Raasay Na Sia "Through the ages" - 7 years evolved - Unpeated Ex-Bordeaux

THE DISTILLERY
Isle of Raasay Distillery is a genuinely new story in Scotch whisky — the first legal distillery ever built on the island, a narrow strip of land in the Inner Hebrides sitting between Skye and the mainland, with a long history of illicit stills but no legitimate one until 2017. It was founded by R&B Distillers, the partnership of Alasdair Day and Bill Dobbie, built with water drawn from the island's own Fionn's Spring and a clear ambition from day one: to create a Hebridean single malt with a genuinely distinct identity, rather than following an established house style borrowed from elsewhere.
That identity is built on an unusually deliberate recipe. Raasay's core single malt is a marriage of six separate component casks — peated and unpeated spirit, each matured individually in three different cask types: first-fill ex-Bordeaux red wine, virgin Chinkapin oak, and first-fill American rye. Vatted together, those six components make up the flagship whisky. Bottled individually, they become the Na Sia single cask series — Gaelic for "the six" — a way of pulling the recipe apart to show exactly what each element contributes.
 
THE WHISKY: NA SIA "THROUGH THE AGES" — 7 YEARS EVOLVED, UNPEATED EX-BORDEAUX
This release belongs to Raasay's most ambitious experiment yet: rather than bottling each Na Sia cask once, the distillery is releasing the very same recipe casks biennially, letting drinkers taste the same spirit ageing in real time — five years, seven, nine, and onward. This is the second instalment, "Seven Years Evolved," following on from the first release at five years old.
The cask in question, 19/468, was filled with unpeated spirit on 5 November 2018 and has spent its entire life in a single first-fill ex-Bordeaux red wine cask — one of the high-quality casks Raasay sources fresh from châteaux in South West France, still stained red on the outside from the wine they once held. Bottled this July at natural cask strength, 60.1% ABV, non-chill filtered and with no added colour, it's a UK-exclusive release limited to just 284 bottles.
Left unpeated, this expression puts the Bordeaux cask's influence entirely front and centre — no smoke to compete with the fruit, just two years of pink-to-crimson colour development and the tannic, wine-soaked character the cask imparts.
 
TASTING NOTES
Colour: Rich golden amber with deep copper highlights, and real viscosity in the glass.
Nose: Layered and generous — red berries and dark cherry lead, backed by vanilla and toasted oak, with a dried fruit sweetness and a faint wine-spiced, mineral edge.
Palate: Bold and full, red fruit and blackberry carrying real intensity, met by caramel and baking spice. The oak tannin from the wine cask gives it real structure, balanced by a gentle malt sweetness underneath.
Finish: Long and warming, red fruit and oak spice lingering alongside vanilla and a distinct wine-cask depth.
Serve: Neat, in a tulip glass — the cask strength has plenty of backbone to take a few drops of water if you want to draw out the fruit further, but there's enough balance here to enjoy exactly as bottled. A good one to pour for anyone curious what red wine cask maturation looks like without any peat smoke in the way.