Ohishi Sherry Single Cask Whisky

Middle of the road, not overpowering.

Söt doft med vanilj och mycket körsbär. Körsbärssmaken träder fram starkt och jag tycker mig känna lite ananas.

Fascinating color

Without overthinking it - it's light and easy to drink. It has a warm and round flavor that is very soft on the tongue and the warmth of the sherry cask is the dominate feature. It wanders into 'delicate' which is a word I seldom use to describe whiskey.

TLDR: Light and hollow without much going on beyond the Sherry pop The nose seems strangely empty with only light notes of 'warm wood' which I imagine is the Sherry Cask and a sharper astringent edge. This might as well be 'anything' - it manages to be smooth and inoffensive on the tongue but lacks any real flavor punch beyond the sherry and I struggle to believe that it was in a cask for 8 years. The pale straw color only enforcing this feeling. I get almost nothing on the finish with zero peeking out in the back of the mouth or palate. My understanding is this is effectively barrel aged shochu (Mashbill: 100% Rice) and maybe it's just not going to be to my taste in Whiskey. I'm sad I paid $70 for this bottle.

Before reading anything about this, I found the nose to be unpleasant, full of waxy milk with a slight bazooka joe gum quality plus something else I couldn't quite put my finger on. As soon as I read that this had a partial rice mashbill, I realized that it reminded me uncannily of coconut sake (specifically Momokawa) but still in an unpleasant way. Extremely soft rice notes on the palate with bursts of hard candy sweetness, plus with a distinct spice and oak char quality I associate with older brandy. There is definitely a sake like quality to this, which I view as a negative in whiskey. The waxiness in the nose also appears in the taste, which I don't love. It occurs to me that this reminds me a lot of a homemade rice wine / liquor that my parents used to make when I was growing up. I didn't like that stuff then, and - with those bad memories coming through - I don't like this now.