GlenAllachie 12 yo Sauternes Wood Finish

Volume: 0.7 litres | Alcohol content: 48% | Chill filtration: No | Colouring: No

Special Features:

A finish in selected Sauternes hogsheads shapes this twelve-year-old single malt from The Wood Collection. The whisky first matured in bourbon casks before moving to hogsheads that had previously held sweet white wine from Bordeaux. Billy Walker had the casks monitored at the distillery until he judged the balance between the spirit and the wood to be right for bottling.

Honey and toffee notes mingle with peach and candied ginger; tropical fruit, baking spices and coconut join them on the palate. The whisky is not smoky and is bottled at 48% in its natural colour, without chill filtration. The 0.7-litre bottle comes in gift packaging.

Tasting Notes:

• Nose: On the nose, honeycomb, butterscotch and toffee sauce mingle with candied ginger, mocha and peach.
• Palate: The palate opens with tropical fruit, heather honey and baking spices, followed by demerara sugar, coconut and marmalade.
• Finish: Citrus notes, caramel and ice cream linger on the finish.

Distillery/Bottler:

William Delmé-Evans designed GlenAllachie Distillery near Aberlour. It was built in 1967 and began production in 1968. From the outset, the distillery was designed to operate largely by gravity. Billy Walker acquired it from Chivas Brothers in 2017 with Trisha Savage and Graham Stevenson. Since then, the independent The GlenAllachie Distillers Company Limited has run the distillery. The core range introduced in 2018 brought its own single malts to the fore; previously, GlenAllachie had mainly supplied whisky for blends.

The distillery uses eight stainless-steel fermentation vessels and a long fermentation period of 160 hours. It has warehouses on site for maturation; Billy Walker and his team assess the casks as the whisky matures and decide whether a change of cask type could add further dimensions. For the Sauternes Wood Finish, that approach led from initial maturation in bourbon casks to a finish in former Sauternes hogsheads.

Facts: