Glenmorangie: Return of the Cake!

About This Competition

Oh yes! I’ve managed to source another bottle of this sleeper hit by Glenmorangie back in 2020. Clearly benefiting from lockdown home-drinking & the novelty of it all, this limited edition release disappeared off the shelves in about two months. Sadly none of the subsequent releases in the “A Tale Of” series have quite been as successful. Bottles of the Cake tend to go for about £180-£2oo at auction these days.

If this is the first you’re hearing of it, the story goes thus – Dr Bill Lumsden, the master distiller; himself a rather quirky chemist by training, was reminiscing about his most precious memories and they all seemed to involve cake. So he set out to recreate the experience of cake in whisky. It seems that maturation in Tokaji dessert wine casks was the magic formula. Now, this is in no way the first time these Hungarian wine casks have been employed to age whisky, but it is quite uncommon and this was probably the first major global whisky release to make use of ex-Tokaji casks.

Unsurprisingly, this whisky is sweet and is delightfully enjoyable with some cake. This multi-layered dram, with a burst of passion fruit, peach, pear, mango. More savoury notes like baking bread, gentle sappy oak and a curious, flinty minerality emerge. This is then followed by classic Glenmorangie notes like honeycomb, vanilla and almond, with a hint of milk chocolate. Several reviewers have noted that this does actually smell like freshly baked cake!