Karuizawa 50 Years Old 1965

Karuizawa was a small single malt distillery operating at the foot of Mt. Asama in Nagano Prefecture from 1956 until its closure in 2000. This single cask expression was distilled in 1965 and matured in an Oloroso sherry cask for 50 years before bottling in 2017 at cask strength, at 63.1% abv, as a distillery bottling for the Taiwan market.

Oloroso is the wood type that most defines Karuizawa: the heavy, dark sherry butter, the concentrated dried fruit and leather that made the distillery's older releases famous. At 50 years, the sherry influence is total, delivering dark plum, figs, leather, bitter chocolate and the dense, resinous depth that only decades in a good sherry butt can build. The high cask strength abv confirms the concentration of a cask that has lost much of its volume to evaporation over five decades, rendering each bottle a rare and unrepeatable fragment of Japanese whisky history.