Last Night's Tipple

One of the great divides in the world of Scotch is between those distilleries that age their whisky in used Bourbon barrels and those distilleries that age their whisky in used sherry butts. Used Bourbon barrels are more traditional (although the most traditional method probably would have been to put the fresh distillate in whatever container was available and to consume it as quickly as possible), and they impart the same vanilla and butterscotch flavors and aromas to Scotch as they do to Bourbon. Those flavors and aromas are much more muted in Scotch than Bourbon, of course, but they will still be there. Recently, however, more and more distilleries have been offering Scotches aged or finished (ie, aged for the last year or so) in used sherry butts. The sherry butts not surprisingly give the Scotch a sweet, grapey, nutty taste and flavor, not unlike the sweet sherries that Brits love.

Macallan is the prototype of a sherried Scotch. They take their used sherry butts very seriously, having them made to their specifications before they're filled with sherry. The arrangement strikes me as something of a rental agreement whereby Macallan owns the barrels and the sherry producers rent them for a few years, although I don't know if this is technically correct. Unlike many producers of sherried Scotch, Macallan doesn't age their whisky most of the way in ex-Bourbon barrels before transferring it to sherry butts for the last year or two: the entire aging process is conducted in sherry butts. That is, Macallan has done this until recently. Within the last two or three years, Macallan has introduced a range of whiskies they call Fine Oak. If you read their marketing fluff for the Fine Oak bottlings, you'll find that this whisky is aged in ex-Bourbon barrels, sherry butts made from American oak, and sherry butts made from European oak. The goal, I think, was to make a Scotch that was less overpoweringly sweet and winey than standard Macallan.

This isn't to say that Macallan Fine Oak Scotches don't have lots of sherry influence. They do. The 10 year old version is big-bodied, creamy, and has a big sherry nose, although not as big a sherry nose as the standard Macallan 12 year old. This was a pleasant and enjoyable whisky. The worst thing that I can say about it is that it was one-dimensional. One of the things that I really about fine spirits is the way the nose and the taste develops in the glass and changes every time one takes a sip or nose. That didn't happen with this whisky. Both the taste and the smell were the same throughout the pour. The one dimension was very good, but it was still just one dimension.