1995 Mortlach 22 Year Old "Faultline - First Fill Sherry Butt" Cask Strength Single Cask Speyside Single Malt Scotch Whisky

Notes

We almost never see Mortlach available for sale by the cask in Scotland. If we do it's almost certainly in a third or fourth fill barrel and almost certainly young and expensive. Even the underwhelming NAS bottling from the distillery still costs $100. Why is it so expensive and hard to get? That answer starts with a J and ends with a Walker. There's just too much money in that special blend to let these casks out of the system. When they do make it out, there's usually a reason. On the rarest of occasions, likely the result some fortuitous clerical error or bad bets by a London executive, we might happen across something like this. Two decades old Mortlach always raise eyebrows around here. Tell me it's been aged in a fresh sherry butt, can be sold for around $100, and tastes amazing? I'm looking like a Vince McMahon Reaction meme -almost a wrestling reference. Even more exciting is that it truly is Mortlach for the masses. Sometimes the beefy gnarly quality of the distillery, the result of an unusual multi-still distillation process, can overwhelm the uninitiated. This cask, however, is so fun and forgiving with all that wonderful Mortlach meat playing second fiddle to the dense sherry and dark malt flavors. There's no question that this is going to be the cask, among all our recent Faultline releases to consider stocking deep. It's very unlikely that we'll ever see value and quality converging quite like this again. Let's all pray that we can keep pulling casks this good.