…agreement that an independent bottler sometimes has to make with a whisky producer to not disclose the distillery name. The bottle has no age statement, so all we really know is that it is a Highland single malt from an ex-bourbon barrel and that is bottled at the bare legal minimum of 40% ABV. The release is a vatting of different ages from that undisclosed distillery, so it’s not a single barrel.
It’s definitely maritime in that it smells like something slathered on a hull to make it seaworthy. I kid. Sort of. There is an intrusion of peat but absolutely no smoke, which makes it smell and taste earthy but without evoking Islay’s style of smoky peat. The overall effect is brooding and difficult, and that so-called partial sherry cask aging is thoroughly in the background…
The 500 Sherry Finish is matured for an undisclosed period of time in first-fill bourbon casks before being filled into 500-liter (hence the name) Spanish Pedro Ximenez sherry butts for one year. The final whisky is bottled at 43% ABV, and is both chill filtered and (probably) has added spirit caramel for coloring. (Sigh.)
… It seems like the Double Cask refers to a maturation in American oak ex-bourbon and then a partial finish in ex-sherry casks. There is no age statement, and the whisky is bottled at the bare minimum of 40% ABV, with no mention of the use of color or chill filtration. This is all bad news on paper, so let’s see what happens in the glass.
A very pale single malt from an ex-bourbon cask, and bottled at the potent but also very drinkable 47.9% ABV, this Teaninich makes me want to go find other (cheaper) bottles from the distillery. Those will all have to be independent bottlers as well, as there are no official bottlings from this distillery, aside from an occasional entry in Diageo’s Flora and Fauna series, most of which doesn’t make it to US.
Quinta Ruban is standard Glenmorangie malt that is aged around 12 years in ex-bourbon casks and then finished in ruby port wine casks for 2 further years, for a total age statement of 14 years. The old 12-year expression spent 10 years in ex-bourbon. The whisky is bottled without chill-filtration at 46% ABV.
Here’s something I didn’t expect to find on the shelves in 2020: A 14 year-old single malt with a cognac cask finish for $40. What is this, 2012? In the arms race that is the modern whisky industry, it’s actually pretty surprising that it took this long for someone to crack out a brandy finish. We’ve seen everything from…
In the UK and other markets this NAS Tomatin expression is sold as “Tomatin Legacy” while in the US it’s sold as “Tomatin Dualchas”, which is the Scots Gaelic word for ‘heritage’ or ‘legacy’. This bottling, whatever its name, is the NAS (no-age-statement) entry-level bottling from the Tomatin distillery in the village of Tomatin in the Scottish Highlands … is vatted from Tomatin single malt aged in a combination of ex-bourbon and virgin (new) American oak casks. The virgin oak is intended to give the under-matured malt component an extra dose of …
This Aberlour is aged in two separate cask types: “Traditional Oak” which is a funny way of saying ex-bourbon American Oak casks, and ex-Sherry casks. These are aged for 12 years and then married together in undisclosed proportions before bottling at the legal minimum 40% ABV. Interestingly, all of Aberlour’s official lineup is now labelled as a “Double Cask” whisky with the exception of a’bunadh. This may be their way of dealing with the expanding crisis of…
An undisclosed Speyside distillery referred to only as “Speyside #3”, this is an 8 year-old Speyside single malt bottled at 50.7% ABV. A fellow Twitterer… Tweeter?… suggested that it might be ex-bourbon Glenrothes. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Nothing will teach you how little you really know about whisky than tasting blind or semi-blind. In hindsight it almost definitely is…