August marked the annual Expensive Taste KW cook off competition. Before we fired up the grills, the club had a chance to dive into another Signatory Vintages bottling.

We are exploring a new distillery to the already expansive club tasting history, is the Strathmill 1996 23 Year Old single malt whisky. This one was secured via a club members trip to Alberta a couple years back.

Here are the details of this bottling:

Distilled on 07/31/1996

Bottled on 03/06/2020, remarkably right around the start of the covid shutdowns.

Bottle # 391 of 458 produced from a marriage of cask #’s 2099 and 2103 (must be Strathmill’s numbering system)

This cask strength whisky came in at 57.4% abv.

Notes: There isn’t much out there on this specific bottling. But I’ll add a few details I took during the tasting.

Nose: warm sweetness, grassy undertones with a little bit of the alcohol from the cask strength

Pallate: stonefruit, warm grassy understones, but not too strong that it overpowers, a little bit of dry sweetness

Finish: was quite warm, got a little bit of the dryness come through again, perhaps some lingering of the sherry hogshead finishing barrels

This one was really interesting, not overly complex, the finish didn’t linger too long, was quite clean. Once again will say quite warm on that finish. A bunch of the group tried it with a drop of water in our drams. Would recommend you try it both ways so that you can compare for yourself.

Overall I think I would like this whisky more when the temp drops to around 0 on a late fall afternoon, maybe not on a warm Saturday afternoon in August.

Really solid tasting overall!