pondering a bottle of Port Charlotte MRC 01 10 year old, just hoping it hasn't got too much sweetness on the palate
No, it hasn’t
I have a bottle, and I’m not a fan of sweeter drams like the various Madeira finishes, and I rather like it. That said, I’ve also recently purchased a bottle of Ardbeg Corryvreckan, and I think I prefer that (though haven’t tasted them together yet).
Now you’ve planted the idea, I might do a short and unscientific comparative test tonight.
Okay, I did that last night and it was quite interesting (to me, anyway!). Enjoyed them both, but given they are both cask strength Islay whiskies, they're rather different. There's definitely room for both in my store.
The Port Charlotte is much more overtly about the peaty character - I think that's probably a key characteristic of Bruichladdich's Port Charlotte expressions, based on the two I've experienced. It's not overtly phenolic like a Laphroaig, but peat and phenol are, I think, the defining characteristics. As HFL79 says, a massively long and complex finish, flavours continue to develop long after.
The Corryvreckan is less peaty, and the sweetness comes through more, though it isn't noticeably sweet (as mentioned upthread, I'm not a fan of the sweeter finishes). On the nose, the thing it conjured up for me, immediately, was marzipan, and there are hints of that in the mouth, but it's not by any means the defining characteristic. It's a smoother, probably slightly softer dram, but again it has complexity that lives on long after the mouthful has gone down. It's probably more of a valve amp to the Port Charlotte's solid state, but a valve amp with drive and punch, not a gutless 300B...
I'd certainly buy both of them again. The Corryvreckan might be though of as the bargain, being 2/3 the price of the PC, but I'm not sure I can ascribe value in those terms, because they're quite different, and I enjoyed them both equally, in their own terms.