Kavalan

The idea of harnessing the terroir of the area in the spirit was at the forefront of Chang’s thinking when he envisioned the type of spirit that Kavalan should be producing. So, to add more Taiwanese character to the spirit he started with the fermentation yeast. Here they use a combination of commercial yeast and wild yeast strains that are fund growing around the distillery.

After double pot still distillation this gives rise to a fruity new make featuring notes of mango, green apple and cherry. Some of that can be sort of found in the final whisky, but as the distillery loves it’s oak and from tasting their range, I would say predominantly first fill casks. Taking advice from the late Dr Jim Swan the distillery matures in ex-Bourbon casks along with casks that once held red and white wine, ex-Oloroso, Manzanilla, Fino and Pedro Ximinex sherry casks as well as ex-Brandy, Moscatel and Port casks.

The distillery showcases all of these different casks throughout its range. The ‘entry’ level bottlings the Distillers Select No1 and No2 features a combination of refill, and first fill sherry and wine casks as does the Kavalan Single Malt. On paper, this is a whisky that really shouldn’t work as one would think that the vatting together of spirit aged in red and white wine along with various sherry casks would create a homogenous end product, but it is testament to Yu Lan Chang that the blending of these casks is wonderfully harmonious, and one can pick out the spirit character along with the various wood notes.

Their top range, the single cask bottlings called Solist are for my tastes far too heavy on the cask and lack the harmony and complexity of the single malt bottling, but the Solist Vinho Barrique didn’t win the Worlds best single malt award for nothing!