Spirits giant Sazerac surprised everyone last month with its announcement unveiling Hawk’s Rock Distillery, a new distillery set in the National Trust-worthy grounds of Hazelwood House, County Sligo. Now, the time has come for its first-ever release, Garavogue, which is ready to make its claim among the best whisky we've had the pleasure of tasting, and jumped straight to the top of our favourite Irish whiskies of all time.
The inaugural liquid is a twenty-year-old single malt Irish Whiskey, created by Master Blender Helen Mulholland. The name - Garavogue - comes from the river that flows through the distillery grounds and into the Atlantic Ocean. Quite a lot to live up to, but boy does it deliver.
One of the things that makes this release special is the sheer number of different casks used. On your average (or even above average) bottle, you’ll probably see a little bit of blurb about which casks have been used. Usually, you’ll have one, maybe two different cask types, aged for the majority of its maturation in one and then finished for around two years in a different cask, each adding different qualities to the resulting whiskey flavour.
Garavogue however, uses five different unique casks, blending the individual flavour notes. It's double-distilled and initially aged for a minimum of 14 years in ex-bourbon American oak casks, then transferred into French Muscat, French Sauternes, Spanish Pedro Ximénez Sherry and Barbadian Rum casks for further maturation.
"It's pushing blending to the absolute limit," Helen confessed when we first tried it. She explained how each cask was individually chosen for each flavour she loved.
"Distillation is a science," she explained. "But blending is an art." The whiskey is playful and adventurous, pushing the expected limit of what a whiskey of this cache is expected to be like.
"I am a technician," she continued, "I was trained as a scientist and so was taught that things should be black and white - but whiskey just isn't. We let go.
"It's an art, it's relationships. You work with whiskies from when they're born, then every year, every month. It becomes like family."
What effect does so many casks actually have on the whiskey?
Well, each cask infuses the liquid with signature flavours - for example, the Sauternes cask brings vanilla, warm peach, and spun sugar, the Muscat brings floral, honeysuckle yet earthy notes. This means that when you sip the whiskey (we’d recommend neat) each sip tastes different.
From the rum cask you get toffee, a full bodied brown sugar sweet richness. Then your sherry cask brings deeper dried fruit.
The flavours come in waves, based on our world-first tasting - deliberately mimicking the river that is the whiskey's namesake. Overall, it delivers an overriding, rich, deep flavour - vanilla and citrus sweetness on the palate, with buttery apple, and fresh fruit from the rum cask. Despite the overarching silky flavour profile, you’re still able to pick out different hints and tastes in each sip. It’s like the whiskey equivalent of re-reading a classic - you get something new out of it every time you go back. Garavogue is sort of like the whiskey equivalent of a luxury 'everything' bagel.
The ageing process brings the whiskey’s proof up to a respectable 94, with each small-batch release being limited and rare.
Sometimes, one of the most exciting things about a fancy whiskey is the bottle, and Garavogue is no exception; the special dram is housed in a distinctive reversed crescent-shape bottle, featuring a blue label that reflects the River’s influence, including a subtle, underlying pattern that mirrors the motion of water.
Garavogue Whiskey will begin rolling out in limited quantities as of June 2025, at a suggested retail price of $199. It’s available for purchase directly via Legacy de Forge, and other distributors across the UK - although we aren’t sure which retailers yet. Chances are you’ll definitely be able to pick some up in Duty Free either way.
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