The Mars Shinshu Mars 2015 Cask #3132

The Mars 2015 Cask 3132 is a single cask single malt from Mars Shinshu, Hombo Shuzo's distillery at Miyada in the Central Alps of Nagano, distinguished by its maturation in a Virgin American White Oak cask with a heavy char. Virgin wood, never before used for spirits, delivers the most extractive and tannic maturation possible, and the heavy char specification accelerates the sweetening influence of the oak's caramel layer.

Bottled at 61% cask strength for the Japanese market after four years, Cask 3132 is the most wood-intensive of the Mars Shinshu single cask series by design. The virgin oak will have driven deep colour, strong vanilla and caramel, with a firm, drying tannin that the four year timeframe will not have had long enough to fully soften. In the absence of specific tasting data, the profile is expected to be bold, wood-led and sweet, an outlier within the distillery's Ex-Bourbon-dominant single cask programme.