TASMANIAN WHISKY WEEK 2025 LIMITED RELEASE
It's TASMANIAN WHISKY WEEK! I love this time of year, and have participated in almost every single TWW since the beginning. From the days when it was just a handful of distillers in a little room with a few bottles on the table, to now a week plus of events across the state, with such pride in our industry and the creativity and passion growing all the time.
So we thought we should do something special this year by bottling a special whisky just for the festival, and make it something we have never done before...
If you're lucky, you may have tasted our Smoky Wedding "Distiller's Cut" last year. We don't produce cask strength whisky much, but every now and then we come across some liquid in our tasting sessions which just taste best when it is rich, raw and unfiltered. That was been the case with this particular Flinders Island Peated Botrytis Cask.
These were some of the first casks we got from Transwood Cooperage, an amazing family run cooperage in Perth, Tasmania. Run by Dave Schmeider who has a great eye for casks and actually cares where they come from, these were toasted, charred and sent to us in 2020, which for another first, this is a five year old whisky!
For those who don't know, Botrytis is a style of dessert wine where a type of fungus (nicknamed "the noble rot") dehydrates the grapes, concentrating their sugar content, making the wine from their juice very sweet and viscous. In this case, the Botrytis wine was matured in oak barrels for 8-10 years before the oak eventually made it's way us across the strait.
The cask influence has given this whisky an amazing sticky date pudding, dark treacle nose with a soft spice and toasted coconut profile. The whisky carries that coconut note through the palate, opening up a flavour of smoked cherry ripe through the finish. Definitely peaty, this dram has a beautiful earthy, native smoke profile which holds up well against that sweetness.
Bottled at 58% ABV, this is the first ever of our "Distiller's Cut" from 100% Flinders Island Peated spirit. At that strength, we are able to bottle this whisky completely unfiltered without any loss of clarity to the juice. This means the whisky is viscous, textural and has great mouth feel.
As a single cask at 5 years old, there were only 101 bottles of this whisky. We brought a small amount down to Tasmanian Whisky Week with us to raise a glass to the amazing Tasmanian whisky industry!
