In the last few years my whisky buying habits have slowed down. I used to be buying whisky at quite honestly an unsustainable rate. So unsustainable in fact that I wasn’t allowed to get whisky delivered to the office anymore because it was becoming too burdensome for the admin team to answer the door to the delivery van’s each day and clearly if it was too much for my work to have the whisky delivered there it was far too dangerous to it delivered to the house.

What this does mean is that I am now opening bottles which can’t be bought anymore and while that makes it almost pointless to write about it does make things interesting for me. As I reach into the back of cupboards and behind bookcases I find bottles I forgot I had and have even less of a guess of where or when I got it. I used to hear people saying stuff like this when I started out and thinking what rubbish how can anyone forget what you have bought but you can and I do.

The Whisky

This is an M&S exclusive from around 2015 or so and like most of the M&S exclusives they did sit on the shelves for a long time and had a few sales at Christmas to get through the stock. The finishes series had an annual batch setup with port, amarone and sauternes being options as well. Indeed, you can still buy versions of these today in their new branding. Each doesn’t come with an age statement but they each get a finishing period after the initial ex-bourbon barrel maturation and what I guess will be first fill bourbon barrels. In this case the finishing cask was Oloroso sherry.

Arran Whisky is a great distillery and always produces high quality whisky. It might not have instagrammers appeal these days without the marketing genius of the Smuggler series but they always check off the major signs of quality: natural colour, non-chill filtering, 46% ABV and strong competitive pricing strategies.

Tasting Notes

Notes of smooth chocolate, hazelnut and the sweetness if ripe figs combine beautifully to display the perfect marriage of the Oloroso sherry cask and the Arran Malt

notes from the bottle

Colour – light golden yellow

Nose – sweet fruit notes of chocolate and raisons are immediately obivous then the undertones of that vanilla and honey from the initial maturation

Palate – As the bright nutty and chocolate notes of the Oloroso lift off the trademark Arran character comes through full of malted biscuits and honey

Finish – Nice peppery finish with oak sugars and some light pepper

Conclusion

A grown up and sophisticated whisky which had a quality ex-bourbon barrel and a very light and short finishing period in the sherry cask. There is a definitive story to the whisky with the first act being the sherry notes and then act 2 in the ex-bourbon notes duetting with the core spirit character from Arran. It’s in some ways a 2 for 1 sale.