Grant's budget blend still asks over its crowd

This is as plain a desk as the shelf offers. Grant's carries a single whisky with a reading this week, the Triple Wood blend, in three sizes. There is no range to climb, no older sibling to tempt you up. The only real question is the one a budget blend should answer cleanly: is it cheap for what it is? On the numbers this week, not quite. The brand's middle price across the three bottles is $67, and the bottle the model can read clearly asks a clear premium over its field.

Triple Wood is a blended scotch married across three cask types, and it drinks the part: honey and apricot, a floral lift, barley sweetness, a note of orange and a touch of anise. It is light, easy, undemanding whisky, the sort poured into a highball or over ice without a second thought. Nothing about the liquid is a problem. The question is purely what it costs against the blends it most resembles.

The litre is the bottle the model reads with confidence, and the reading is not flattering. At $65 against a crowd near $49, the ten whiskies rated nearest it on taste, it is about 33% over. For a mass-market blend, that is the wrong direction. The whole appeal of a bottle like this is that it undercuts the field, and here it does the opposite, sitting a third above the cheap blends it competes with. The liquid is fine; the tag is simply not the bargain the category promises.

The same whisky comes in a 700ml bottle at $52 and in a larger 1.125L bottle at $91. The model cannot separate these two on value from the litre with any confidence, because they share a price band it treats as one, so I will not hang a verdict on either tag. What matters here is the arithmetic, because with an identical whisky in three sizes the only thing that changes is the price per pour. Work it through and the litre is the cheapest way to drink it: the 700ml costs a little more per measure, and the 1.125L bottle, despite holding the most, costs the most per measure of the three. If you have decided to buy Triple Wood, the litre is the size to buy.

That is the whole of it, and the honesty of a one-whisky desk is that there is nowhere to hide. Grant's Triple Wood is a decent, light, three-cask blend that this week is not priced like the bargain its shelf position suggests. The budget end of the blend aisle is exactly where a shopper goes hunting for value, and the lesson here is the one the familiar names keep teaching: a cheap-looking label is not the same as a cheap price against the company it keeps.

Here is how to buy. If Triple Wood is the whisky you want, in a highball or a mixed drink where its easy honey-and-orange character is all you need, take the litre at $65, because it is the cheapest per pour of the three sizes. Skip the larger 1.125L bottle at $91, which costs more per measure than the litre of the identical blend, and the 700ml at $52 only makes sense if you want the smallest outlay and are not fussed about value per pour. If what you are really after is a budget blend that undercuts its field, this is not it this week, and the cheaper names on the same shelf are worth a look before you commit.