Johnnie Walker Black Label 12 Year Old Whisky

If you're a newbie to whisky ,try this really smooth,a little smoke, along with monkey shoulder the best blended whisky on the market!

After 10 years of tasting many.. many cheap and expensive and VERY expensive whiskies.

Black label is the best.

Nice whisky for the money. I get lovely toffee like flavour. Never add water to this one. On another page to the red or to cheaper varieties. 12 years smooths out the edges. Pleasantly surprised with this can't say that about the JW red.

"Read below please" summed it up very well. I would be very surprised if ANY whisky is the same as it was 10, 20, 30 more years ago. There are so many variables at play but the biggest one is reduction of alcohol. This product used to be 43.4% abv - now it is 40%... Shame! Let us do the dilution if we choose and charge extra if necessary... anyway STILL a very good drop and 12 years is the sweet spot.

A good blended scotch for a fair price. On the nose : fruit, raisins, vanille, smoke and peat. Better than the non-smoke, non-peat blended whiskies : Famous Grouse, JWRed, Bells, Teachers etc. 85 points

Sipping one in a bar with a copita glass right now in Spain as I wanted to try one as it’s getting difficult to find whiskies here. So I wanted a cheaper alternative to what I usually drink (to keep them for longer)- Laphroaig, bowmore, caol Ila and wanted to try this one as you can find it here quite easily. I’m not a blended lover, even though I have tried some more select ones which are quite nice, I find this to be perfectly acceptable for a mass produced one. Definitely get those Christmassy notes, some smoke, a bit too smooth for me maybe but enjoyable- like a lighter jura 10

On the nose I get a buttery toffee with apple.

On the palate I get a very smoky charred wood flavor with a hint of peat. Sultanas and a slight toffee note add to the flavor, a dash of water makes this whisky more appealing. The finish is short and spicy with a hint of fruit.

Like most Scotch a acquired taste, much prefer Bourbon as it tends not to beat you up as much.

Really like this blended whiskey as good as a few malts, my new favourite

JWBL used to be about as close to a standard affordable stalwart as....well as almost every single whisky in Scotland until the psycho CEO class decided that nobody would notice if they ripped the heart out of their products and replaced them with dreck!
I have changed the drams I buy several times over the years, as more and more beloved whiskies have been mutilated. One heartbreaking example was Ballantine's 17 year old. I badly miss Lagavulin 16. They sell whisky called Lagavulin 16, but it is emphatically NOT Lagavulin 16. It no longer exists. There are some bright lights of course. We know who they are.
God Bless Them.
Like many of the non-paid, experienced reviewers on this website, I have been drinking JWBL since The Eighties. This whisky has been criminally mistreated for many years, but every now and then I buy a bottle....just to see how bad things have become. I do the same with Big Macs....just to remind myself that I hate them. Now I don't know whether it is my imagination, or whether I have become so unused to drinking Black Label that I can't actually remember what it tastes like, but the couple of bottles I have bought this year have actually been pleasant. I live in an Asian megacity. I don't know whether that is relevant. And there is a shop not too far away from me that sells vintage Blue Label. (!)
But I am drinking a just-bought measure of JWBL right now and the only thing it seems to be lacking is the oily mouthfeel that we know and love and touch of depth. Perhaps previous bottling have been so utterly pathetic that I have set the bar too low for a valid opinion?
I eagerly await a response from the MoM community. :-)

When this stuff was 43% it was very, very good as far as a 12-year-old Blended Whisky goes. It is not the same whisky regardless of it being 3% weaker. I suspect management have thought:- No one drinks Black Label straight anymore, let's reformulate it to be a "premium mixer".