Kilchoman “Islay Series”: STR / New Oak Finish Single Cask 1041/2019 for the 5th Anniversary of the Vineyard Series
The Vineyard Series is a classic car weekend event for Land Rover fans, which has been held in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, since 2021. The focus is less on driving the cars and more on socialising with the Land Rover classic car community. There are exhibitions of historic Land Rovers and, of course, numerous stalls selling all things Land Rover.
The event took place for the fifth time from 25 to 27 July 2025. To mark this anniversary, US importer ImpEx Beverages released a special bottle of Kilchoman and named it, with a wink, ‘Islay Series’. We have already reported several times on Kilchoman’s connections to Land Rover, which go back to the family, and this is already the third bottling from Kilchoman with a Land Rover connection.
The bottling is an STR Cask Matured / New Oak Finish Single Cask Release, the sixth and for the time being, last bottling of a finishing experiment by Anthony Wills in New Oak casks that began in March 2023. We had reported on this regularly, not least because we had released one of the rare casks at the end of last year as a Kilchomania bottling.
Anthony had a series of 5-year-old fresh STR casks (Shaved, Toasted & Re-charred ex-red wine casks) from 2018 and another series of three-and-a-half-year-old STR casks from 2019 finished for just under a year and a half to just over two years in new European oak casks. The casks were made by a French cooperage from oak (Quercus petraea / Quercus robur) from the Carpathian Mountains.
This bottling has the longest New Oak Finish at just under 27 months, after which the remaining New Oak casks were re-racked, i.e. transferred to neutral casks, due to the oak character becoming too strong. In addition, this bottling is the only one from a cask of the 2019 series before re-racking.
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Cask No.: 1041/2019
Cask type: 1st Fill STR Cask, New Oak Finish
Date Filled: 7.8.2019
Date Decanted: 12.3.2023
Date Bottled: 4.6.2025
Age: 5 yo
Finishing period: almost 27 monaths
Strength: 58,7 % abv
Level of phenols in malted barley: 50 ppm
Number of bottles: 276
Bottle volume: 0,7 l
Barcode: 5 060210 708641
Market: USA
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