After visiting the Speyside region, throwing in some lowlands whisky distillery, visiting awesome whisky places, we’ve finally got to the most exciting leg of our Oct 2013 tour – visiting my favorite Island, Islay!
We took the morning flight from Glasgow to Islay, picked up the rented car we ordered and drove to our first Islay Distillery tour – Bowmore.
So here we are in 2014 (Armageddon didn’t happen) and we want to start it with some new review/tasting notes, but this time not Whisky but Vodka!
What? Do I hear you mumble blasphemy? Yeah I know this blog is dedicated to whisky but it’s a new year and I decided to review some other spirits once in a while. And to top that – one of those is aged in cask vodka!
So 2013 is coming to an end so it’s time for the last post of 2013 and wrap it up and summarize all the good Whisky things happened in it.
Earlier this year, The original Douglas Laing company shocked the whisky world announcing it was breaking down to 2 companies: Douglas Laing (which retained the original name and HQ) headed by Fred Laing, joined by his daughter Cara and the new Hunter Laing company headed by Stewart Laing with his 2 sons Scot and Andrew.
I was very curious to hear and see how the new company has setup and what are their plans so I reached out to them and setup a visit at their new HQ.
If you followed my blog in the last year, you probably know that I received a few Japanese Whisky bottles from Japan. One of those bottles was the Japan-only Yamazaki Single Malt. 
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Following yesterday’s superb Glendronach 1993 (see review here), here’s another one, although this time it’s a NAS expression, made in small batch, bottled in cask strength.
This is of course, the Glendronach Cask Strength expression, now reaching it’s 3rd batch.
So barely 5 months passed since Glendronach released batch 8 of single casks bottlings which featured some very good and interesting whiskies, and here we have batch 9, just in time for the holidays season.
Today we’ll taste the 1993 Vintage – Single Oloroso Sherry Butt #5, distilled on 15/1/1993 and bottled October 2013, which delivered 645 bottles with cask strength of 53%.
“It was a cold, rainy day” – that’s how most stories begin, right? No, you say? Oh well, even if it’s not the truth most of the time (especially here in Israel), it was true for the day we visited Auchentoshan Distillery.
Before I continue with more Scotland trip posts and more recent whiskies reviews, we shouldn’t forget those ‘archived’ tasting notes in the my notebook. It’s still weekend in Europe, it’s winter weather here (at least), so we’ll go for some treat of peat and sweet – the Lagavulin Distiller’s edition.
Whisky Gospel 