Signatory Single Cask Caol Ila 8 Year (Cask #318694)

Caol Ila is a distillery well-known to Scotch fans. Hailing from Port Askaig on the famed isle of Islay, this distillery's character typically offers industrial oils, maritime notes, and, while it shows plenty of smoke, that profile is usually somewhat more delicate and clean compared to other Islay whiskies. It has long been a component in Diageo's Johnnie Walker blends and has only recently been offered as a Single Malt.  Rarer still is to find it as a Single Cask bottling.

In this case, a milder peated Islay may never before have been bottled. Give it a bit of time to open up and this is a wonderfully gentle Islay dram that shows a different side of Caol Ila - one expressing peat as typically found in much, much older whiskies: earthy, organic, and almost vegetal, rather than in your face with smoke. The smoke hardly shows itself at all until the finish, where it appears and lingers gently and aromatically like cigar smoke hanging in a room well after the stick was put out. Here you get a lot of Islay with the smoke on mute - coastal, natural, and mineralic.