Closed for over forty years, Port Ellen will be reborn. The unveiling of Port Ellen Gemini marks a bright future for the legendary distillery, with exquisite twin whiskies set on different paths.
Port Ellen Gemini Original
Port Ellen Gemini Original is an exquisite whisky matured in reserve European Oak butts, longer than any previous release from this cult icon, and left in its original splendour. This untouched whisky from 1978 has smooth, sweet, salty, and smoky characteristics allowing an appreciation of Port Ellen distillery’s time-honoured craft and the characterful Islay smoke.
Tasting Notes
Appearance
Appearance
Gaze into clear harvest gold.
Body
Body
Medium to full.
Nose
Nose
Explore light prickle, hints of baked pear and sweet edible seaweed. Dive deeper, for maritime scents born of long years in a sea-side warehouse. Surface, to faint traces of smoke that become ashy, as with a spent bonfire. Late on, seek out a sweet suggestion of soft fudge. Add water to find that sweetness and smokiness more pronounced.
Palate
Palate
Find pleasure in the firm, smooth body and vital, sweet-spicy flavours. Marvel at the intensity and freshness of those flavours after so many years. Discern a dash of salt mid palate, amid the embrace of a smoky warmth. Add water to find a smooth mix of baked apple skins and lightly medicinal aromas, the charred ashes of a bonfire clear in the development.
Finish
Finish
Luxuriate in its length, leaving aromatic sweet smoke to linger on the palate.
Port Ellen Gemini Remnant
Port Ellen Gemini Remnant, the second of these twin whiskies, embarked on a new maturation journey within the Port Ellen remnant cask. A feature of every distillery, the remnant cask is used to measure excess spirit from a filling run. The Port Ellen remnant cask is likely to have touched some of the distillery’s most historic whiskies and has now been used in the final maturation of Port Ellen Gemini Remnant. Saved by a group of Islay distillers at the close of Port Ellen in 1983 and sheltered for 40 years, the cask was recovered and re-seasoned, setting new life in motion through the innovative finish of the 44-Year-Old Port Ellen. This finishing technique imbues the whisky with a golden garment of sea salt, smoke, dried fruit and oak.
Tasting Notes
Appearance
Appearance
Gaze into rich, deep gold.
Body
Body
Full.
Nose
Nose
Find pleasure at once in rich and fruity top-notes of dark sherry, spirit-soaked prunes and old dry oak spice. Search below for fainter hints of tobacco and charred wood ash, with hints of salt and sawdust. Note how all of these combine slowly, revealing sweet, rich charred ash-smokiness. Add water, to sense sweet, rose-perfumed notes and chocolate-coated toffee caramel.
Palate
Palate
Enjoy voluptuous smoothness, allowing it to envelop the palate. Sense rich, sweetly fruity and full-flavoured notes, with sumptuous, sweet spiciness and gently smoky warmth. Add a little water to enrich the sweetness of this passionate flavour symphony.
Finish
Finish
Savour the long, rich and intense sweet-smoky flavours, as they reach a spicy, crisp crescendo made spicier still if a drop of water is added, with a last wisp of smoke in the long aftertaste.
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