Collectivum XXVIII

About the Collectivum XXVIII

Collectivum XXVIII is a blended malt Scotch whisky from Scotland, released by Diageo in 2017. It is not the work of one distillery. Twenty-eight of them went into it, which is what the Roman numerals in the name stand for. The bottling arrived as part of that year's Special Releases, the annual limited run Diageo has issued since 2001. It was the first blended malt ever to appear in that collection. Every active single malt distillery Diageo owned at the time is in the glass. That is twenty-eight sites across Scotland, married into a single vatting. The cask mix was just as broad. Refill American oak hogsheads and refill European oak butts carried the bulk of it. Ex-bodega European oak and first-fill bourbon casks filled in the rest. Dr Nick Morgan, Diageo's head of whisky outreach, announced it. Spice comes first on the nose: nutmeg, cinnamon and a crack of black pepper. Toffee and chocolate sit underneath, with orange peel and a floral lift above them. Sipping it, things turn sweeter and rounder. Honey and vanilla arrive early, then allspice, then a wash of sea salt. A medicinal note runs across the middle, thin but unmistakable. Barley sweetness holds the whole thing together. It closes peppery and salty, with toffee fading last. Most Special Releases put one distillery under the spotlight. Collectivum XXVIII does the opposite. It is a snapshot of an entire company's malt stock at a single moment. Diageo bottled it at 57.3% and released limited numbers worldwide. No age statement appears on the label, which was still rare for the series in 2017. No other bottle lets you taste twenty-eight distilleries at once. That is the whole point of it.