Alc.43%
Bottle:
Flat flask style bottle with high shoulders and a well weighted bottom. Decorated with a necklace and silver wax badge. This is the same presentation for all the forty creek high end limited edition release.
Nose:
Wow! Packed with wine and soft English toffee. Ripe field berries, and a slight sourness, almost edging on beery. Honeycombs stuffed with strawberries and apple blossoms. The nose is so complex, yet so easy and pleasing to pick out the ever evolving aromas. Finally there is some gravity to the nose with overturned earth and cinnamon stick.
Palate:
Wine forward. Spicy red, fruity wine. Dank. Raspberries, cassis, cassia buds and anise. Spiced honey roasted pecans and apricot stones are no surprise to john’s style. This is a very complex, changing palate. The more it airs, the fruitier it becomes. Loads of toffee and grape popsicles with a pleasant nuance of petrol and butter rum lifesavers. Medium finish.
Overall:
This is a whisky not to be missed. Buy two if you can.
Please note:
The story behind the whisky is 12 years in the making. John had some barrels that had aged for three years, and he took those barrels and redistilled the product, concentrating the harmonized flavours. John then dumped the redistilled product into his own cabernet sauvignon barrels and packed them away.
It turns out that john hall forgot he had that whisky maturing in cab sauv barrels. In fact, he forgot for 9 years. If you see the warehouse in which he stores his barrels, you can see how easy it is to overlook a few barrels amongst the hundreds of thousands in stock.
So we have those cab sauv barrels now filled with very flavourfull whisky, and so john further blended in some barrels of whisky that john picked out himself to balance out the whisky. he released only 9,000 bottles.
score: 93
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