Glengoyne 16 Year Old Japanese Mizunara Oak

In the ultimate whisky love-hate relationship, whiskymakers know Mizunara can deliver incredible depth of spice, vanilla and fragrant wood to a whisky – but it’s notoriously difficult to work with. In fact, its knottiness and tendency to leak means making a working cask out of Mizunara is like “composing a symphony on a kazoo”.

That makes Mizunara tricky to work with, as well as hugely expensive, because Mizunara trees can take up to 300 years to grow enough for harvesting (which is quite a while to wait for a dram).

All that cost and persnicketiness means most Scotch distilleries will usually risk a few months finish in Mizunara at most. Not Glengoyne, though. They’ve redefined what’s possible, and gone for twenty times that: a full six-year secondary maturation in this incredible wood.

Not a huge surprise, then, that it wiped the floor with the competition at the latest International Spirits Challenge, beating out 98 other bottles to win the ‘Best Single Malt between 13 and 20 years old’ category trophy and picking up a Double Gold medal.

There’s no doubt about why it won: the six-year secondary maturation in Mizunara (on top of an initial ten years in Oloroso) delivers cloves, ground ginger, brown bread and baked banana. Its golden colour is entirely natural too, bottled with no chill filtration or added colour at 53.4% ABV. This a dram to really sit with, as subtle slivers of sultana linger on and a nutty creaminess rounds things out nicely.

As you can imagine with a rare oak like this, there’s limited stock available worldwide. Luckily for Club Members, we’ve got the entire Australian allocation of Glengoyne 16 Year Old Mizunara Oak.

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