02 December 2024
November 2024 Live Tasting Recap: Redwood Empire and Glen Moray
Tags
Last week, we enjoyed two fabulous tastings with Redwood Empire and Glen Moray to celebrate our November offerings.
Redwood Empire
Our first tasting took place on Tuesday 26th November with Redwood Empire where we were joined by their Master Blender Lauren Patz and their Director of International Mark Fogleman.
Redwood Empire is situated in California’s Sonoma County, a region that is most famous for its wineries. Taking its name from the redwood trees which grow in the northern California wilderness, Redwood Empire started production in the area about a decade ago and have grown steadily over the years. Next week, they’re due to move to a bigger site so they can continue to scale up their production.
Their location often raises the question “can you make bourbon outside of Kentucky?” The answer is a resounding yes. Lauren states that there are no silly questions in whiskey but the one silly assumption is that bourbon can’t be produced in any other state. However, Lauren highlights that people’s biases towards whiskey that comes from elsewhere in America is actually somewhat beneficial to the distillery as they are constantly exceeding expectations.
The offering at Redwood Empire is soft and subtle – Lauren lived in Japan for a period and has been highly inspired by the finesse and technique that goes into Japanese whisky production and aims to emulate some of this with Redwood Empire.
Lost Monarch, this month’s Discovery whisky, is a perfect representation of the innovative nature of Redwood Empire. It’s a blend made up of 55% rye and 45% bourbon and Lauren likens the taste and mouthfeel to Pop Rocks, with the rye spice cutting through the bourbon sweetness.
Glen Moray
On Thursday 28th November, we hosted this month’s Traditional live tasting with Glen Moray. We were joined by Global Brand Ambassador Iain Allan, who had just arrived home the day prior from a long trip around the US and Canada.
Iain has been with the distillery for 20 years and is immensely proud of the 20-plus whiskies in their portfolio. The distillery arguably has more cask variety than any other distillery in Scotland. “Cask exploration is what we’re all about,” says Iain.
Next year, Glen Moray will be launching a distillery exclusive ‘maple syrup spirit drink’ – which can’t legally be classified as whisky due to SWA regulations – which really highlights their curiosity and ambition. It will be available in both peated and non-peated variations – Iain tells us that the peated variant is particularly delicious.
This takes us on to this month’s Traditional dram, the Oloroso Cask release from Glen Moray’s Warehouse 1 series, an exceptional range that puts the distillery’s mission of cask exploration at the fore. This release is spicy and bursting with notes of dark chocolate and Christmas pudding – the perfect dram for the festive period. One of our attendees stated that the expressions is “one of the best Olorso sherried whiskies [they’d] had this year.”
If you weren’t able to join us live, fear not! The both tastings are available to watch on our Facebook page and our YouTube channel.
We hope to see you all at next month’s live tasting! Details to be shared soon…
