Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm happy to be here. My name is Kristen, as always, my co-host, Pat. We've got our big guns, Roger Adamson here with us. He's our guy every time we want to talk about spirits, beer, and pretty much anything interesting. He's kind of an encyclopedia. Pirates too, don't forget pirates. Privateria too, that's an important distinction from piracy. Thanks, Kristen. It's great to be here again with you. Well, we're here and we thought, okay, let's talk about Oloroso. And then, you know, I'm the wine side, you and Roger kind of the spirit side. So we thought, well, let's talk about Oloroso Sherry as a category, and then take it a step further and talk about spirits that are aged or finished in Oloroso casks. So you brought quite a few selections for us today, Pat, for us to try to kind of get an idea of how Oloroso interacts with whiskey. Absolutely. It's got a long storied history of interacting with whiskey. I mean, England as a country in Scotland by default were long buying Sherry by the cask, and it was shipped over in Sherry casks directly from Jerez, Spain, going back centuries. And all those casks were traditionally then reused. I mean, they're not going to let them go to waste. It was before the bourbon industry had taken off, and it was certainly before we enacted laws that said bourbon had to use a new barrel every time. So the fault aging vessel for whiskeys across continental Europe, especially on the British Isles at the time, were Sherry barrels. And thank god for that too, because it just adds a round, delicious, kind of unctuous dried fruit. And I just kind of love the complexity that Oloroso Sherry barrels add to any distillate, really. Yeah, certainly it's sweeter flavors, more familiar flavors, definitely makes whiskeys that I would often refer to as crowd pleasers. Well, let's talk about what Sherry is, I guess, in kind of its basic definition. So Sherry, obviously fortified wine. The difference between Sherry and Port is Sherry is fortified after the base wine has been made to dryness. So they start with a dry wine made of a grape called Palomino Fino. Palomino Fino, if you guys want to make a regular, you know, drinking table wine out of it, it's like the biggest fail ever. Like it just doesn't really work so well. But what it does is makes delicious Sherry and Sherry gets its characteristics by the way that it's aged. So it's not really so much about the grape itself, but about what happens post-production after that base wine is made. So two different basic camps of Sherry are those that are aged biologically under the protective layer of yeast called floor or oxidative and that's Oloroso. So Oloroso, that base wine of Palomino is fortified to 18 percent. We have the basic definitions, right? So Fino is aged biologically, Oloroso is aged oxidative. So when you invite oxygen in to aging a white wine, which is what Palomino Fino would make as a base, you get a deepening of color because white wines gain color with oxidative aging, and then they also get what we refer to as oxidative aromas. So these are things that you guys are probably very well aware of, but aromas of caramel, coffee, toffee, molasses, brown sugar, the fruit spectrum gets a bit more of that dried fruit, the pruney characteristic, and a kind of a roasted walnutty characteristic that I love with Oloroso. So that's kind of what we're talking about. With the evaporation of aging, even though we've begun at 18%, when we put that bad boy in Barrel, and when we pulled it out of the Solera, we bottled it, we're somewhere around 20 to 24% ABV for some of the top, top end Oloroso Sherry. So very high in alcohol. Palomino, Pat, you asked about the acid as far as the intrinsic quality of the grape. Why does it make such a terrible table wine? Is it acid or is it low yield? Low acid. So all Sherries are acidified. All Sherries. You just can't have this amount of alcohol and glycerol in an Oloroso and sugars and things that develop without having that acidification. That acid is going to give it balance and give it lift. Otherwise, that baby is going to be very, very cloying and flabby on the palate. Now, when you say acidified, they add acid into it? They add acid into it. Is that usually just a citrus thing? Tartaric. Tartaric acid. In the form of tartaric acid, yeah. What are we talking about as far as aging goes for these when they're during that oxidative process? So, the way that Sherry is aged is very special, and it is aged in what is called the Solera system. Really kind of difficult to describe without any visuals, but it's a fractional blending. So, what they basically do is, let's say we've got five barrels stacked on top of each other, and that is going to be one Oloroso aging system called the Solera. I was under the impression it had to be three barrels and only three barrels high. Am I, as usually, incorrect? Well, in a bodega, there are three barrels high as you walk through, but I'm just kind of using five barrels. A typical system can be up to 14 barrels, 14 separate levels within that Solera. And flowing between all 14? All 14. Really? Yeah. So, I know the first creadera, second creadera, and then whatever the bottom layer is called. That's called the Solera. That's the Solera. The etymology of that word means that that particular barrel was on the floor. And that's where you draw out. And draw out in Spanish is sacar. So, that's where dry sac or to call Sherry sac comes from, is to you draw it out of that bottom barrel. So, all of the barrels that precede the Solera are called creadera, first, second, third, fourth, or whatever. So, the idea is to keep the wine fresh. So, theoretically, if you have a Solera that goes back 80 years, you still have some Oloroso Sherry that was put in there 80 years ago. Because what you're doing is you're taking from the first creadera and you're removing one third of the volume of liquid, and you're taking that and then dispersing it into the second creadera. You're taking one third of the volume of liquid from the second creadera and dispersing that into the third. And it's called running the scales, and you blend it down that way amongst the barrels. And will they only ever draw out one third of that bottom layer, the Solera at a time? Well, that's the maximum. They can only draw out one third, and they can only bottle one third at a time. Now, is this a trade regulation or a Spanish government regulation? That's the Consejo Regulador for Sherry. Each Spanish denomination of origin or appellation has their own, more or less, their own Consejo Regulador, which I just call now the wine police. Anyone who's listened to Barrel to Bottle has heard me say this many a times. Champagne has wine police. You know, a lot of old world regions have very strict laws under which they must make their wine. So what we end up with then is a wine. If I've got a cream sherry, what am I drinking and how do I know? Well, there's a lot that actually goes into the cream categories within sherry. And what these generally are are dry sherry. So sherrys are dry, Fino, Manzanilla, Monteado, Oloroso. These are dry sherrys. And they are oftentimes back blended with the sweet wine made of a grape called Pedro Jimenez or just PX. So you take PX and you'll make a sherry. In the same way, you'll make a Fino, a Monteado, or Oloroso. So they're basically just on mats, outside on the ground, and they're allowed to dry naturally and raisinate. You're concentrating the sugars, the minerals, but also not just that portion, but the acids as well. So people kind of forget to bring acid along on the train when you're talking about drying grapes in these kind of sweet wine making categories. So you have a higher acid to balance out, although PX still must be acidified like all cherries generally are. So you make a sherry just like normal, but they're round, they're unctuous, they're sweet. I mean, they look like motor oil in the glass. I was just going to say, they really pour thick. Some people literally pour them over ice cream, right? I am one of those people. I love that dessert. It's awesome. Yeah, it's fantastic. We've got the Loosed Out East India. This is an example of a sherry that's made in a true style, using good, good grapes, great wine production, great methods, and back blending with Pedro Jimenez. I think sometimes a sherry suffers because people come in looking for one because of a recipe, and they might reach for the lower shelf, something they figure, it doesn't have to be something nice if I am cooking with it. But what I have always tried to say is, cook with something that's nicer, enjoy drinking it with the meal. Yeah. Well, your dish is only going to be as good as your ingredients. Oftentimes, in terms of cooking with wine, yes, it's a minor component, but it's just like anything else. Your pork roast is going to be just as good as how that pig was raised and fed before you made it. It all goes down to just the bottom line factor. Your dish will be better if your sherry is better, and you'll also probably enjoy it more, like you just said, Roger, out of the glass. I couldn't agree more. So you don't have to always cook with cheap wine. Although I do have a recipe. I'll make this for you guys too, because it'll knock your socks off. I make a beef stroganoff, and on the recipe placard, it literally says sh** chardonnay, and you can't make it with good stuff. You can just block that out, right? Yeah, so anyway, so that's it. So that's kind of the basics of Sherry. So we're talking about then lending these old barrels. So we're talking about a solaris system. These barrels sometimes are, I mean, decades old, dare I say a century old, of holding on to these unctuous round oxidized wines that just soak up that flavor. So when you put in a spirit, when we're making scotch, now what are the bases of the distillative scotch? 100% malted barley. I mean, blended scotch is going to be a blend of grain whiskey and malt barley whiskey. Grain whiskey is usually going to be corn. So being that we've distilled it to a very high proof, generally when it comes off the still and goes in barrel for scotch, what are we talking about? It's generally no more than 70% alcohol. Okay. But that's a solvent of pretty high degree at that point in time. So how long does it take for that solvent to pull all of those flavors and aromas out? Like if I put a pure make spirit off of a pot still in an old Oloroso barrel, the reason I get the color is because of the oxidative aging and I get the flavor as I pull out of the barrel. What are we talking about here in terms of time before you get like maximum Oloroso aromas? There's multiple answers to this, I suppose, but it really matters on the new make spirit itself, which is going to change drastically from distillery to distillery based purely, really, on the size and shape of the still. If you have a spirit like Glenmorangie, for example, they love to talk about how they have the tallest stills in Scotland. Just the necks on these stills are 16 feet, 10 and a quarter inches tall. So these stills produce a lot of reflux. So reflux being as you're boiling that and you're trying to get those alcohol vapors to reach the top and fall over the line arm and condense into the alcohol you collect, not all of them can reach the top when the still neck is that tall. So they fall back in and they get boiled again. And so all this reflux creates a very light, delicate, fruity and slightly floral spirit. So Glenmorengy, if you just put it on a Sherry barrel, it is going to be completely overpowered and overwhelmed by the Sherry in just a matter of a couple years. Whereas if you take a spirit like Edredower, which we will taste a little bit here, Edredower has famously small stills. So they got these squat, small, short stills. And it makes a very meaty and oily and powerful spirit. And so that holds its own against Sherry. I mean, it's really a wrestling match between the spirit and the barrel. And sometimes the barrel wins, sometimes the spirit wins. Well, my question is this, and Roger, I don't know if I didn't ask it correctly, but am I talking a matter of months here in which we're starting to get a lot of that Sherry character? I mean, I understand the longer you leave it in, the more you're going to get. But there's got to be a natural bell curve to where the barrel doesn't give any more, and then we're just aging based on evaporation and things like that. The other aspect sometimes is that single malts can be finished in these type of casts. So you might move a single malt that had been aged in bourbon barrels, say, for a number of years, and then the last year or two, it may have spent time aging, finishing in a Sherry barrel, Madeira, other dessert wine. It will pick up those flavors after a matter of months. Yeah, it's a short process. It's a very quick. Very quick. And of course, it depends on the barrel. If they've used that Sherry barrel several times before, not the same case. It will take a while longer. But if it's a fresh Sherry barrel, if it's what's called a first fill Sherry cask in the Scotch industry, then yes, it will take on Sherry flavors very quickly. Well, that's something we should probably define, first, second, third fills. Important distinction, and that's one of the major benefits of our single pick, single malts, is that it will sometimes have that distinction where it will let the customer know this is a first fill, so you're going to have much more current outs. Yeah, the Hedgerdauer takes on exactly the second fill. First fill Hedgerdauer's tend to be, even though they hold up to the Sherry, it tends to be a lot of Sherry and not a lot of Scotch though. So we always want something that is looking for complexity more than just being walloped with Sherry. It's a Sherry bomb, so to speak, in the industry. Let's scale it back here and let's taste through this Sherry quickly. So when we smell this cream Sherry based on Oloroso, you can smell what I had referred to earlier in the cast as these oxidative aromas, right? So what do you guys get on the nose here? What's the Sherry again? This is a Lusdal cream Sherry. I get a lot of that classic dried fruit, the raisin, figgy notes to it a bit. I always tend to get a little bit of a faint leathery character. Is that normal or am I crazy? In a tertiary note, it most definitely is. A lot of that pruney, dried fruit characteristic, but it's a molasses, right? A little bit of gingerbread here, kind of that sort of... Christmas fruitcake in its best form, a true fruitcake, not the paperweight salad ones, but one that was made well soaked with... The only good fruitcake is the one I use the year after it's made to, you know, break somebody's cart window. You're not going to win any friends with that, are you, Roger? You guys just haven't had a real fruitcake. So, let's go ahead and taste it then. Now, we talked about the flavors that were imparted onto the spirit, onto the scotch, especially from an Oloroso Sherry barrel, but are we going to find roundness and richness as well from the sugars in the barrel? Does that come through? Absolutely can. Again, it's kind of... if the spirit lets it come through. I mean, the spirit's initially in control and then climate, evaporation, weather, all that stuff warehouse. Now, we have kind of a good definition of Oloroso, talking about these various styles. Let's kind of see how it lends itself to Scotch and Bourbons and other spirits. Well, let's start here with an approachable, lighter style of spirit in Irish whiskey. Yes. So, we have the Whistler Irish Whiskey, single malt Irish Whiskey. It's a seven-year-old, aged in bourbon barrels and Oloroso Sherry barrels. So, this is a finish. So, first Bourbon for some time, then finish in Oloroso. Now, Irish Whiskey is, tends to be a fruitier, more delicate spirit. It oftentimes owes that to triple distillation. The more times you distill something, the lighter and more fruity it gets. This is a double distilled single malt. This was originally distilled at the Cooley Distillery, and then it was aged partially at the West Cork Distillery, and then it was bottled at the Bowon Distillery. So, it's seen quite a bit of a journey around the island there. It went from north to southeast to kind of central again. Is my geography right? It went from kind of north. Yeah, north is fair. This nose is really interesting, Pat. What is it about some Irish whiskeys that it gives it this neat kind of... I pick up a lot of peach and almost like a tropical fruit character. Yeah, I was going to say tropical and stone fruit is pretty common. This is, you know, that lighter style. It's just a light, sweet, crowd pleasing style, so to speak. I love it. I think it's great. Yeah, really approachable whisky, really fairly priced. The Sherry addition on the end here is just kind of like a kiss of complimentary, you know, Oloroso notes. This is the classic example of a whisky that would be completely overpowered by a fresh Sherry cask. If this was aged 100% Sherry, you wouldn't get those bright kind of white fruit that peach, that stone fruit character. It would be very pruney and very, and very dry and like that, rather, you know. Yeah. There's kind of a sweet spice character, both to the Sherry we tried and I feel that comes through on some of the whiskies. Yeah. Like a bakery, like a pumpkin pie spice. Yeah, I tend to kind of group it together as baking spice or brown spice. But that kind of little bit of clove, little bit of nutmeg, cinnamon, I mean, on their own, those spices can sound abhorrent in a whisky. You're like, I don't want my whisky to taste like nutmeg, you know, but mixed together with a nice, on a bed of kind of that cereal grain character with a little bit of that ripe fruit. It's actually very pleasant because it's more of like a real subtle. Grilled peach, you know? Yeah. If you guys ever grilled peaches, they're fantastic. Yeah. Do I look like a guy that eats many fruits and vegetables? If it's grilled, you'll eat anything. Alright, so the next whiskey we're going to talk about, and its Sherry influence, is Amrut Intermediate Sherry. Amrut is actually an Indian single malt. We've been selling these now for maybe eight years or so, it was maybe nine years. It is a single malt, 100% malted barley. This actually starts its life in a bourbon barrel, then it goes to a Sherry barrel for one year, and then it goes back to the bourbon barrel, thus the Intermediate Sherry. Now this is bottled at full strength at 57.1% alcohol. That's a spicy meatball. I really enjoy the single malts that are bottled at cast strength, because I like typically drinking whiskey with a little bit of ice. And again, we always emphasize that you should enjoy whiskey however you like it. It is not a sin to add ice. But if you're adding ice to something that's 80 proof, it is going to taste a little watered down and flabby. But something like this, I think, is really going to open up and be a little softer. I like adding a little water to it first. And if it still tastes a little spicy, then just an ice cube is going to cool it down just enough where it's really going to become this enjoyable drinking experience. Is there a mandated minimum proof for bottling scotch? 40% alcohol. That is the law in Scotland. So this omelet, I enjoy quite a bit. It is a very powerful, it lets you know you're drinking it. I mean, that high proof, like you said, a spicy meatball, it's got that dried fruit character, but it's got plenty of wood to balance it out. I mean, omelet is aged in a tropical climate, and so it gets a lot out of the wood in a short period of time. But it also keeps the whiskey from being too kind of flabby and voluptuous. Sherried whiskeys tend to get really sloppy really quickly, and they can just be flat and flabby and kind of sweet and just blah. And I think the higher proof and a little bit of wood really gives us some structure. All right, what do we have next? Next, we're coming back to America, actually, with Oppadin Bourbon. Oppadin is made in sunny Wheeling, Illinois. The exotic Wheeling, Illinois. This is a Binny's Handpicked Barrel. This is barrel number 153. This was actually, it's a young bourbon. It's a blend of bourbons aged one year and aged a little over two years, which were then aged in a 40-year-old Oloroso Sherry cask. 40-year-old. 40-year-old. Tight. Now, this is a whiskey I absolutely love. And this thing, to me, is big, and it's 59.34% alcohol, but I always get a lot of chocolatey, fudgy character out of this. And I've never been in... It is made, the malted barley made in this bourbon, used in this bourbon mash, was actually a bit of kind of brewer's specialty chocolate malt, which is not flavored. It is just roasted and gives off some of that chocolatey flavor, and I don't know if it combines with the Sherry or what. I'm certainly no Sherry expert, but I love this whiskey. Well, I get the molasses brown sugar and pruney smell from this whiskey, I think, that comes from the Sherry barrel. It definitely shows its youth in the front end. You definitely get a lot of sweet corn at the beginning. And green apple. This gives you a chance to see how valuable nice aging can be for younger whiskey. Yeah, I mean, young whiskey in, you know, if the wood regimen is, is it made of wood and will it hold liquid, then yeah, this would taste a lot differently. But when he's using higher quality casks like this, you know, it really makes a difference. This is tremendous. Sloppy molasses and then the cracked black pepper at the same time. It's kind of the New England IPA of bourbon, honestly. Right. It's really pronounced. I mean, it jumps out of the glass. It's like a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc kind of thing. It's just, it's out there. I can't relate to that reference. Well, it's just, you know, my bad. No, I'm kidding. I can't. So what kind of barrels was that aged in prior to the Sherry, but traditional charred American oak? To be labeled as a bourbon? To be, yes, smaller, not super tiny, I believe 25 gallon. So to be labeled as bourbon, it has to be aged in charred oak first. This opidin is one that I would put an ice cube in. It's, you know, it's very, very strong, and you really do, it kind of burns your nose if you get a little bit too close to it. I think that I would say, round it out with a bit of ice, but God is it good. Yeah, he's doing really cool things up there. Interesting gins, interesting whiskies. We tasted a rye whiskey that they made that had a, that batch of rye they got that day when they ran it through the still, just had a bit of a medicinal character to it, and it was just kind of an off-grain. Normally, you could send that back to the grain supplier, get your money back. They were like, well, this is kind of cool, and we happen to have this Exelafroid Barrel here, which is smoky and notoriously medicinal, so they put the rye whiskey in that, and it was awesome, and it just married together beautifully, but it was so Okay. So you can probably still get it at Delilah's. Well, if anybody can sell it, Delilah's. Yeah. Okay. I have two single malt scotch here. So first one is a 2006 Edredauer. It is 10 years old and it was matured in a second fill Sherry Hogshead. A Hogshead is the standard barrel size for the scotch industry. It is 250 liters, whereas an American standard barrel is 53 gallons, so closer to 225 liters, 220 liters or so. So it's about 10 percent bigger than an American standard barrel. So this is a signatory label of Edred Auer. Funny, Edred Auer and signatory owned by the same company, and they actually share warehouses and a campus. But this was bottled as signatory from the Edred Auer Distillery. This is a Binny's handpicked selection. This came in about a year ago. So there is still some floating around, but not a whole lot. Orange, butterscotch. A lot of butterscotch for me. It's just, you know, real rich kind of butterscotch, toffee, English dessert. I like how on these signatory labels, it tells you the date it's been distilled, the date that it was bottled, the bottle number of the lot, the cask number. I mean, everything is right there. The more information, the better. I think they could keep that information and bring the label into a modern century, but that's a separate conversation I have to have with them. I feel like the grain, it's very grain forward in the single malt. I feel like this is the sweet corn smell. I think this is like almost a bit of a, it's got a canned cream corn kind of hint to it. The Apadon had more. Of the corn? Yeah, more grainy, grainy, grainy. I love how soft and gentle this drinks for 59.6% alcohol. Right. Of course, it's got some lingering heat and dryness because alcohol is just kind of going to sap the liquid out of your mouth, but I could drink this neat though. I think it'll be a little, it'll show a little better with a little bit of water, of course. There's a really neat almond character to this, and I really feel you do pick up on the Sherry on the finish. There's a fruitiness on the very, very end. I was going to say for me, it's kind of like a soft, almost virgin on overripe fruit. I can't really pin it down, but... The fact how this plays with the soft structure, but the heat to me is so interesting because you just wouldn't think that it would be so soft up front. And it's not overpoweringly hot, but it just that spicy peppery quality with the fruit, it's just crazy. Yeah, it catches up to you for sure. But on the front, if I only taste the first third of this whiskey, I would never guess it was almost 60% alcohol. Yes. Lovely whiskey. I like it. It's very good. And it finishes for, it's like a marathon here. This thing kind of lasts for a long time. I'm going to be tasting this on my drive home. And last but not least, I have brought a special treat today. I have brought a bottle of Glendronic Grandeur, which is a yearly release of very limited bottle numbers, you know, usually around 1,000 to 2,000 bottles that is big, big Sherry age, classic Glendronic. Glendronic is known for being big, chewy. They love Sherry cask aging. Almost every whiskey they have ever put out has a lot of Sherry influence on it. So this is actually a 24-year-old cask strength. It's 48.9%. What can you tell us about Highland? I mean, Highland obviously being a place in Scotland, but in terms of a style, what am I looking for when I see Highland on the barrel? I'm looking for something a little chewier, fruity, tends to have some Sherry influence, not quite as delicate and floral as Speyside, which is just a region within the Highlands. Generally not peated, not salty, you know, it doesn't have any of that kind of maritime influence. Just a nice kind of a lot of rich toffee and kind of that stewed baked fruit kind of character. I like Highland. I'm not a fan of peat, so I kind of go for that on the label that I know I'm going to be safe and sound. It's just, you know, peat's never really been my jam. Yeah, I mean, peat's a real jerk sometimes. So what do you guys think of this Glendronic Grandeur? I thought it was a nice little treat to bring. A lot of fruit. Apricot, dried apricot, peach. Lovely, lovely stuff. I drink this whiskey and I'm just immediately transported into a house I can't afford, in a library full of books I wouldn't read, sitting in a very comfortable chair. It's very layered. Obviously, it's a term we use to describe complexity, but also it's not just about being layered, it's how well it plays. There's the front end, but there's a really broad mid-palette, and then the finish is completely different. So it's a spirit that tells a story on the palate. I like that. You know what I mean? There's a lift and then a drop again and it's great. You don't want to just default and be like, this is a complex whiskey, but it really is. It starts so differently than it finishes, and there's a lot going on in the middle. Just wonderful, wonderful stuff. Unfortunately, it is very expensive, and Glendrona Grand Releases are only getting more expensive. But obviously people are buying them, so they're going to keep up in the price until people stop buying them. Well, quality to price ratio is different for everybody. If you have the means, then amen. Yeah, great stuff. Thanks for this. This is really good. No ice. I don't think I would need ice for this. This whiskey is perfect as is. So, for our loyal listeners out there, we do have a customer Q&A portion to Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. So, go ahead and write to us, at Binny's Bev on Twitter, for your chance to win a $20 gift card. We recently went on the road, and we took questions at World of Whiskies, which is an enormous, lovely, wonderful event that we hold at Binny's in Lincoln Park, and you can taste thousands of different expressions. And we got this lovely lady, Akira Niehaus, and she asked, Why do companies use Sherry casks in Scotch production? Is it better than standard casks? So I think obviously then we covered what Sherry does, but we didn't really talk about why or the prevalence of Sherry over others. And then I'm going to subset that guys by saying, why not use, you know, what would happen if we tried to use a Fino or do they use a Monteato? I mean, Fino would be weird, but... They do use Fino, they do use a Monteato, they do use Manzanilla. Sherry casts have always been prevalent in the Scotch industry because it's what was available in the 1800s. I mean, the English were drinking Sherry by the punch and by the barrel, and these barrels full of these butts, these barrels full of Sherry were being shipped whole, filled from Spain to England where they'd then be served at a bar, bottled off, sent all over the country, and instead of sending those barrels back, they got sent up to Scotland to age whiskey. When America passed a law saying bourbon had to be aged in a new barrel every time, all of a sudden on the global spirits market, there was a glut of used, high-quality, charred American oak barrels available, and that kind of took over from there. And as Sherry consumption has gone down drastically, Sherry barrels are harder to get, bourbon consumption has gone up drastically, there's more bourbon barrels available than ever. It's just more of an economics thing. You know, the Scotch are kind of notoriously cheap, so they're going to use whatever is available. So, well, I think the thing to take away here, the historical aspects and the economic aspects, and how history is going to kind of breed into one thing is going to take us to a place, but overall the market is going to dictate what we're using, and as laws and things change, that's how it goes. But also then we have the case of proximity. Yeah, proximity and taste, too. I mean, there are certain distilleries whose house style, the profile of their taste is absolutely embedded in Sherry cask aging, and they will only age in Sherry casks. And all of those kind of trends with, especially historically in the 17, 18, 1900s, would have changed dramatically based on who the English were friends with at the time. You know, after the Mathuean Treaty in 1703, and the Brits banned anything from Spain, that's when port blew up, and then they were putting everything in port barrels, and then they loved everything from South Africa. Then once, because they had a bunch of, sorry, export embargoes were blocked on France, then once they were lifted in the 1860s, and South Africa became irrelevant. And it just kind of just depended on who they were fighting with. You know, what crown was fighting with which crown, it really kind of dictated the style of alcohol that people were drinking that day. It's pretty interesting when you look back in that historical kind of lens. This also speaks to what we were saying before about how Sherry has just kind of fallen off. It's become viewed as sort of a something that only older generation appreciates. If you enjoy these whiskeys that have this Sherry Barrel finishing, that's all the more reason to give Sherry a chance and to try drinking Sherry. I've even played around before with adding tiny, tiny amounts of Sherry to different whiskeys just to see what you come up with. Sherry is a shockingly food-friendly wine, too. You wouldn't think so. I mean, it's got this reputation of cream Sherry, of this big, sweet, heavy dessert kind of stuff. And actual Oloroso Sherrys and Fennel Sherries, they're wonderful with food. I think that Sherry is going to see even more of a renaissance than it has in the past. It's becoming more and more prevalent. And the saving grace to that is the cocktail scene. The bartenders around the globe, especially in the major cities, are really grasping on to Sherry as a lovely component in cocktails. And so that's helping quite a bit. So thank you, Akira. Akira, thanks so much for writing in. Guys, go ahead, write us at Binny's Bev on Twitter for your chance to win a $20 gift card. Good question answering, you guys. Good job. So, Oloroso Sherry and it's kind of it's it's brethren. It's it's children. The spirits community. I love it. It's whiskey successors. I like that. So thanks for listening. I hope that you enjoyed this episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I sure did. Roger, thanks for coming. Thanks for having me. Pat, always a pleasure. Greg? For sure. Cool. Guys, keep tasting. We'll see you next time. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm Kristen, with my esteemed co-host Roger and Pat. We're here to talk about anything ethanol. And fun.