Whisky Club #2 meetup: short but sweet. Stitch Bar the site, their top shelf lined with single malts. TWTM has a crush on The Islands (the salt! the tang!) so here’s just a few words about my first choice, the Arran Amarone finish.

Amarone is an unusual wine in that it is made from partially dried grapes, which intensifies the sugars in the fruit*. So, with the wine itself having very raisin-y characteristics, it was salt AND these intense honey-dried-raisin notes that I was experiencing.

Other people must like it too, as the bottle was almost empty..

I was happy to notice that it wasn’t at all like a sherry cask finish. I mean, not that it would have been necessarily, but the whole point for me was to taste what influence this wine would have because right now I know a bit more about wine than I do about whisky! I think the wine cask finishes are really interesting because you have two separate booze-making processes (distillation / fermentation) coming together in one barrel with all these new permutations of flavour.

I am starting to also love the textured fire of the non-chill-filtered finish. As a closet fan of high-performance european sports cars, I think it gives me the same sense as the top-notes when one’s foot is very close to the floor and the engine begins to scream/roar 😀 aaahhh yes. Likewise the whisky.

Until the next dram: stay excellent.

* I Made a Terrible Mistake: The original version of this post also mentioned that grapes used to make amarone are also botrytis-affected. Wine Geek Sibling informs me that this is wrong! wrong! So I deleted it, and I can only blame my own poor research, when I really ought to know better.