Bottle Stats

Produced by Kavalan Distillery, exclusive to K&L Wines in California
Taiwanese single malt whisky
Full maturation in a sherry butt (presumably oloroso?)
No age statement
ABV is 57.8%
Single cask #S081223016A
#252 of 498 bottles
Bottled in 2014

Distillery Key Facts

Kavalan Distillery was founded in 2005 and became operational in March 2006
Located in Yilan County, Taiwan, approximately one hour southeast by car from Taipei
Kavalan is the old name for Yilan County and the people who once dwelled there (and apparently not a play on Macallan)
The late Dr. Jim Swan worked as a consultant with Kavalan during their first decade of production, establishing their wood policy and their distillate style (“fruity, oily and complex”).
Kavalan was the first distillery to use Swan's signature STR cask treatment (shaved, toasted, re-charred)
Annual production is approximately 9M litres of alcohol
Five mash tuns
40 stainless steel washbacks
20 copper stills, with 10 wash stills and 10 spirit stills working in pairs (pot stills manufactured by Forsyths)
Fermentation time ranges from 60-72 hours (summer vs winter)
Uses a spirit cut of 65-55%
Two massive, five-storey racked warehouses, with a 3rd racked warehouse only just completed in October 2023 that is larger than the other two warehouses combined
Angels' share is somewhere between 8-15%
Primarily using American oak for maturation but also fortified wine casks from Europe for limited releases
Subtropical climate with long, hot summers and short, mild winters (14-28° C average temperatures with 95% humidity nearly year-round)
One of the most visited distilleries in the world, with over 1M annual visitors (greater than half of all Scotch distilleries combined)

Why Kavalan?

Taiwan is a huge consumer of single malt whisky. Just how huge surprised me.

In terms of Scotch whisky imported into the country, Taiwan is the 4th most valuable market on the planet at £315M (falling just behind Singapore at £316M but still well ahead of China at £233M), with double-digit growth year over year.[^1]

[^1]: In 2022, the United States and France were the top two most valuable Scotch import markets at £1.053 billion and £488M, respectively. Taiwan's population is just shy of 24M people – a fraction of the United States' 334M and France's 65M. It's also a ludicrously small fraction of the populations of China and India, which have both eclipsed 1.4 billion people.

Taiwan’s import taxes for spirits are based on alcohol content and volume, not value. This makes for more affordable products to consumers while encouraging distillers to market premium products. In fact, Scotch brands generate higher margins in Taiwan than most other export markets by pushing their higher-end bottles. (source)

I interpret this all to mean that Taiwan really, really likes “the good stuff” and that they've been buying obscene quantities of it. Are they actually drinking it? Who can say? Whatever the case may be, there's a very large thirst for single malt whisky in Taiwan, so naturally some distilleries are now producing domestic single malt there.

Kavalan is, by far, the most well known of the bunch.

Up until 2002, Taiwan operated a state-run monopoly system for alcohol production, blocking any non-state entities from making alcohol. This system ceased when Taiwan joined the World Trade Organisation, and Kavalan didn't waste much time getting started. In 2005, they broke ground on their distillery, and a mere nine months later they were producing alcohol. In 2015, Kavalan won “World's Best Single Malt Whisky” at the World Whisky Awards for their Solist Vinho Barrique expression, at which point Kavalan seemed to absolutely explode in international popularity.

I've been fortunate to try quite a few Kavalan expressions at cask strength. There's no denying that there is a lot of flavour in these bold, heavily cask-influenced whiskies. Some of them – particularly European oak influenced expressions – I think are highly complex. Their rapid maturation in Taiwan's steamy climate makes these young whiskies (i.e. between 2-8 years old) very flavourful, but they've all disappointed me by their lack of depth compared to Scottish single malts and other cold-climate countries with slow maturations and low angels' share.

Admittedly the concept of “depth” in whisky is sometimes hard for me to articulate, but I know it when I experience it. This doesn't mean that hot climate whiskies like Kavalan are inferior to cold climate whiskies – they're just different. I don't think it's a straight apples-to-apples comparison with Scottish single malt whisky, and that's completely ok. It's its own thing. My only real complaint about Kavalan is that everything is cask-influenced to the point that I have no idea what the underlying distillate characteristics are.

Anyway, this particular Kavalan “Solist” Sherry Cask bottling should still be fun to try. These “Solist” expressions are considered the best of what Kavalan produces. I bought it in California in 2019, but it was actually bottled back in 2014. According to the shop I bought it from, 234 bottles from this single cask were “lost” in an importer's warehouse somewhere for nearly 5 years. Furthermore, because this was bottled in 2014, it predates Kavalan's massive expansion in 2016, so the cut points were allegedly much higher at 78-72%, rather than today's cut points of 65-55%.

Plus it looks like an absolute sherry bomb. Often the sherry bombs are the biggest crowd-pleasers. We'll see!