Het Whisky Forum

Piet schreef:Karuizawa Asama 1999+2000/2012, 11yo, 46%.
.......
Score in eerste instantie 88. ... maar na een paar glaasjes en wat meer tijd geef ik hem toch 89!
Deed in eerste instantie denken aan de Glendronach 15yo Revival maar die is dan wat bitterder en ook meer uitgesproken. Ik vind deze Asama meer gelaagd en "frisser".

Dat gezegd hebbende moet ik ook attenderen op het feit dat een aantal karakteristieke kenmerken dit tot een "love it or hate it" whisky kunnen maken, zoals blijkt uit VBT-3#6 en de score-range op b.v. WhiskyBase.

I_SPEY schreef: Een soort van zuinigheid, zo van, er zijn flessen - óf ik heb flessen, die beter zijn en daarom een betere score verdienen

When Number One Drinks bought the entire remaining inventory of Karuizawa distillery, they quickly discovered the vast majority of the stock was from the 1999 and 2000 vintages, the final years of production. It was immediately clear that this relatively young malt needed to be categorized as soon as possible – there was loads of it and it was uneven in terms of taste profile – and so they brought in their Master Blender who tasted every single cask. Some casks were earmarked as “immediately ready to be bottled as single casks”, but most needed re-racking. (A few were rejected altogether.) The stock that had been put aside for vatting was nosed and tasted again to confirm the relative maturity and the taste profile. It was then decided to create two different vattings, both of which involved bringing together the liquid from a number of casks and then returning the contents to the original casks, all of which were still very active sherry butts. Obviously, since each of the original casks was less than full, fewer casks were needed to re-rack the vatted contents.

The first batch was a vatting of 77 casks – re-racked into 60 casks – that were considered to be mature already. These 77 casks were the ones needed to produce the final profile the Master Blender was looking for. The second vatting was of those casks he felt needed more maturation, with 59 casks re-racked into 46 casks. This was all carried out in late 2011, early 2012. Since then, there have been a few releases drawn from these re-racked 1999/2000 casks – let’s call them the “Asama casks”, for the sake of brevity. Everything so far has been from the first vatting:

(1) the “Asama” (46%), released in 2012 – which was first available in Sweden, and then in other markets as well;
Deze dus tevens HWF VBT-3 #6

(2) two single marrying-casks for the Tokyo International Bar Show / Whisky Live 2012, bottled at cask-strength;

(3) two “Spirit of Asama” releases for The Whisky Exchange, bottled at 48% and 55% abv respectively;

(4) a cask-strength version (61.7%) called “1st Release” for Taiwan

A fifth one – a 2013 version of the first vatting, which has benefitted from 18 months of marriage, bottled at 50.5% and with new packaging – will be launched over the summer.

cor0566 schreef:Als ik de uitgebrachte stemmen bekijk , dan kun je toch niet praten over een goede prijs-kwaliteitverhouding.
De meerderheid zet hem weg tussen de 80 en 84.
Neemt niet weg dat ik nieuwsgierig ben hoor, maar toch.
Groeten Cor.

cor0566 schreef:Hoi.
Ben het zeker met je eens ( 90 euro bij 85 punten ).
Wilde hem ook niet wegzetten als minder of zo ( absoluut niet ).
Maar het zijn toch voortaan ontzettend dure jongens, en dat bedoelde ik met Prijs / Kwaliteit.
Maar mooi dat je inderdaad kunt zeggen " ik heb meerdere Karuizawas gehad ).
Groet Cor