(Disclaimer: The price didn't matter for my rating.)

Tasted this with the 21yo (2016), 23yo (2017) and 22yo (2018) head to head and had a lot of fun.

Final score:
23yo 91P
21yo 88P
25yo 88P
22yo 86P

It is very drinkable, if you like the modern Ardbegstyle like I do. But it offers little complexity, it tastes more like a designed blend, without any highlights.

If you expect something outstanding or consider its price (750€ in germany, at least at first...), this has the potential to be your disappointment of the year.

Nose: rather boring. Yes, the typical Ardbeg smoke is still relatively dominant at the age of 25. Clearly a bit medicinal and also typical Ardbeg fruit notes, but very subtle. The citrus notes are still the clearest.
Taste: Of course, the peat comes into its own here too, but otherwise other flavors tend to remain in the background. A slight sweetness, neat spice and a little oak. But very poor for 25 years. Unfortunately also a subtle bitterness
Finish: The finish is much weaker and boring. Smoke and bitterness linger over ...
Conclusion: Compared to the 19 year old Traigh Bhan, especially the 2nd batch there, the 25 series is really far behind. We don't want to talk about the PLV here.

For once, an Ardbeg special bottling finally convinced me again for a long time.
It is sweet, very sweet, graceful, fine, light golden and finely balanced. It is almost like being a bear licking warm liquid honey. It is not noticeably smoky.
Anyone who is a pure color drinker and likes extremely strong notes will not be happy here.
However, if you love a very fine summer barbecue concert in the honey bear forest, you will definitely be happy here.
This whisky is so perfect that it doesn't need to be diluted.
It's nice that Ardbeg is also able to play such fine and balanced tones on the taste board.

So... Ardbeg 25.
I am almost famos for my ardbeg hatred and my whisky groups slowly mocked me for not having a foundation to hate ardbeg any more (I have some history and gifted an Ardbeg 17 to a good friend as a revenge for gifting me something special).
As we could score one bottle for the initial sale point we shared samples and I bought 2cl of this 25y thing.

Nose: yep, that is neat. You can smell some kind of "richness". Its age, the Ardbeg style of peat... the burnt pineapple.
Mouth: Oh, neat, Ardbeg 10
Finish: Oh neat, the Ardbeg 10 finish.

I used way more curse words in our whisky group to describe my emotions.

So everything aside: why does it still score a 84?
The nose is very noble and I was really "shocked" after the first sniff (because it was amazing!)
Spend as much time nosing this thing as you can.
So, Ardbeg 10, solid 8/10 for me... scale to 100 and add something because of the amazing nose -> 84 for me.

I feared I have to reavaluate everything I know about the Ardbeg of the recent 3-5 years.

Bottle design and feel is really something for the collector... it states "hey, I was expensive".
And - damn - it was.

In this price range are so many bottles ( even secondary market prices compared to the initial 750 ) that this suffers in every way possible against those bottles..