Tasting Notes
This month we’re delighted to unveil Cask No. 151.1: “The Swedish Mozart”, our first release from a distillery where the sun barely sets at this time of year.
This was the first whisky distillery to open in Sweden when it started producing spirit in 1999, focussing on sourcing local barley and using Swedish oak casks for maturation.
Production is now based in an innovative 37-metre high ‘gravity distillery’ where the forces of gravity are harnessed at every stage, from preparing the malt at the top of the structure to mashing, fermentation, distillation and finally to cask filling at the lowest level. The team has produced both a peated malt and a fruitier, unpeated style over the years since the distillery was founded. The Society’s first bottling is from the fruitier end of the distillery’s output.
“Cask No. 151.1: “The Swedish Mozart” is a 9-year-old bottling from a new charred oak barrel with an awesome colour,” says SMWS spirits manager Euan Campbell. “The whisky comes from a vertical distillery, and this cask was matured 50 metres underground in a disused iron mine. The result is a Sweet, Fruity & Mellow flavour profile whisky, full of vanilla, coconut and marshmallow notes, and with a very deep colour – it’s heady and hypnotising.”
The SMWS gives a new number to every distillery that we bottle from, with an increasing number of non-Scotch whiskies making it into our iconic green bottles over the years for adventurous members to explore. You can read more about that in members’ magazine Unfiltered from March this year here.
Limited to 1 per member
An extremely pleasing aroma of sweet herbal notes combined with the floral scent of lavender and primrose as well as crushed heather. On the palate neat, sweet and smooth which reminded us of Mozart chocolate cream, that milk chocolate liqueur refined with Belgian chocolate with flavours of butterscotch, custard and touches of cinnamon. With a drop of water, we were transported to Salzburg and the Tomaselli coffee house dating from 1700, where Wolfgang Amadeus sipped his coffee, a melange – a mocha with milk and whipped cream and certainly not accompanied by a snowball (soft marshmallow coated in chocolate and sprinkled with coconut). So harmonious, just like the works of Joseph Martin Kraus referred to as “the Swedish Mozart”.