whole range.

Take the floor. White Label, the famous workhorse, is $52 against the roughly $47 its ten nearest cost, so about 11% over. The whisky is exactly what it has always been: honey and melon, a squeeze of lemon and lime, soft grapey fruit. A perfectly decent mixer and a reasonable cheap pour, tagged a touch above the other cheap pours it sits beside. The 12 is the next rung and much the same story, $69 against about $63, roughly 10% over. For the extra money you get a rounder drink, caramel and a light sherry sweetness with a twist of grapefruit, and twelve years of age on the label. Both sit over their rooms by about a tenth. Not a scandal, just not the bargain the brand's reputation implies.

Then the litre, which is where the shelf plays a small trick on you. White Label in the one-litre bottle is $69, and against its neighbourhood of about $47 that reads as roughly 47% over, by a distance the worst-looking value in the range. Except it is the same whisky as the $52 bottle, in a bigger bottle, and the model is comparing a litre against drams sold in 700s. Do the division and the litre works out to about $48 for the same 700 millilitres, which is actually cheaper by volume than the standard bottle. So the 47% is a measuring artefact, not a rip-off. If you are buying White Label to pour freely, the litre is the sensible call. The lesson is to read the size before the gap, because on the shelf tag the litre looks like the dear bottle and in the glass it is the cheap one.

Up top the markup is real, and it grows. The 15 is $80 against roughly $66, about 21% over. The whisky steps up with it, melon and banana, baked apple and orange, a woody note settling in behind. The 18 is $131 against about $105, roughly 25% over, and it is the softest and most polished of the lot: light and floral, a gentle sweetness, toasted grain on the finish. Both are pleasant blends. Both ask about a fifth to a quarter more than the whiskies they sit next to. The further up the Dewar's range you climb, the wider the gap over the room gets, which is the reverse of what a value house is supposed to do.

So what is going on is not that Dewar's is overpriced in absolute terms. Everything here is cheap next to a single malt. It is that within its own weight class, the blend shelf, Dewar's charges a small premium at the bottom and a bigger one at the top, trading on a name that still means something on a back bar. The whisky is fine. The pricing just quietly leans on the label the whole way up.

So, buying. If you want White Label to mix or to pour without thinking, buy the litre: it is the cheapest way to the same whisky despite how the tag reads. If you want a step up to sip, the 12 at $69 is the pick, rounder than the White Label and only a tenth over its room. The 15 at $80 and the 18 at $131 are for someone who wants an older, smoother blend and does not mind paying a fifth to a quarter over the going rate for the privilege. None of them is a steal. The trick is not to let the litre's scary-looking number push you toward the small bottle, which is the actual poor value here.

Buy Dewar's by the size that suits how you drink it, and ignore what the shelf tag wants you to think the litre costs.