The case for this bottle rests on a record, and records in whiskey are usually temporary. This one is not behaving that way. A ceiling that survives thirteen consecutive annual releases stops looking like a fluke and starts looking like a boundary, and the longer it holds the more the 2013 bottling functions as the fixed point the rest of the line is described against. That is a durable position to own. Two practical notes. Authentication is trivial by the standards of this line — 135.4 is unique, so the proof on the face settles it without reference to the L13 code, which is not true of most batches here. And be careful with age claims: there is no age statement on this or any release in the range, and a 2013 bottling is not an old whiskey by virtue of having been bottled twelve years ago. Time in glass is not time in wood.

Do not treat the record as a dare. The temptation with the line's strongest bottling is to drink it neat and call it a test, which tells you about your palate rather than about the whiskey. Pour a small measure, taste it undiluted once so you know the starting point, then work down deliberately. The more interesting exercise is comparative: set it against a batch in the 127s and the gap between the two is the entire operating range of this line, roughly eight proof points across fourteen years. Tasted alone the number is trivia; tasted against the bottom of the range it tells you something.