Allt-a-Bhainne 20 Years Old 2005 Recioto Finish (Alistair Walker Infrequent Flyers)

Distilled in 2005 and bottled by the Alistair Walker Whisky Company in 2025 under the Infrequent Flyers imprint, this is a 20 Years Old Allt-a-Bhainne at 59.1% ABV finished in Recioto della Valpolicella casks. The release is one of 324 bottles, an unusual choice of Italian sweet red wine cask finish for a Speyside blend filler.

Allt-a-Bhainne ferments malted barley for 48 to 50 hours on Mauri liquid yeast in closed stainless steel washbacks, then double distills through two copper wash stills and two copper spirit stills with steam heating and shell and tube condensers. The short Speyside ferment produces a clean malt forward spirit built as a blend filler for Chivas Regal, Passport and 100 Pipers. New make is reduced with Rowantree Burn water and tankered to Keith for cask filling and maturation, since the distillery holds no warehousing on site.

Recioto della Valpolicella is a passito style sweet red wine from the Veneto, made from Corvina grapes air dried before fermentation to concentrate sugars. The wood retains residual sugars and the dark cherry, fig and raisin register that defines passito wines, an unusual finish for a Speyside spirit. Against twenty years of underlying cask interaction, the Recioto finish layers Italian passito wine character over a developed base profile. Cask strength bottling preserves volatile compounds that lower strength bottling would lose to dilution.