How sherry-casking sweetens your whisky experience
Ageing whisky in barrels that were used to store sherry gives the alcohol a sweet, fruity flavour
We are standing in the cellar at Delgado Zuleta, a bodega in Sanlúcar de Barrameda in southern Spain’s sherry-producing region, surrounded by black wooden barrels stacked up on their sides, four barrels high.
There is a cool humidity in the air, and there is a fruity, yeasty scent coming off the casks.
Pelayo Garcia, master sherrymaker, stops in his explanation of how sherry is made to look up at the barrels ruefully.
“Every now and then I wonder if we did the right thing to part with those casks,” he says. “They’re so precious.”
The casks he is referring to are five rare barrels that had been used for hundreds of years to age sherry, Spain’s unique fortified wine, at the bodega. Talisker, the oldest distillery on Scotland’s Isle of Skye, recently persuaded Delgado Zuleta to part with these casks to make their own exceptional product, the first in a new series of single malts, the Talisker Bodega Series: Talisker 40YO.
The 40-year-old single malt is finished for three to four months in the casks previously used to age the bodega’s award-winning 40-year-old Amontillado.
The sherry flavours, retained powerfully in the wood, interact strongly with the whisky, adding waves of fruit and sweetness to Talisker’s trademark pepper. There are peaty aromas, with full-flavoured raisin and a fruity smokiness on
the palate.
Sherry casks have been used to age whisky for centuries. But sherry-cask finishing – putting an already mature spirit into a cask that has only aged sherry for anything from a few days to many months – which was once popular in the 1940s and ’50s, is now seeing a resurgence. Sherry-cask-finished whiskies, with their rich, fruity sweetness, are softer and more approachable. The best renditions are downright delicious.