Single Cask American Oak – Ex Colheita Porto Tawny barrel

Matured in a medium charred American Oak barrel that had held Portugal’s finest Colheita Porto Tawny, this whisky is a complex, joyous, and immensely rewarding experience from the get-go. The colour is a wonderful and deep mahogany with gold ochre hues dancing in the glass as it is slowly rolled around.

Colheita is among the most specific and demanding designations in the Porto Tawny category. Where standard Tawny Port is a blend of multiple vintages aged to a house style, a Colheita, from the Portuguese for ‘harvest’, must originate from a single vintage year and be aged in small barrels for a minimum of seven years, though the finest examples age for decades. The result is a wine of extraordinary provenance specificity: one year, one set of conditions, one slow oxidative evolution. What remains in the oak after the wine is drawn off carries all of that history.

At 69% ABV this is a cask strength expression of considerable intensity. A small addition of still water is recommended to open the full aromatic complexity.

Tasting Notes

Nose. A bouquet of burnt sugar, raisins, quince paste, and glacé figs, and just when one thinks that is all it has, notes of polished rich old balsamic and exceptionally fine vanilla come through along with dark fruit notes, muscat, and sweet caramel.

Palate. Clean entry on the palate, broad, luscious, long, and intense. All the wonderful fruit flavours come through in a cascade and then a torrent; subsequent sips yielding deep citrusy notes, marzipan, and cereal, before transitioning to notes of dry sherry, umami, and butterscotch. With time in glass, the whisky settles into its groove and starts to display a lithe peppery profile where the sweetness is complemented and balanced.

Finish. Glorious, toasty, warm, buttery, and wonderfully tannic, with amazing notes of stewed fruit, molasses, marmite coupled to spices. Delightful, rewarding, challenging and yet friendly, a special drop to be enjoyed with special friends. An expression worth building a cellar around.

Technical Details

Edition: 2.04

ABV: 69%, cask strength, water recommended

Cask type: Single cask, medium charred American Oak, ex-Colheita Porto Tawny