As tasty as the photo shows …

We wanted to try a collaboration with a restaurant this year and were SUPER delighted when Tabanco by Ambiente said yes after an intro from club regular Phil.

That led to one of the most fantastic afternoons ever as we mentioned to our wives that we were just popping out to do some ‘whisky admin’.

This involved us taking many bottles of whisky to Tabanco, eating tapas and trying different sherries with Rob and Johnnie – essentially MasterChef without Greg Wallace annoying you.

The output of that January afternoon was a sublime tasting on the 20th September kicking off the 2024 York Food Festival with a four course tapas tasting menu paired with sherry alongside whiskies finished in the same type of sherry:

From a whisky perspective, we kicked off with a Tomatin 13 yr old Fino as we got onto some very tasty starters and began to find out that Tabanco shared our club preference for the larger measure.

A Glen Moray 2008 Manzanilla followed with some croquettes and Lustau Manzanilla En Rama. The evening was full of sherry knowledge alongside our tasting notes and we learnt that “En Rama” means “from the branch”, the idea being that this is Sherry in its rawest and most natural form, straight from the barrel with no filtering or fining.

Whilst many distilleries are not specific about the bodega the sherry butts are from, one of the club’s favourite independent bottlers, Woodrow’s of Edinburgh, produced a Mannochmore 15yr as their Q4 2023 release which provided more detail – Refill Bourbon Hogshead, finished in 1st fill Bodegas Fernando de Castilla Oloroso Sherry Hogshead for 3 years. The exact match sherry and delicious accompanying pork fillet would – if he had been invited – made Greg Wallace foam at the mouth and be unable to visit the biscuit factory the day after.

We poured 2 of the 281 bottles ever made of this 54.1% deliciousness and have recently found out that it is a finalist in the 2024 Scotch Whisky Awards – fingers-crossed for Woody and Megan!

The photo of the Braised Oxtail (below) shows that there was a heartiness to the food, which was useful to absorb some of the sugar-packing Barbadillo La Cilla Pedro Ximénez, which we paired with a Knockdhu 10yr from Cadenhead’s.

With Petit Fours to round off the evening, feedback was VERY positive and we are considering a rerun in the future. Perhaps another afternoon of ‘whisky admin’ beckons…

Rob, Jim & Jasper