Review - Diageo Special Releases 2020

 

 

It is that time of the year again - Diageo, Scotland's largest whisky producer, has announced the line-up for the 2020 edition of its Special Releases programme. The annual bottlings are designed to highlight rare or old whiskies from within Diageo's extensive portfolio of maturing stocks and are eagerly anticipated each year since the series was first started with just three expressions in 2001.

This year is one of the smaller recent collections and sees just eight bottlings with a theme of 'Rare By Nature' running through them. This includes the same eight brands as the 2019 selection and is designed to be 'an encore to what was a very successful and well received set of whiskies'. As with all previous years the whiskies are all bottled at their natural cask strength. This year's selection has been curated by Dr. Craig Wilson, one of the Master Blenders at Diageo.

Review - Diageo Special Releases 2019

It is that time of the year again - Diageo, Scotland's largest whisky producer, has unleashed the 2019 edition of its Special Releases programme. The annual bottlings are designed to highlight rare or old whiskies from within Diageo's extensive portfolio of maturing stocks and are eagerly anticipated each year since the programme was first started with just three expressions in 2001.

This year is one of the smaller recent collections and sees just eight bottlings with a theme of 'Rare By Nature' running through them. As with all previous years the whiskies are all bottled at their natural cask strength. This year's whiskies have been selected by Dr. Craig Wilson, one of the Master Blenders at Diageo.

Review - Oban 'Little Bay'

This is a new expression for the core range single malt range of Oban. The whisky is so named because Oban translates as 'little bay' from Gaelic and it has been created by two of Diageo's Master Blenders, Dr Matthew Crow and Dr Craig Wilson. They have used a range of different ages of whisky, which have been matured in three types of casks - European oak ex-sherry casks, re-fill casks with new oak cask ends and re-fill American oak hogsheads. These have then been combined and married in small oak casks for a short period of time to allow integration of flavours.