A single cask bottling from one of the smallest distilleries in Scotland, and with a major point of difference - it's fully matured in a chardonnay cask! Now that's not something you see everyday!
Unlike the red equivalents, non-fortified white wine casks are still something of an oddity in Scotch whisky. Of course there are plenty of examples of Sauternes casks and other unnamed dessert & sweet wine casks, but when it comes to your standard dry & semi-dry / off-dry white wine casks the selection becomes much more narrow. Off the top of my head, only Glen Moray uses these seemingly unloved casks on a regular basis, and that's in an entry-level whisky that is only briefly finished in white wine casks, specifically chardonnay. Bruichladdich have dabbled occasionally, but mainly in either single cask one-offs or as a small part of the mix in larger vattings e.g. Octomore 10-year old second edition. Glenfiddich have more recently done a similar thing with their "Grand Cru", while closer to home Sullivan's Cove have released a single chardonnay cask special edition a couple of years ago that was not a cheap proposition, and the majority of those will probably never be opened. So why don't white wine casks get more love & attention? Availability does come into it, since a much smaller amount of these varieties of white wine actually spend a substantial amount time in wood, if any at all, in comparison with red wine. Stainless steel vats are much more common, and in general only the more robust varieties of white wine will be filled into wood, with barrel fermented wines being the main exception - notably those that will go on to become champagne or sparkling wine, and then chardonnay, which is referred to as either wooded or unwooded. As you might expect, unwooded chardonnay wines are lighter & fresher in character and lighter in colour, compared to wooded varieties with richer character & colour and a heavier mouthfeel. This little oddity that we're looking at today from the Highland home of oddities, Edradour, is a little different from all of those examples I mentioned in that it's served up at cask strength and has been fully matured in a single chardonnay white wine cask rather than simply finished or "double matured". Pitlochry's Edradour Distillery is something of an oddity in general, particularly when it comes to their SFTC - meaning 'Straight From The Cask' - range of single cask bottlings. In the unpeated Edradour guise these 500ml single cask releases are more often matured or finished in sherry or red wine casks or occasionally sauternes sweet wine casks, while the same goes for the distillery's peated Ballechin range in the SFTC series.
Edradour is a fascinating little distillery, producing a heavy, rich and often funky & dirty spirit thanks to manual hands-on production through small stills equipped with downward-angled lyne arms and worm tub condensers. This more traditional condensation method is slower to turn the spirit vapours back into liquid, and provides less interaction with copper in the process which tends to result in a thicker, meatier, dirtier and sometimes outright sulphurous spirit, with more character and more texture. A worm tub condenser, pictured above, is a beautifully simple piece of equipment - they're a long coiled copper tube, generally tapering in diameter before heading to the spirit receiver. That tube is submerged in cooling water, meaning they're generally placed outside the walls of warm still houses. Famous distilleries like Mortlach, Cragganmore and even Talisker continue to use these older style condensers to great effect, long after the vast majority of the worldwide whisky industry switched to the modern, more efficient shell & tube condensers which are more predictable and more easily maintained, and also cheaper. It's a rare thing to be able to compare one type of condenser to the other at the same distillery, so it's difficult to pinpoint the exact difference in the finished whisky while ruling out other factors and variables. One of the only examples is Dalwhinnie Distillery in the Highlands, which changed from worm tubs to shell & tube condensers in the mid-1980s. But tellingly they switched back to worm tub condensers after the spirit character had changed, apparently becoming less complex & characterful. And let's not forget that Dalwhinnie is owned by Diageo, who you'd assume would be more in favour of lower costs and higher efficiency, but you'd be mistaken - of the 17 working distilleries that continue to use worm tub condensers in Scotland, nine are owned by Diageo. In fact only one of the company's 'Classic Malts' range uses shell & tube condensers - Islay's Lagavulin. Speaking of Islay, the Queen of the Hebrides finally has a worm tub distillery in her arsenal - while the rest have long been converted to shell & tube, newcomer Ardnahoe has been fitted with worm tubs. We're still at least a couple of years away from seeing their first whisky, but this will be one of the few substantially peated whiskies that has been through a worm tub condenser - Edradour in Ballechin guise, Talisker & Springbank are currently the only examples, with one limited release exception from Cragganmore - so the results from Islay's ninth distillery will be very interesting!
The single cask Straight From The Cask (SFTC) Edradour that we're looking at today is quite special to me - I grabbed this bottle from Pitlochry on my first trip to Scotland back in 2017 after tasting it at the distillery's tasting bar following my tour & visit that was courtesy of Edradour's Australian importer & distributor, The Whisky Company. I was basically given carte blanche over said tasting bar at the time, and even amongst a cask strength 21-year old, an ex-Port Ellen cask finish, and an excellent distillery-exclusive example of the heavily peated Ballechin that was matured in a Madeira cask, it was this chardonnay-matured example of unpeated Edradour that wowed me as something a little unusual and very surprising. I couldn't decide between the aforementioned Ballechin and this Edradour at the time, so I promised myself that I'd return to the distillery on the return trip from Inverness and nab one to take home to Australia. But with time pressing down on us on that return trip to the distillery was looking a little risky. Luckily the town of Pitlochry has an excellent whisky shop on the main street named Robertson's, and they happened to have a bottle of the exact same single cask sitting on the shelf, so that helped make my decision! This SFTC bottling of Edradour is a 12-year old from cask number #363, a chardonnay white wine hogshead, distilled in September 2004 and bottled in July 2017, with an outturn of 407 500ml bottles at a cask strength of 53.3% ABV. And as with almost all of the distillery's single malts (their entry-level Edradour 10-year old is the sole exception) this whisky is non-chill filtered and naturally coloured. Since this whisky has been fully matured in a chardonnay wine cask, I'm going to have to dedicate this review to a great mate of mine who is turning 40 today. I'll stop short of naming him here in the hopes of keeping my invitation to the pending celebration, but since he's such a huge lover of "chardy" - it's bordering on an obsession, really - I can't help but give him a mention in this review! Happy birthday mate!
Distilled Sept 2004, fully-matured in a single chardonnay hogshead, bottled July 2017. Cask strength, non-chill filtered and natural colour. Cask #363, 407 x 500ml bottles.
Colour: Dark bronze.
Nose: Rich, fruity & spicy. Aniseed, melted butter & white chocolate cake frosting - but not as sweet as that might sound. Aftershave / cologne-like wood spices. Thick melted vanilla bean ice cream with toffee sauce. Touch of bright lychee liqueur and green banana. Hint of dry earthiness.
Texture: Big, dense, rich & chewy. Sweet and spicy. Very little heat.
Taste: Rich creamy vanilla, melted butter again, and toffee fudge. Aniseed & drying wood spices keeping any sweetness in check and working perfectly. Lots of old leather, some black pepper an lemon zest, touch of white chocolate. An interesting dry minerality in the background, like powdered stone / gravel! Touch of cherry jam too.
Finish: Long length. Melted butter, lemon & a drop of tangy olive oil. Tropical fruit liqueur and that dry earthiness again - a peppery barrel char I'd say, or it could even pass for a slight touch of peat. Toffee chews, black pepper and baking spices to finish.
Score: 4 out of 5.
Notes: Delicious. It's a bit of an oddity; it's hard to pin down, and it's slightly crazy - well it is an Edradour after all! The thick chewy texture and big bright flavours (the latter is unusual for an Edradour) are very enjoyable, without an aggressive or overbearing wine influence or cloying sweetness. There's certainly wood spice, and quite a dark colour for a white wine cask, which makes me wonder if it was European oak? But I'm not sure how common that is for Chardonnay (maybe the birthday boy can tell us in the comments!?!). There's also a lovely dry peppery earthiness that could almost pass for a touch of peat, but Edradour isn't peated - that's where Ballechin comes in. Although it does make me wonder if this spirit run could've followed a run of Ballechin through the stills or spirit receivers before they were flushed out. Or maybe it's just barrel char. Either way, it works very well!
Hopefully we'll see more chardonnay cask matured whiskies in future where the spirit character can stand up to any cask influence and result in a very balanced whisky - Islay, I'm looking in your general direction here! I can see Bunnahabhain or Bowmore working well with this sort of cask influence. And if they can turn out like this Edradour SFTC has, they'll be winners. This is certainly the best dry/off-dry white wine (i.e. not dessert, Sauternes or fortified wine) cask whisky that I've tasted to date. And being a single cask bottling from a few years ago it's not likely to be easily repeated. That's both the beauty and curse of a good single cask! Happy birthday Mr. Chardy lover!
Cheers!
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