Glenfarclas vintage 2002, Distillery Exclusive 2023 for Spirit of Speyside Festival

Glenfarclas Distillery post-tour tasting, 3rd May 2024, whisky# 4 Nose: Malt extract, rum and raisin chocolate, cherries, orange peel, preserved ginger, dried apricot and leather. It’s a marvelous, commanding nose that has intensity but is well balanced. An excellent sherry nose. Palate: The arrival is sweetly spicy with preserved fruits stewed in dark honey, pippali, hot cinnamon and nutmeg. In the development the palate becomes maltier with licorice, oak and espresso coffee backed by a leathery, tobacco note. The texture is very good, just a little oily with perfectly contained alcohol. Adding water tones down the spice notes a little, enlarges the sweet flavours (but also introduces a touch of bitterness) and makes the texture creamier. Finish: Long. Mildly spicy and sweet with a candy-like fruity acidity in the aftertaste. This distillery exclusive bottling was released for the Spirit of Speyside Festival in 2023, but bottles are still available from the distillery door (the 2024 Festival exclusive was a NAS called “107” but I did not have an opportunity to taste it). It was distilled in 2002, matured in a 1st-fill sherry butt (distillery cask 3774) for 20 years, and bottled on the 15th February 2023. 636 bottles were filled at cask-strength of 54.3%. A very fine example of classic, old-school 1st-fill sherry Glenfarclas. The nose is quite magnificent and the palate not far short in quality. This is good sherried whisky, but not a generic sherry bomb. I did note a slight astringency when it was watered but this just provided balance against the spicy-sweetness of the neat palate. “Excellent” : 88/100 (4.5 stars)

I really love when time passes and you get to try whiskies from distilleries you have disregard out of pure prejudice, specially when everybody says that a second chance can change your whole concept of it. For me, this is the case of Glenfarclas. A distillery which their core expressions gave me a red apple juice profile that i honestly seemed to find a little boring. Well, my opinion has turned 180 degrees, since now i got to try some of their non-mainstream stuff, and i now recognize i have been missing some serious single malts here. When i visited the distillery, which is overwhelmingly beautiful, i got to try this 2002 vintage distillery exclusive, bottled on 2023 for the Spirit of Speyside festival, at 54.3%abv. On the nose a super nice aroma, that started with a 70-80% pure dark chocolate, red fruits and then out of nowhere you get this cardamom spice. Creamy vanilla, creamy ice cream and impalpable sugar. On the palate it was marvelous: apple pie, fruit spice, cinnamon and sweet pepper. Red apples and impalpable sugar. Aftertaste was delicious and very long lasting. Hay and very sugary. It is like milk with sugar. Overall, this might be the best speysider i have had in a long time. It was so good i bought a bottle in the shop, and that is particularly a compliment, since i can only bring back 4 bottles of whisky to Ecuador due to custom laws; that being said, in a trip to Scotland you have to be very picky when selecting the only 4 bottles you are bringing back home. My score for this outstanding dram was 94 over 100.