21 Club Release No.11
Native Cherry
22 Year Old Vin Santo Casks Finish
As a valued member of Australia's most exclusive whisky club, the 21 Club, you enjoy unrivalled access to 21 exceptional bottlings of our oldest and rarest whiskies - each a distinctive piece of Australian whisky history.
This month, we are delighted to offer you exclusive access to 21 Club Release No.11 - Native Cherry.
The Whisky
Native Cherry began its journey in 2003, with eight American oak first fill ex-bourbon casks selected and matured for over two decades on Tasmania’s North West coast. In April 2024, the whisky was transferred into fifteen 50L Vin santo Italian dessert wine casks; some of which are over 40 years old.
During 14 months of finishing, the whisky developed remarkable depth and complexity, with the Vin Santo casks imparting complex dark fruit notes that complemented the American oak character beautifully. In June 2025, the casks were brought together and vatted into four ex-bourbon neutral vatting casks, allowing the spirit to marry and integrate.
From these four vatting casks, Cask 1 was selected for this 21 Club release, Native Cherry.
Vin Santo
Vin Santo is a traditional Tuscan dessert wine made from the white Trebbiano and Malvasia grapes. The name is believed to originate from its historic production in Tuscany, during Holy Week. It's a wine that is equal parts rare and expensive (especially in Australia), so to have casks in North West Tasmania is quite the privilege.
The winemaking starts with slowly drying the grapes using the appassimento method on racks or straw mats in well-aerated parts of the winery, concentrating their natural sugars and character. The wine is then aged in barrels, where it is exposed to seasonal temperature fluctuations over time and often healthy amounts of oxygen. Alongside its natural sweet intensity, Vin Santo is often defined by a gentle oxidative character, alongside complex aromas and flavours of fruits, nuts and spice.
Tasting Notes
Nose
Fruit forward with muddled cherries, plums and raisins, lifted by caramel, marzipan and warming spice.
Palate
Figs and candied cherries with gentle spice, balanced by oak tannins and lemon oil. A beautifully viscous and sweet texture.
Finish
Chewy, lingering and delightfully rich.
Native Cherry
Each of our 21 Club releases has featured a Tasmanian endemic rainforest tree, species that are unique, beautiful and brought to life in the drawings of Inti Callaghan on the labels of the 21 Club whiskies.
For this release, we chose Native Cherry (Exocarpus cupressiformis)
Ecologically, Native Cherry contributes to biodiversity and habitat complexity by acting as a food source for native birds and small animals, while its parasitic interactions influence the nutrient cycle and broader plant community dynamics. By forming connections with multiple host species, it becomes part of an extensive underground network, underscoring the interconnectedness of these ecosystems.
This treasured release will come with a Certificate of Authenticity, a note from the artist Inti Callaghan and a postcard sized version of Inti's beautiful artwork.
Please note that all 21 Club releases are pre-ordered and bottled only upon order placement. Our ordering window for Native Cherry closes on May 31, and the whisky will be dispatched in mid-June.
The Vin Santo Story
Native Cherry is the first Vin Santo cask-matured whisky released by Hellyers Road and to our knowledge, the first in Australia. That's not really surprising - Vin Santo is a pretty obscure wine and for good reason: it is difficult and expensive to make, can only be made in small quantities and comes from a pretty limited area in Tuscany.
High alcohol and sugar are achieved without fortification, giving you an incredible balance of sweetness and acidity. The grapes are raisined by drying on straw mats until the sugar is really concentrated - essentially evaporating the volume, so the yield from the harvest is tiny. This is why there is so little available and why it is so expensive.
The raisining, and therefore the sugar level (and potential alcohol), is much higher than most sweet wines, but the difference is also in the vinification - fermentation in small barrels, inoculated by leaving the dregs (the mother) of the previous maturation, over and over.
Barrel fermentation is followed by long maturation in those same casks. The casks end up reasonably neutral from a wood character perspective (to the wine at around 17%, though not necessarily to whisky at 51%) because of the decades of repeated use. And because the casks are small and a bit leaky, you end up with quite a bit of angels' share during maturation. This leaves headspace in the casks, so you also get oxidative characters as well.
Vin Santo offers this incredible balance of sweetness, acidity and oxidative aged characters, like you get in an Oloroso or Amontillado Sherry. With all this in mind, we set out to find some Vin Santo casks and had a cask trader scouring Tuscany for nearly a year before he landed on some. Vin Santo casks are used repeatedly and valued for their history, so they rarely come to market. We got lucky and bought all we could, which wasn't that many - though it left room in the container for some of the amazing obscure French dessert wine casks we've brought you, like Maury Rancio and Rivesaltes Ambré (and another one or two we'll keep under wraps for now).
The casks were first filled around 1980 - so over 40 years of repeated fermentation and long-term ageing of this beautifully balanced, unfortified, high-alcohol wine.
The casks themselves were made in northern Italy - European oak and very rustic coopering. They are the smallest casks we have at Hellyers Road at just 50 litres, and have incredibly thick staves, giving them mostly straight sides with very little belly. The short, fat staves would have been very difficult to bend. They were also seeping viscous lees - the texture of molasses, the leftover mother - from around the chine and they are still seeping today.
Filling a handful of such richly saturated first-fill casks with a very old whisky was risky. There was a real chance all those powerful lees characters, so deeply embedded in the wood after so long, combined with the high surface area-to-volume ratio of the very small casks, would completely overwhelm the complexity and balance of the whisky. So unlike most of our secondary maturations, which are considerably longer, our Head Distiller, Fiona, gave these only short finishings. Even so, the first fill was super lush and viscous, so she repeatedly filled each cask with whisky from the same 2003 parcels, blending each subsequent fill back with the earlier ones.
The result? We can guarantee it is unlike any whisky you've tried before and in a very, very good way.