Teeling 13 Year Old Revival Vol II - Calvados Finish

The Teeling distillery, Dublin’s latest asset, is celebrating its first birthday. Last year they released a special bottling of 15yo rum matured whisky to honour the occasion of their rebirth, called Revival. A fun little whisky, that though a tad expensive, really showed the remarkable evolution Irish Whiskey has gone through these last few years. Can you imagine the joy of finding a sample of this year’s Teeling Evolution II, with a complementary glass on my doorstep? Even more exiting is that they swapped the rum treatment of the previous Revival with a Calvados finish after Bourbon maturation. A calvados finish? Yes, seems like a great choice to add some fruitiness to a whisky that has only just entered its adolescent years. Still they are hard to find and it is definitely a first to me. This is exhilarating…

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Description: distilled in 2002, presumably at the Cooley distillery, matured for 12years in bourbon barrels before being finished in Calvados casks, bottled in 2016 for Teeling.

Nose: light and floral, a strong aroma of apple pie (no surprises there), cinnamon and powdered sugar with a soft touch of vanilla. Not quite like a warm apfelstrudel, more like an apple fritter.

Mouth: definitely light bodied. The palate starts off with a slight alcoholic nibble but then the pear and apple aromas come rolling in and it turns quite zesty all of a sudden, with a good portion of dried orange peel sprinkled on top.

Finish: ever so slightly drying with a tad of bitter orange oil. Cinnamon, cloves and cayenne notes give it a spicy send-off

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Verdict: Who would have thought that the Irish were such funky sweet tooths? A simple light dram that packs quite a lot of punch in the both the indigenous and exotic fruit department. It may not be the most complex, but it is young and quite a lot of fun. Maybe the pricing is a bit off again, but they need to pay off their brand new distillery, thus quite reasonable.