Kavalan Distillery opened in 2005 in Yilan County, Taiwan, on the wet northeastern coast where the Snow Mountains meet the Pacific. Within a few short years, Master Blender Ian Chang and the King Car Group team had positioned Kavalan as the world's most awarded new-world distillery, and Concertmaster — first released in 2009 — was one of the expressions that did the heavy lifting.
Concertmaster takes Kavalan's house single malt and finishes it in a combination of Ruby, Tawny and Vintage Port casks shipped from Portugal. Taiwan's climate is brutally tropical, with humidity that drives extraordinarily rapid maturation and an angels' share that can exceed 12% a year. The Port casks have to work fast, and they do — the red-fruit character is unmistakable from the first sniff.
The palate is generous and immediately appealing, with the kind of fruit-forward sweetness that makes Concertmaster a brilliant gateway whisky into the Kavalan range. At 40% it is gentler than the cask-strength Solist bottlings, but the flavour density is still impressive given the modest strength.
This is a whisky with a real sense of place — subtropical Taiwan in conversation with the Douro Valley — and a useful reminder that Asian whisky's rise was already in full swing well before the current Indian wave. Charming, polished, and historically significant.
