The GlenAllachie 10yo Cask Strength - Batch 6

The Maker

The GlenAllachie Distillery is rather modern among its Speyside compatriots and is most famed for having gone through a recent renaissance. This renaissance has quickly powered its ascent to becoming one of the most talked about Scotch distilleries in the market today. Founded as recently as 1967 by Mackinlay McPherson with an installed capacity of four million litres, GlenAllachie has spent most of its working life (minus a brief mothballing in the late 1980s) churning out high volume malt for the use in blends such as Mackinlay, Whyte & Mackay and Chivas Brothers.

Throughout that time the distillery was noted for little more than its gravity fed design (to minimise costs) and its rather extensive warehousing network - which at 16 separate buildings is a stock level that puts many far larger distilleries to shame. This all changed in 2017 when it was announced that ownership (including the impressive stockpile of over 50,000 casks) had been transferred to ‘The GlenAllachie Distillers Company’ under the management of industry heavyweights Billy Walker, Trisha Savage and Graham Stevenson.

While these three businesspeople are well known in the sector, it’s likely that the average drinker will not know them from Adam. That’s understandable of course, but to give a sense of their experience, Billy Walker alone has already ‘resurrected’ (to use his preferred term) Deanston, Tobermory, BenRiach, GlenDronach and Glenglassaugh distilleries during his fifty plus year career. In short he knows what he’s doing!

Since 2017 the GlenAllachie brand has been completely rebuilt from the ground up with Billy Walker making use of his well earned reputation to become the very visible face (with his signature on every bottle) on everything they produce. This has included making some fundamental changes to how the distillery makes its whisky given the reputation it held from those decades as a blending factory for producing a rather ‘hot’, if not unpleasant, spirit.

Step one was to immediately cut production to just 500k litres (an 80% reduction) and also to lengthen the fermentation time to around 160 hours (60 to 75 hours is considered average in the sector). Alongside this Walker oversaw the construction of two traditional dunnage warehouses. GlenAllachie has also chosen to become what I’ve previously described as a ‘cask centric’ distillery with an annual ‘wood budget’ in excess of £2m to ensure that what they have in stock, and are now making to the new formula, is being put in the best possible casks available to mature and finish.

While these are huge changes the simple fact is that five years on we are yet to see what impact they have had on the spirit since it hasn’t got old enough to be released yet. In the meantime Billy Walker and co have been busy raiding that massive warehouse stock and have set about blending and/or finishing what they could find into a brand new core range and special releases slate which has won significant acclaim throughout the whisky drinking world.

On this standing alone we can expect to see some even more amazing things from GlenAllachie over the next decade as they begin to release products for which they have been able to control the whole production process.

The Expression

When it came to choosing which GlenAllachie would be my first purchase I got lucky with timing. After hearing a lot of good things in the ether, my searching in the weeks before last Xmas coincided with the release of the sixth batch of the 10 year old cask strength. Two things immediately appealed to me about this. First that the fourth batch had won ‘World’s Best Single Malt’ at the World Whiskies Awards 2021, and second that it had a fascinating cask make up.

While we naturally don’t know the formula (we don't get Ardnamurchan levels of transparency here), the batch is made up of Pedro Ximénez and Oloroso sherry puncheons, as well as small helpings from virgin oak and Rioja wine casks. These combine to give it that amazing colour you can see above. It also comes in at a punchy 57.8% ABV and as you’d expect is non-chill filtered and of natural colour.

The Neck Pour

This ended up being my contribution to a Burns’ Night party. Between the mountains of haggis we ended up with a good range of nine whiskies which had everything from a Longrow 18 through to a French independent bottling of Penderyn. It also contained a core range GlenAllachie 15 which served as a nice contrast to this release. It’s fair to say that this utterly wiped the floor with the competition being the favourite of four of the six present and second favourite of the remaining two.

Everyone there was really struck by the rich intensity of both the dry and sweet ends of sherry on both the nose and palette. The cask make up worked to give a remarkable level of texture to the spirit. It’s a strange thing to say but you can almost taste the constituent casks in the mouth as it washes around like waves of flavour. It’s a hugely impressive achievement when you consider the base spirit is one intended for the blends market. What didn’t come through at this initial point was the Rioja influence. Yes there was a bit of virgin oak bitterness which worked so well with the sweetness of the PX, but the influence of the tannins was not yet very pronounced.

Having this alongside the 15 made it all the more interesting. The 15 was also very good, but in comparison it felt like a toned down imitation. I think if we didn’t have the 10 we would have all liked the 15 a lot more and it would have been battling with the Longrow for the win, but putting it alongside something this intense, and complex and it was just not in the same league.

The Body

Coming back to this bottle in the Spring it’s obvious that on the nose that Oloroso is still dominating, but what’s coming through much stronger now is the virgin oak char. In this regard it’s not too dissimilar to the Glen Scotia Victoriana I reviewed a few months back.

As the bottle develops I’m definitely noting the strength of it more. There’s certainly a ‘hotness’ to the spirit which as far as I can discern is typical of GlenAllachie. But the layers or ‘waves’ of flavours are still there and still impress. There’s the sweetness of the PX, but then there’s a bitterness coming through that’s linked to that oak again. A lot like a darkly roasted coffee or perhaps a strong dark chocolate. Finally I’m starting to get some of those Rioja tannins on the finish which is leaving it long but very dry despite the initial PX sweetness. To be honest the more of this I have, the more I like it!

Final Thoughts

I’ve decided to add some water as we get into the final third of the bottle. This is a rare thing for me. I appreciate that many do it as the norm, but unless something is above 60% I’ve never really found much benefit from it. But in this case there’s still a density that needs to be unlocked and water seems the best way of going about it.

I found that doing so certainly did open up a nutty oiliness. While pleasant enough and definitely additional, I can’t help but think that it diminished the wider whole. But on the positive side it throws the balance back towards the sweeter end of the spectrum and the finish becomes a very rich burnt sugar.

For the final few drams I’ve ditched the water and focused on enjoying the rich PX nectar intercutting with the oak char and Rioja tannins. Really impressed with this. Truly lives up the hype. I see the batch 7 has already come and gone, but will keep a look out for the 8 in the autumn to replace this.

If you can get this in your part of the world then it’s definitely worth picking one up. I’m also really excited to see what comes from GlenAllachie in the next few years once the releases start to contain the post-2017 stock.