Ferg & Harris is a fairly new independent bottler from Edinburgh, Scotland. As Young Spirits they provide warehousing, bottling and labelling services, but in 2022 they also launched their own range of whiskies. The company gets its name from the founders John Ferguson and Alex Harrison. Their warehouse currently holds around 500 casks.
Their first batch consists of three whiskies, the first being this Secret Speyside 12 Year Old finished in a PX sherry cask.
I always get annoyed by contradictory information by bottlers. Here for instance they write on Instagram that it was finished in a sherry butt, whereas their website mentions sherry hogsheads. There’s also confusion about the number of bottles (892 bottles at the top or 1192 bottles at the bottom of the page) and the length of the finish (6 or 12 months according to different retailers). Accurate details just add to the impression of quality…
Speyside Single Malt 12 yo 2010 (55,7%, Ferg & Harris 2022, PX finish, probably hogsheads, many btl.)
Nose: big PX sherry, bringing the usual raisins, figs and dates, with chocolate and sticky toffee notes. Light hints of nuts and lacquered meat. It’s quite dark and bulky, with a few too many caramel notes for my taste, although the minty / herbal notes and (burnt) orange peels on top lift it a little.
Mouth: really robust, showing the same profile, full of dark chocolate notes, toffee dessert, with some herbal wood underneath. Mid-palate it shows a nice fruity boost, with hints of blood orange and blackberries. Then back to butter caramel candy and bitter chocolate. The overload of sherry makes it a little liqueur-ish.
Finish: very long, drying and warming, still on chocolate, caramel and hints of herbal tea.
A slightly bulky style of sherry that reminds us of some of the Glendronach Parliament batches. Definitely a rich and chocolatey sherry bomb, but complexity isn’t too high. A good daily sipper though. Available from DeinWhisky.de among others.