Tasting Panel Notes

Our Distillery Dive series kicks off 2022 with a serious bang! Hailing from the oldest working distillery in Scotland (dating back to 1763), Distillery #16 in the southern Highlands is our next destination.  Members have been treated to the peated expressions of this distillery from time to time, and today we examine a special pair of casks from their unpeated stocks.

In 2019, SMWS spirit manager Euan Campbell identified two casks from Distillery #16 that had been aged in Port pipes for 18 years. He combined the casks and split contents into two sherry hogsheads – one ex-Oloroso and the other ex-Pedro Ximenez. As you’d imagine, they are both very dark and rich with lots of red fruits and subtle spices, and it’s fascinating to see how a split cask can head off in different directions due to different forms of additional maturation – in a similar way that we saw with our Jazz Trio bottlings from distillery 24 in 2018. This is one of the primary focal points of our Distillery dive series. Each cask displays the  decadence rendered from maturation in two different fortified wine casks. Cask No. 16.58 Hair-tingling revelation offers jammy fruits and marked nuttiness before leading us down the dark trail to candied cherries, game meats and savoury spices. Cask No. 16.59 Too good to be true shifts toward sticky sweet desserts and bitter herbs for an equally compelling taste experience!

Cask No. 16.58 - Hair-tingling revelation
Date distilled: April 2001
Cask: First-fill Oloroso hogshead
Age: 20 years
Alcohol: 53.7%
Region: Highland Southern


Cask No. 16.59 - Too good to be true
Date distilled: April 2001
Cask: First-fill Pedro Ximenez hogshead
Age: 20 years
Alcohol: 53.7%
Region: Highland Southern