Appearance – This Whisky is light Gold in colour, it’s quite viscous on the glass, and has slow thick legs.
Nose – It noses at a higher ABV than 44.9 % ABV, it’s a loverly rounded and deep nose, with honey, sultanas, dates, cinnamon, black grapes and black cherries, it’s a mixture of Christmas pudding with a dusting of icing sugar and Black Forest Gateau, with rum notes.
Palate – The palate is also deep and rounded with lots of stewed dark fruits, it’s quite juicy and syrupy, and again a mixture of Christmas pudding and Black Forest gateau, plus cola cubes, pineapple slices, a touch of ginger, and brown sugar. It’s nicely married also.
Finish – It’s the long side of medium for me, warming, peppery, Black liquorice, old style cough syrup, aniseed twist sweets, tobacco leaves, a little Cocoa bitterness and old leather.
My thoughts – I took an instant liking to this in a blind tasting, of the 5 drams tasted that evening this came #1 for me, and with a 50/50 split with malt/ grain whisky content it’d be difficult to pick this out as a blended whisky. It’s not a Sherry bomb, but It’s very nice.
Would I buy a bottle? – Yes I’d buy a bottle, if you like ex sherry cask flavours this one is pretty good.
Notes – This bottle is a 50/50 Malt/grain blended bottling, the Malt whisky was used at cask strength and was from a single cask, the Grain Whisky used is 31 years old! There were 618 bottles produced. No references were found concerning colour and chill filtering.
Thanks to – The Blind Tasting Consortium (Twitter).
Picture credit – @TheWhiskyImage on all social media platforms, (On Twitter here), and Thewhiskyimage.com online.