Laphroaig Cardeas Port Wood

Well, summer has truly arrived on Islay, which is particularly good as we’ve just taken part in the Feis Ile Festival. A big thanks to the thousands of you who came to visit us over the week-long festival and I those of you who were able to join in with our special events on the Sunday, Monday and Tuesday enjoyed it as much as we did. If you couldn’t make it you can catch up on some of the festivities on our Feis Ile live blog page here. This is perhaps the most eagerly anticipated email by our ‘Friends’ from me for the whole year because it gives me great pleasure to announce that this year’s special ‘Friends’ bottling - Cairdeas - is now on sale in our online shop. Of course every year Cairdeas is different, but this year I believe it is truly special and very unique indeed. I’m sure you’ll understand when I say that we do sometimes like to keep a few secrets to ourselves! Well, I managed to get a style of barrel that we’ve never used before and one that I’d been hoping to for a long time: port barrels! I’ve always felt that the marriage of Laphroaig with these barrels would produce something very special and frankly I was not disappointed – the result is simply delicious! For the technically-minded among you: it’s been bottled at 51.3% ABV, is non-chill filtered and is an all natural colour. But to be professional, here are my official tasting notes: Nose Stewed Rhubarb, Huge peat moving into vanilla ice cream and milk chocolaty. Gentle cloves, minty and fresh... Cairdeas Port wood then becomes floral like summer roses, orange marmalade and finishes with a long, dry charcoal finish. Palate A lovely mouth feel and a nice balance, Cairdeas port wood has an initial honey sweetness but becomes dry quickly then creamy and floral, it shows a heavy saltiness and a great liquorice root flavour that really lasts, it then develops into a long, heavy charcoal finish mixing with orange rind flavours that really linger on the palate. It’s on sale for £47 with a maximum of three bottles per FoL. Click here to buy I hope you enjoy drinking it as much as I enjoyed making it! Please do pass your thoughts and views on to me via our Facebook and Twitter pages as I always love to hear you thoughts. Slàinte, John Campbell Distillery Manager, Laphroaig