Sherry casks have been used to mature whisky for as long as whisky has been matured. The fortified wine from Spain’s Jerez region is long-established as the preferred maturation cask type for legions of whisky fans.

The main types of sherry wines used to season whisky casks are Oloroso and Pedro Ximenez. Pedro Ximenez is a grape variety used to make particularly sweet, concentrated dessert wines and is one of the most popular sherry styles among whisky fans. Oloroso is a dark, dry style of aged sherry made with the palomino grape; for whisky, the Oloroso sherries are sometimes sweetened with the addition of Pedro Ximenez, making a style known as cream sherry. 

Other common styles of sherry wine used to season whisky casks include Fino, Amontillado and Moscatel, though nowadays these wines seem more commonly used for finishing whiskies rather than full maturation.

Here you'll find a collection of all our single malt and blended whiskies that contain spirit matured or finished in sherry casks. Sherry cask matured whiskies are renowned for rich, fruity flavours, often featuring dried fruits like raisins, prunes or dates, and usually show other characteristics including prominent nutty or chocolatey notes.

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In the early days of illicit whisky stills, distilling operations were necessarily small scale. Spirit was sold as moonshine and any whisky ageing that occurred was minimal and usually more by accident than design compared to the complex cask management systems employed by today’s distillers. 

The Excise Act of 1823 enabled single malt whisky distillers to legitimise their operations, giving the former moonshiners the security and stability to increase production. The invention of the Coffey still a few years later paved the way for large scale grain whisky production and led to the advent of whisky blending, as Scotland’s merchant grocers began mixing whiskies from different distilleries for their proprietary blended whisky brands like Johnnie Walker, Buchanan’s and White Horse.

The merchant blenders would buy the whiskies for their recipes in bulk, sending the empty wine casks from their inventories to be filled at the local distilleries and returned to their cellars for maturation and blending. Inevitably, it was quickly noticed that the casks’ former contents affected the character of the spirit inside; soon, it was realised that the longer the whisky remained in the cask, the better the end result.

Sherry consumption in the UK in the 19th century was booming around the time of the emergence of whisky blending, with many merchants shipping the wine directly from Spain. The abundance of fresh sherry casks meant that the benefits of ageing whisky in them were quickly discovered, and the use of sherry casks for whisky maturation was soon commonplace.

The popularity of sherry-matured whisky meant that by the turn of the 20th century the practice of importing and seasoning American oak barrel staves with sherry - or with paxarette, a concentrated sherry flavouring agent - became increasingly common when sherry casks were in short supply. These staves were re-coopered into 250 litre hogshead casks, which were often simply referred to as American oak sherry casks.

In the 1930s, following the repeal of Prohibition, large quantities of bourbon casks became available to the Scotch whisky industry again. These 200 litre casks were smaller and considerably cheaper than the traditional 500 litre sherry butts, and were re-coopered into the American oak hogshead casks that took over as the default industry standard after WWII. After the war ended, sherry producers began bottling more of their own wines domestically, squeezing cask supply further and leading to the increased use of paxarette and sherry-seasoned casks in the whisky trade.

Sadly, in the 1970s and 1980s the UK’s love affair with sherry began to dwindle at the same time as the whisky industry fell into an over-supply crisis. The subsequent cut-backs in whisky production naturally affected the demand for sherry casks, dealing another blow to the Jerez producers. By 1990, tightened regulations led to the abandonment of paxarette, and the end of the classic era of sherry cask-matured single malt whisky. 

Nowadays, the percentage of sherry casks used in the whisky industry is considerably lower than in previous decades and the standard of the sherry used for these casks is very different to previous eras as well. Since 1981, the Spanish government has stipulated that all sherry wines must be bottled in Spain; sherry casks for the whisky industry are now a separate product made to order by the Spanish producers and are rarely used to ferment or age sherry in the traditional way.