Ballindalloch distillery is located at the heart of the Ballindalloch Estate, owned by the Macpherson-Grant family. Part of the estate was leased to Cragganmore distillery in 1869 but the family sold their stake in the distillery to DCL in 1965.
I have fond memories of a dinner at the beautiful Ballindalloch castle, when I stayed at Glenrothes distillery for a week. Lady Clare wrote a couple of cooking books on traditional Scottish cuisine. Her husband, 23rd generation of the family, started the new distillery in 2011, growing barley on the estate itself, with the first distillate flowing in Sptember 2014.
Ballindalloch is a very artisan distillery with a lot of manual operations. They took quite some time before releasing the first expressions. The inaugural release from 2023 was already 8 years old. Today I’m having a single sherry cask release exclusive to the Benelux countries. Cask 108 is part of a trio of Benelux exclusives.
Ballindalloch 2015 (60,5%, OB for Benelux 2024, sherry butt #108)
Nose: a bit funny at first, with a rubbery hint in the background (highlighted with water), but not too bad. Settles down on nice red fruit candy (raspberry) with apricots, red plums and baked apples. Forest fruit jam. Also worn leather, cinnamon pastry and a resinous / polished side. It suffers a little from the high alcohol strength, but it’s really inviting nonetheless.
Mouth: a slightly synthetic fruitiness (raspberry and plum), quickly overtaken by firm herbal notes. Juniper, pine needles, white pepper and drops of herbal bitters. A lot of black pepper and bitter clove. Walnuts and bitter citrus peels. Still a rubbery hint as well. Started in a nice way but it gets quite harsh over time. Water helps, to a certain extent.
Finish: quite long, but mostly finishing on bitterness, leather and clove, with a dash of cold coffee.
The nose promised good things, but on the palate it goes downhill. A quirky cask perhaps, and the high ABV doesn’t help to make it shine. Available from Whiskysite.nl for instance. A sister cask was bottled for the UK.