Sherry Cask Whisky
Does the Wine Harm or Enhance the Whisky?
24. Wine bliyos harm whisky. There is a posek who allows drinking
sherry cask whiskies. His main reason is that since it is clear from the Gemara and Shulchan Aruch that water, beer, and other beverages that sat in a container that had wine do not need bitul, as the wine harms them (above, 18), there is nothing that will cause us to say that wine enhances them. This posek understands that whisky too, which is in the category of “other beverages,” is harmed by wine. Thus, it .)הגר”ש מילר, קנדה( does not need any bitul whatsoever
25. Wine bliyos enhance whisky. However, in practice, we know and see that the wine enhances the whisky. Distilleries invest much time, money, and effort to obtain this flavor and they advertise that their whisky was matured in sherry casks. It is not a blanket rule or a halacha l’Moshe miSinai that wine gives an undesirable taste to all other beverages, as the above posek reasons; it all depends on the particular case. The proof for this is the halacha of Hadrianic pottery, a type of earthenware vessel made specifically to absorb the wine flavor in its walls and then release it into water. The halacha is that .)שו”ע סי’ קכ”ג סי”ג( the absorbed wine does in fact need bitul
26. Sherry casks are intentionally made to release the wine flavor into whisky (above, 5-8) and most poskim hold that wine enhances the whisky’s flavor (20). Hence, the consensus of nearly all the poskim when applied to the current reality is that the flavor that the wine .)שו”ת מנח”י שם( imparts to the whisky requires bitul
נתרם לע”נ מרת הגליון נתרם לע”נ האשה החשובה
Is the Whisky Enough to Be Mevatel the Wine?
27. Several experts in the fields of kashrus and measurements, calculated the dimensions of commonly used barrels and found that the volume of whisky in a barrel is not six times the entire volume of the barrel walls; it only has six times the volume of the barrel’s inner surface (Harav Akiva Niehaus of the Chicago cRc’s kashrus department, who personally visited Scotland to see things up close; much credit to him for his important essay, Sherry Casks). Thus, one may not be meikel unless he uses all the kulos: that six parts – and not sixty – is the minimum for bitul (15), and the Iggros Moshe already wrote that a virtuous person will be machmir; that only the surface volume requires bitul (22), and we already pointed out that most poskim hold bitul is measured against the entire volume of the container (23). Since the volume of the whisky is not six times the volume of the barrel, it is assur according to nearly all poskim.
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