Inbox - May 16, 2014

Welcome to this week's Inbox.  For those that have recently discovered us, Inbox is our weekly round up of whisky news and PR material that has found its way in to our email inbox. It was created as we cannot write full articles or do justice to every piece received. It features items from around the world of whisky and is published by us each Friday.

Within Inbox we aim to write a few lines detailing each press release/piece of news/PR event that we have received and provide links, where possible, for you to find out further information.  Here is the news that has caught our attention from this week ...

________

Balvenie - Single Casks expand
The popular Speyside distillery of Balvenie have announced the latest addition to their single malt range - the Balvenie 15 years old Single Barrel Sherry Cask.  This replaces the old 15 years old Single Barrel, which has been in the core range for a number of years, and joins the 12 years old Single Barrel First-Fill Bourbon Cask, which came out last year.  The new expression will be initially available in the UK and USA with a recommended retail cost of £75/$100.

The release will see one European oak ex-Oloroso sherry butt bottled one at a time, with no more than 650 ever being available from each cask.  Each cask will be hand selected by David Stewart, the Balvenie Malt Master and industry legend.  Bottles will be hand numbered and include details of the cask such as dates of filling and bottling.  The new expression will be non chill-filtered and bottled at a strength of 47.7% ABV.

David Stewart commented: "I’m very proud to be sharing our passion for the unique qualities of whisky drawn from a single cask of a single distillation. Due to variances of a natural product such as wood, no two oak casks, even of the same type and filled with spirit from the same distillation, will produce an identical single malt. The fact that each cask is unique and that the contents of each cask will taste different is a lesser-known facet of the whisky-making process but it’s a magical one."

 

Gordon & MacPhail - Very old whisky released
The award-winning independent bottling company of Gordon & MacPhail have released one of their oldest ever single cask single malt whiskies.  The special whisky was distilled at the Glen Grant distillery in Speyside in 1948 and has been bottled earlier this year at 66 years of age.  It has been bottled at its natural cask strength of 46.6% ABV and there are just 160 individually numbers bottles available.  No pricing information was included in the press release.

The whisky is presented in a specially designed decanter and a mahogany wood casket.  This includes a book written by whisky writer Charles Maclean about the release.  Each bottle is individually numbered.  The Glen Grant 1948 was bottled exclusively for Wealth Solutions, a Polish based company specialising in the supply of rare spirits for connoisseurs.  The launch in Warsaw was attended by Michael Urquhart, the Managing Director of Gordon & MacPhail, and Charles Maclean.

Michal Kowalski, the Vice President of Wealth Solutions said: "I am very happy to be able to offer this unique, very rare, greatly aged Single Malt Scotch Whisky to Polish connoisseurs and collectors. It was created before man went into space and landed on the Moon, before he climbed Mount Everest. This is not only whisky, it’s a living witness to the second half of 20th century".