The tastiest whiskey I ever had was some Crown Royal that had been moldering in the basement of a bar for over 20 years, factory sealed with the tax stamp still on it. Tasted like caramel but not as sweet.
Whiskies (which is a family of spirits that includes Scotch and bourbon) don't generally age much in the bottle. They may settle down a bit in the first year, but, after that, it's down-hill if anything.
When you see a ten-year-old Pinot Noir wine, for example, that ten years is bottle time. Wine continues to change and evolve dramatically in the bottle. But, when you see a ten-year-old whiskey, that's barrel time. Once bottled, they really don't change much and rarely for the better.
Crown Royal is a blended whiskey just like JD. They mature it in barrels of about 50 gallons and then blend the different barrels to achieve a desired and consistent flavor profile. Crown Royal is also a Canadian Whiskey. Canadian Whiskies are usually sweeter, more caramel; that is the flavor profile they blend to.
BUT, you are absolutely right to say that an old bottle of Crown Royal will be sweeter than a modern one. Canadian whiskey houses have been drying up their profiles (less sweet) lately. They're doing this to more appeal to the American market which prefers a drier (less sweet) whiskey.
Many whiskies are blended. Some wines are too. Becasue they don't change much in the bottle, blended whiskies can be kept in their bottle for a long time. But, wine does change in the bottle. So, blended wines tend not to have long cellar potential. Three wines that blended together great this year probabaly won't be that great three years from now when each has changed, possibly in different directions.
I mentioned blended whiskey where multiple barrels possibly from different years are blended to achieve a desired flavor profile which can be very consistent from bottle-to-bottle over a very large batch and also from year-to-year. I mentioned single-barrel whiskey which is, as the name implies, taken from a single barrel that just happens to mature to some sort of perfection.
As long as I'm holding forth, I should mention single-malt whiskey. Single-malt is blended, but it only blends barrels made from a single malting (generally a single year's production). As a result, it is not possible to hold a totally-consistent profile batch-to-batch. This does lead to some sense of "good year" and "bad year." Every now and then, it leads to something like the 1974 18-year Macallan. (BTW, when whiskey is labeled with a calendar year, it's the year in which it was distilled which is contrast to wine which is labeled with the year it was bottled in.) I'd say there's three shots left in the bottom of my bottle of 1974 Macallan 18 which I was lucky enough to purchase in 1992 before it got discovered; last I saw the 1974 Maccallan 18 offered on a wine list, my three shots are worth $150 each.
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