Woodford Reserve Blended Malt Sherry Cask Finish 2024 (Distillery Series)

Been a while since I wrote anything down here. Somewhat excited as I'll just openly admit I like woodford malt a good bit. Nose - well, I got nothing to compare this too. Huge wallop of just powerful alcohol sweetness. Oak meats cotton candy...and the cotton candy and oak just over saturates you to complete failure to keep smelling. Once acclimated to this, I get rich oak over vanilla/white chocolate. But there's this funk overwhelming here. You might think of oak and cotton candy as a sweet dessert but no, the funky notes here are coming from those two elements. It's warming to the nose, getting warmer the deeper that smell travel....kinda like how Ardbeg is a bit cooling. This is that turned up to 11 and with heat. It's like you have moth balls, hay, and somehow an alcohol sting behind sugary funk. Behind that I'm starting to get classic sherry notes of raisins and figs. Red fruity gummies. It's not alcohol forward, but there's something like that here. Taste - First drink in 4-5 days. The strange doesn't stop. Arrives sweet, almost I'm thinking more like a port wine than sherry. But instantly it moves into that oily woodford malt, but darker...dirtier, stranger. Slight spice. A decent alcohol note, but to be fair I haven't had a drink in a bit. The body is giving more oily notes than expected at woodford's silly proofs. This is supposed to be blend of 5 different malt's that woodford is making and it tastes like someone just threw 5 whiskies together and finished them in a cask. I love the arrival of sweetness, but the rest of this is sadly a complete mess where the finish just gets worse and worse. I does have some nice spice and linger...but that can't save the rest of this. 5 stars on the different scale. A 1.25 on the quality scale. As always I score out of 4 and save 5's for EPIC whisk(e)y. Goes for about 70 so I'm calling it 140 since it's a 375 so people aren't expecting this to be cheap. Hard pass imo, but it's something different.

A ton sweeter than any other Woodford and it’s not even close. Still had the WF trademark taste but very different. The juice itself tastes ok but the adjunct makes it very different and solid. But I’m glad to only have 350ml (even though that cost more than most bottles). Gets a 4 instead of 3.75 cause its different.

Sweet Sherry finish, good but not a huge fan of the sherry finished bourbons.