Glen Garioch 1998 wine cask 15yo
Wine with your Malt?
0 190
Review by @whiskyflaneur
- Nose~
- Taste~
- Finish~
- Balance~
- Overall90
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- Brand: Glen Garioch
- Type: Scotch
- Region: Highland
- ABV: 48%
Normally old wine cask's are used to "finish" a whisky and normally anything from a few months to 3-5 years but this is 15 long years in ex Bordeaux red wine casks, a first for me or have i missed another distillery that have used 100% wine cask for a release? Black forest gateaux screams on the nose (chocolate & black cherries) rum & raisin, red grape skins, sweet & aromatic oak (cinnamon incense sticks!) plum jam on toast and that is just the nose! The mouthfeel is dark chocolate, ginger, dried red berries, cherry bakewell, plummy merlot wine notes, honeycomb & mocha. This is a big finish with more dry & spicy red berries and plum jam on toast notes and layer after layer of that chocolate,ginger & honeycomb.Strange that this is still so elegant and balanced after all its life in wine casks.
Find where to buy Glen Garioch whisky
Glen Moray Chardonnay Matured
And weird stuff from Lost Spirits
There might be others but those are the only two that come to my mind. I haven't had much of this stuff (wine-matured or -finished), but the general opinion seems to be the fully wine-matured stuff is better than stuff that's just wine-finished.
My favorite theory for this is that wine-finishing is employed not as a pre-planned strategy from the day of distillation, but as a Plan B when traditionally matured stuff in the warehouse isn't looking so good. So it's a way to lift and salvage sub-par casks.
Only the distillers know, but as I say, that's my favorite theory.