Taste Test: This Danish Distillery’s New Rye Strikes the Perfect Balance With Its Sherry Cask Finish

Welcome to Taste Test, where every week our critic Jonah Flicker explores the most buzzworthy and interesting whiskeys in the world. Check back each Sunday for his latest whiskey review.

Aging whiskey in a sherry cask is nothing new, particularly when it comes to scotch. The Balvenie was one of the first to use this type of maturation as a secondary finish, and distilleries like the Macallan and the GlenDronach age virtually all of their whisky in sherry butts. When it comes to Danish whisky, however, this technique is quite new—and that’s because the category overall is not very old. The most prominent Danish distillery, Stauning, released a new sherry cask-finished version of its core rye whisky last fall, and it’s worth taking a closer look at.

Stauning was founded in 2005, but has only been getting more attention here in the U.S. over the last few years (its first American release was in 2023), which certainly had something to do with spirits incubator Distill Ventures’s involvement with the company. Unfortunately, one of Distill’s biggest backers, Diageo, recently said that it would not support the program any longer, leading Stauning to announce that it was laying off a quarter of its workforce. In another setback, a few days ago an old agreement between the E.U. and Canada resurfaced which said that European whisky producers could not call their rye whiskey “rye whisky,” even though Canadian rye is really a catch-all term that can refer to any whisky made there whether or not there’s rye in the mashbill. Stauning cofounder Alex Munch likened this to France saying you can’t use the terms “grape” or “wine” outside of France, according to website The Spirits Business.

This hits Stauning particularly hard because one of its core expressions is in fact a rye whisky. The mashbill for this expression is 70 percent malted rye and 30 percent malted barley, both of which are floor malted at the distillery (not a very common practice), and the whiskey is double distilled and matured in new charred oak barrels. It’s a fruity and spicy whisky that reads rye but is really unlike any American rye whiskey you’ve tried, almost more like a rye bread than anything produced at MGP or Kentucky distilleries. This new limited-edition release takes that core whisky and finishes it in Pedro Ximenez and Palo Cortado sherry casks. According to the distillery, this is truly a small batch release—just three casks were married together yielding 800 bottles. The whisky has no color added, it’s non chill-filtered, and it was bottled at cask strength of 50.5 percent ABV.

The amount of time that the whisky was finished in sherry casks is not mentioned, but it was clearly enough to have a big impact on the flavor. There are rich notes of dark and milk chocolate, ripe berries, dried fruit, and espresso beans, but the rye’s core fruity and spicy identity is not obscured. There are a lot of sherry cask-finished whiskies available these days in all categories, and not all of them work. Some of them go overboard on the finish, others seem like an attempt to mask or fix what might not actually be such a good whisky in the first place. This is not the case here. Stauning’s sherry cask-finished rye has a nice balance of flavors and while it’s clearly meant to be a sipping whisky it would be fun to experiment by using it in different cocktails.

As mentioned before, Stauning is currently facing some challenges, and that doesn’t even include the effect that Trump’s new tariffs will have on imports from the E.U. Hopefully, this small Danish distillery will find a way to survive, because it is making interesting and flavorful grain-to-glass whiskies that really stand apart from other categories. Case in point is this excellent new Sherry Cask Finish—give it a try if you find a bottle, you won’t be disappointed.

Score: 90