My eager wait for Wylye’s whisky

Sam Barber reaches his hand into his low wines and feints tank. It comes out coated in a vibrant teal paste. He invites us journalists to do the same, to rub the filmy substance between our fingers. This is verdigris, a byproduct of his distillation process at Wylye Distillery caused by the interaction of fatty acids and copper.

Sam says his spirit still is “covered” in it, but he relishes the oily sheen. “The low wines and feints tank is my favourite tank — and it’s okay to have a favourite tank,” he says playfully.

The same but different

Wylye has been in production at Windmill Farm, a former dairy in its namesake Wiltshire village, since 2024. Barber’s distillery, housed in a converted barn, is conventional on the surface but there are peculiarities in how it’s used. 

For his mashes, he uses a mix of Laureate and Maris Otter barleys, sourced from nearby Warminster Maltings. His fermentations last several days, with the yeast left in suspension to encourage autolytic flavours — the kind of bready notes you can find in traditional-method sparkling wines like Champagne. Sam says his wash “smells meaty”, and it has a pretty robust strength too, finishing up at about 10% ABV.

His 1,900-litre wash distillations last about five and a half hours and yield 750 litres of low wines at 24% ABV, with a “distinct” banana bread note. The spirit distillations contain a high proportion of recycled foreshots and feints, accounting for up to four litres in every 10. The spirit cut is collected from 77%–64.5% ABV. It’s slow, taking more than three and a half hours to collect at a flow rate of 1.2 litres per minute, but for Sam this sedentary pace is crucial: “If you are distilling at 100mph, the chances are you are going to end up with a spirit that is pretty rough.”

Although steam heated, the stills are capable of generating Maillard reactions. “You just don’t get them to the same degree [as direct firing],” Sam explains. He’s looking for body and depth rather than serious caramelisation, the slow pace preventing heavy scorching.

He ends up with 260 litres of new make at 73% ABV from each distillation, with the spirit receiver taking two batches at a time to balance out discrepancies.

“As a smaller distillery you are always battling against variables,” Sam says (conceding that, as a solo operator, he is the most significant one). Unlike some of his peers, he wants to mitigate that variability: he keeps his barley varietals and yeast strains consistent, trusting the distillation process to generate his desired character, and takes frequent samples to ensure the new make is “up to spec”.

“The new make is an area where I have control,” he says. “My view is that what leaves [the distillery] should taste the same every day, but once it goes into a cask you are in the hands of Mother Nature… You can source good wood, but there is always a risk.”

The art of the stave

And source good wood he has. Bourbon casks bear names of producers across the US, including Kentucky Peerless, Four Roses and Garrison Brothers. He has a sherry-cask seasoning programme with two Spanish bodegas, Xaranthia in Jerez and Robles in Montilla; again, he’s looking to control variables, determining the style of wine (oloroso, PX, fino, palo cortado), the species of oak (American, French, Spanish), char levels (1–3), and time (typically 24 months).

When Sam has finished filling the warehouse, he’ll have roughly 50–55% bourbon casks, 35% Spanish fortified wine casks, and a balance of everything else. These include some new oak casks, “so I can say I have some casks that have only ever held my whisky”, and first-fill Portuguese red wine casks he commissioned specially from cask partner J Dias — another measure to ensure consistency.

“If you like bourbon whiskies that are spirit forward, but you find sherry casks to have too much influence, red wine kind of sits in the middle,” he says. The sample of red wine cask-matured spirit he shares with us lives up to that promise: it’s malty and nutty with notes of ripe strawberries and cherries, ginger, orange and chocolate.

Mouthfeel is a huge consideration, arguably as important to Sam as flavour. He doesn’t want drinkers “blinded by the tannin”. Again, the cask samples he shares bear this out. Despite being a maximum of 37 months old, and still brushing past 60% ABV, they’re very drinkable.

Bringing Wylye to the world

Sam’s first single malt whiskies technically reached maturity in mid-2026, but he wants to launch with a full core range of bourbon and fortified wine cask expressions and a vatting of the two. “Further down the line we might bring out something else, but [I’ll] start out by saying, ‘This is what I have been up to,’ because it takes more to gain people’s trust.”

In a wine-inspired move, he plans to publish technical notes with each whisky to provide information on production specifics “for those who want it”, rather than putting all that information on the bottle label.

He’s not a big fan of tasting notes, saying the information in a technical file can give you more clues of what to expect than someone else’s notes. He’s not about “telling people what they should be tasting” and wants to let them “make their own minds up”.

Reviewing my own tasting notes from our media day, they are full of enticing words: peach, pineapple, biscuity malt and herbaceousness drip from the bourbon casks, while the fortified wine casks reveal figs, salted caramel, poached pears, black cherry, macaroons, and that banana bread character. Tucked into the corners of my sample list are comparisons of spirit from char #1 and char #3 casks, and distillations with and without peated malt.

There’s ample technical fodder here for the enthusiast, but one of the things I admire most about Sam is that he hasn’t forgotten the regular drinker, whose knowledge base is smaller but their pleasure (and their pound) no less valuable. The planned core range ensures Wylye has a consistent public face and easily communicable message.

I think my mind’s made up, Sam.