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History In A Bottle Day 17: Berry's 40 Year KWM Blended Scotch

Posted on December 19, 2022

This post is Bonus Content. It has information on one of the KWM Cask bottles that are featured on the back of our 2022 KWM Whisky Calendar box. You can find the blog post for the mini bottle for Day 17 of our 2022 KWM Whisky Calendar here.

by Andrew

This was the most unexpected of our 25th Anniversary bottlings, in fact, I forgot it was even coming until it arrived. So how do you forget about ordering a couple of hundred bottles of Blended Scotch with your logo on it? You can have too much of a good thing!

Berry Brothers & Rudd is a 325-year-old family-owned firm, which has been based at the same address, No.3 St. James Street in central London, ever since its founding. The old shop which you can still visit, with its slanted floors (owing to a fire), and pockmarked exterior (owing to the Blitz), is a stone’s throw from St. James Palace, and around the corner from the Pall Mall. This is one of the most desirable streets in London and a street with strong diplomatic links. Many embassies are found in the area, Canada’s is only a few blocks away. Berry Bros leased a room to the Texas Legation for a few short years in the middle of the 19th century during which it was an independent country. Berry Bros & Rudd is primarily a wine merchant, but also a blender and independent bottler of Scotch whisky. It is an old-school firm, in the best sense. Business is all about relationships, mutual respect, and shared history. Something the big beverage companies have long ago forgotten about.

Once a year or so I’ll make a trip to London, to pay homage to the chaps and Berry Bros, and a few other partners. The visits usually start the same, in the pub, catching up over beers. Usually, it’s just a couple, on a few occasions, it’s been rather more. I was visiting them in 2017, on a rather moreish occasion, when after beers we retired to the office from the pub to review samples. We worked through at least a dozen samples before Doug McIvor, the Reserve Spirits Manager and Blender for BBR, said, you have a 25th Anniversary coming up, don’t you? Dougie had a treat for me, he had six cask samples of 25-year-old mystery Blended Scotch whiskies. I remember working through them, selecting the one I thought was best to be bottled for KWM to celebrate our 25th Anniversary. But it seems I also sampled another whisky that day… which they were keen to offer KWM as an exclusive.

I had completely forgotten about that other whisky until the morning my importer called me to inform me that both of my exclusive blends had arrived. “Both? I said, “I only remember a 25-year-old!” It seems I had also requested 300 bottles of 40-year-old Blended Scotch Whisky, bottled exclusively for KWM… I had vague memories of the whisky, and it seemed like the sort of thing I’d be interested in, but it was a purchase I had not been planning on arriving.

We brought it in, and I started to panic, the first bottle was bad, really bad. We opened a second, same problem… something was wrong with it but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. What was I going to do with 300 bottles… But Shawn came to the rescue, pointing out the whisky was corked, an occurrence which is not so rare as it might seem. So we opened a third bottle, and it was gorgeous. We had 300 bottles of rich, sherried, and elegant Scotch whisky, which tasted a lot like Macallan.

The 25-year-old Blend was good, but the 40 Year was spectacular. We loved it, and our customers did too… so much so that we had to do a second bottling run!

Berry's 40 Year KWM Blended Scotch

Andrew’s Tasting Note

Nose: Christmas cake, new leather sofas, old Armagnac and paring dark chocolate with Cuban cigars; on top of the candied fruits there is some bright orange and more delicate tropical tones: mango and papaya; silky caramel and creamy vanillas emerge later with some light but crisp spices.

Palate: Big, rich, fruity and spicy; huge Christmas cake notes merge into espresso beans and more soft but crisp spices; the second sip settles down into tobacco, dark bakers chocolate and loads of fruit: some candied, dried dark fruits and the more delicate tropical ones from the nose; more hints of old Armagnac, there also notes of jujubes soaked in nutty Oloroso sherry.

Finish: Long, coating, fruity and spicy; dark chocolate, sherry, tobacco and oranges mingle and fade into the distance with the faintest whiff of smoke!

Comment: This is a beautiful old whisky in the vein of 25+-year-old Glendronachs, the long lost Gordon Macphail Strathisla 40 Year and sherried old Glenfarclas… we can only begin to speculate on the component whiskies, who doesn’t love a little mystery?!

Andrew Ferguson

Owner

Kensington Wine Market

This entry was posted in Whisky, KWM Whisky Calendar 2022, KWM Single Cask

 

 

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