Whisky : Kavalan Solist Ex-Sherry; Isetan Mitsukoshi Cask Selection

Country/Region : Taiwan

ABV : 57.8%

Cask : Ex-Sherry

Age : 6 Year (Distilled 24 June 2009, Bottled 2016)

Nose : Boozy brown sugar, flaming rum baba cake, and flambeed bananas.  Dense fruity notes of dried cherries, salted plums, and cherry-lime soda.  There is a nice contrast to the fruit with a woody mahogany, leather, and dry old archival papers.

Palate :  Full bodied with a sweet dry profile.  Punch of dried fruits and brown sugar followed by slightly tart pickled plums and the tropical fruit smoke of flavored maassel/shisha burning in a hookah.  Dry notes of leather, desiccated fruits, and archival papers come at the end.

Finish :  Lingering dry pickled plum and brown sugar.

Score : 7

Mental Image : Archival Smoke Break

Notes :  This was a really wonderful Kavalan.  While it hit heavy on the sherry fruit notes, the cask also brought a number of other interesting background notes which gave this real depth the flavor profile.  This was not a one note sherry monster even if the profile was cask driven.  The wonderful brown sugar notes were checked by delicious tart fruits and I absolutely loved the impression of shisha and a hookah lounge that came through and built up over time.  

This dram had a wonderful complexity, especially when notes of old papers and archival material came though.  There is a particular scent to working and researching in an archive and this dram really hit it.  It is the aroma of old yellowed papers, rusted staples, leather ties, faded ink, and dried glue— it is hard to describe, but it becomes instantly recognizable once you have spent enough time handling papers many decades or centuries old. Between the papers and the tobacco I was left with the impression of how an archive must have felt back in the 1940s or 50s before smoking became strictly banned from the reading rooms— the days when an elbow patched historian might have lingered over the same papers I stare at now, but with a pipe smoldering in his hands.

Overall a wonderful dram that balances a number of different impressions with an inviting aroma and a long lasting finish.