What does a Pedro Ximenez puncheon do to a 29 year old whisky?
Pedro Ximenez is the sweetest and darkest of the sherry styles, made from dried grapes, and a puncheon is a large cask of roughly 500 litres. Over twenty-nine years that combination pushes a whisky towards dried fruit, treacle and chocolate. A puncheon's size matters as much as its history: fewer litres of spirit touch each square inch of wood than in a smaller barrel, so a long maturation in a big cask develops more slowly and less aggressively than the same time in a hogshead.
How does BenRiach cask 2221 differ from cask 2067?
They are different barrels of the same distillery's 1994 peated spirit, both bottled in 2024 at twenty-nine years. Cask 2221 spent its life in a Pedro Ximenez puncheon and was filled on 17th June 1994; cask 2067 was filled a month later, on 18th July, into an Oloroso puncheon. Because each is a single cask, the wood and the barrel decide the character, and nothing stated about one describes the other.
When was BenRiach cask 2221 distilled and bottled?
The spirit was distilled on 17th June 1994 and the cask was bottled in 2024, giving the stated age of twenty-nine years. Both dates are printed on the front label, along with the cask number, the cask type and the spirit style, which is how a Cask Edition bottle records its own provenance.