Designed to provide a preview of flavours the whisky connoisseur can look forward to the award-winning craft whisky maker R&B Distillers has launched a third iteration. It’s a mixture of whisky finished in Tuscan Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc casks for eight weeks, with whisky finished in the wine casks for 18 months. This unusual spirit will have a full bodied fruity and lightly smoky flavour, the perfect accompaniment to a festive cheese board. At £56.95 a bottle the limited edition is an excellent choice for Hogmanay or Burns Night. It even works really well in cocktails. In addition to the Raasay offering R&B has also released two premium new whiskies: The Tweeddale: Evolution and The Tweeddale: Silent Character. These limited edition blended malts are the latest addition to the Tweeddale collection and have been inspired by the brand’s fascinating whisky heritage. Co-founder of R&B Distillers, Alasdair Day, is the great-grandson of Richard Day, a master-blender in the Coldstream in the Scottish Borders during the 19th Century. Alasdair inherited his great-grandfather’s whisky ‘recipes’ which had been painstakingly recorded in a cellar book. Alasdair has been recreating the original Tweeddale Blends since 2009. The Tweeddale A Silent Character’, which sells for £175 a bottle has been created using Alasdair’s Great Grandfather’s recipes. They discovered that Single Grain from Cambus Distillery was the whisky most consistently used in blending during the early 1900s and had been favoured by Richard Day.
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