Blair Athol 10 yo Wine Barrique The Whisky Broker, 2020 release, 56.5% ABV, UCF, natural colour, 266 bottles.
Let’s wrap this up with an indie, why don’t we? Blair Athol, right?! ‘s Got a visitor centre for well over 30 years, right?! Lies right next to one of the busiest roads in the country (the A9) and attracts about 90,000 visitors each year (pre- global pandemic numbers, obviously), putting it in the top 5 of most visited distilleries in Scotland, right?! So you’d think Diageo, who are not exactly a bunch of newbies running around the place not knowing what they’re doing, would cash in on that and actually make sure there’s a readily available core range with at least 3 or 4 expressions of the stuff, right?!
Wrong! Apart from the 12 yo flora & fauna, a few distillery exclusives and an annual ‘Special Release’ a few years ago, there’s very little official bottlings out there. Now, I’m not in marketing, but I think I can spot a missed opportunity here. Or is all of the 2 million litres they annually produce going into Bell’s? Let’s hope not, but at least Bell’s had the sense to release Blair Athol as an 8 yo official bottling back in the day when it was still under Guinness ownership. Good luck finding one of those.
So, all hail the Independent Bottlers who come to the rescue and make whiskies from Blair Athol (and Benrinnes, and Dailuaine, and Miltonduff, and Glentauchers, and Balmenach, and…) available to us, the enthusiasts. In this particular case, it’s The Whisky Broker that deserves a wee shout-out. They might well be one of the better kept secrets in the world of independent bottlers because they often have great value bottles,
yet you seldom see people raving about them. Just saying.
A big thanks is owed to Nick Gascoyne for providing the sample, and now, without any further ado, let’s crack on.
On the nose it’s got this rich red fruit sweetness going on, along with some sugared cereal notes, which in turn gets countered by herbaceous (sage) and grassy notes. All sorts of jam (strawberry, plums, raspberries) and a salty-sweet liquorice is there as well. Something earthy, like mushrooms and forest; spices like cayenne and red pepper, but never prickly or hot. Then it takes a U-turn again to come back to those wine notes with blackcurrant and berries. Literally a sensational experience. Over time (after some 30 minutes – do take your time with this one, it deserves it!) wine notes surface even further with a rich and savoury undertone.
The palate is a bit more straightforward, I think. More grainy and less sweet, but thick and robust with demerara sugar, treacle and a bready – dough note. The texture is quite full and meaty – chewy. A drop of water helps it develop once more, as there’s now notes of spices and pepper, and ‘hot’ sweets (as in melted and caramelized sweets), yet the mouthfeel suddenly becomes quite noticeably dry as well.
This goes in into a long spicy and a drying salty, sticky finish.
An absolutely stunning nose. Nosing it kept me well happy for some 45 minutes before I even had my first sip! The richness and complexity is just wonderful, and although the palate might get called out a bit trying to fill those awfully big shoes, it’s still very, very good. Cracking whisky!
So that’s it for this little series on wine casks. I initially had a bit of an oddball Caol Ila planned for next week to wrap this series up, but then ‘things happened’, an new idea arose, I got in touch with a few people and if all goes as planned, there should be a bit of a special blogpost coming up next week. Yes I know you now won’t be able to sleep all week because of the excitement and anticipation, but a decent cliff-hanger once in a while helps to grab people’s attention, doesn’t it?
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