Two casks. Two decades of patience. One island most of the world will never visit.
That’s the deal Jura is putting on the table for this year’s Fèis Ìle, the annual gathering on Islay and Jura that has spent four decades quietly becoming the most important week in the whisky calendar. To mark the festival’s 40th anniversary, the distillery has released two single cask expressions each one a product of long maturation, a single unusual finishing cask, and the kind of warehouse rummage that only produces results when the blender actually knows what they’re looking for.
What Fèis Ìle actually is and why it still matters
For anyone who hasn’t made the trip: Fèis Ìle pronounced roughly “Faysh Eela”, and translating from Scottish Gaelic as the Islay Festival is a ten-day celebration held in the last week of May across Islay and neighbouring Jura. It launched in 1986 as a community event rooted in island culture, music, and the whisky that defines both islands’ economies. Forty years on, it draws visitors from across the globe and shapes the release calendar of nearly every distillery on Islay.
What makes it different from a tasting fair or an industry showcase is the scale of access it offers. Distilleries open their doors properly. Distillery managers pour drams in the warehouses where the casks sit. Blenders talk through decisions they’d never discuss in a marketing brochure. The festival remains a non-profit organisation, with proceeds directed toward supporting the Islay community and its culture.
The 2026 edition runs from Friday 22nd May to Sunday 31st May and carries an additional weight: this is the 40th anniversary, and virtually every distillery on the island is treating that milestone seriously. Lagavulin has a 31-year-old hand-fill and a 14-year-old Oloroso finish. Caol Ila has an 11-year-old finished in Don Julio tequila casks. Ardnahoe is releasing its first 7-year-old expression. The benchmark is high.
Jura’s answer is two single casks one for the festival as a whole, one specifically honouring the anniversary.
The 16-year-old: Armagnac finish, coastal edge
Jura’s annual festival release is a 16-year-old bottled at cask strength from a single 400-litre Armagnac cask. The whisky spent the majority of its life in second fill Bourbon barrels chosen specifically for their transparency, allowing Jura’s distillery character to stay forward before an 18-month finish in the Armagnac vessel.
Lead Blender Joe Ricketts describes the thinking plainly: the Bourbon maturation kept the spirit expressive and fruity, then the Armagnac cask layered in something complementary rather than dominant. The result, according to the distillery’s tasting notes, sits in territory you’d expect from that combination apricot and apple on the nose alongside dark chocolate and black liquorice, stone fruit and dried fig on the palate, and a long finish with dried nectarine and what the notes describe as “subtle rock pool notes.” That coastal mineral character is Jura’s signature, and it’s still present even after 18 months in French brandy oak.
The details:
- Age: 16 years
- ABV: Cask strength
- Cask: Second fill Bourbon / 18-month Armagnac finish
- Price: £130 / 70cl
- Available exclusively at Jura distillery, 22–31 May 2026
Age: 16 years
The 40th anniversary release: 24 Years in sauternes
The second bottle is the more significant one, both in age and in ambition. A 24-year-old single cask finished for eight years in a Sauternes barrique, this is the expression Jura has been returning to since 2001. Ricketts describes visiting those vintage Sauternes casks with the distillery team over the past couple of years, tracking their development as the spirit picked up what he calls “charming patisserie-like notes.”
Eight years in a Sauternes cask is a serious commitment. Sauternes the sweet Bordeaux white wine produced from botrytis-affected grapes brings a very specific character: honeyed stone fruit, beeswax, preserved citrus, and a natural richness that works with whisky that already has age-driven depth. The tasting notes bear this out: citrus peel and ripe apricot on the nose, brioche and vanilla-spiced peach on the palate, a finish of macadamia nut and preserved lemon with sea spray.
Unlike the 16-year-old, this one won’t stay exclusively on Jura. As well as being available at the distillery during the festival window, it will also appear in specialist whisky bars and pubs across Scotland which gives it a slightly wider audience, though “slightly wider” in this context still means rare.
The details:
- Age: 24 years
- ABV: Cask strength
- Cask: Refill Bourbon / 8-year Sauternes finish
- Price: £320 / 70cl
- Available at Jura distillery 22–31 May 2026, and specialist whisky bars across Scotland
Why these two, why now
The 40th anniversary of Fèis Ìle has pushed every participating distillery to reach further into their warehouses than usual. Jura has leaned into two ideas: one that showcases the distillery’s approachable, fruit-forward character through a shorter, complementary finish; and one that demonstrates what happens when you give Jura spirit enough time and the right cask to do something genuinely complex.
Neither of these whiskies will be available to order online or find on a supermarket shelf. If you want them, you need to be on Jura on 29 May, when the distillery will be welcoming visitors to its beachside site with tours, tastings, live music, cocktails, and boat trips along the coastline.
Jura has been making whisky on that island since 1810. The distillery sits in Craighouse, a village of a few hundred people, on an island where red deer outnumber residents ten to one. Getting there requires a ferry to Islay, then a smaller ferry crossing to Jura. It is, by most measures, out of the way. Fèis Ìle exists, in part, because the distilleries decided that the journey should be worth making. Two casks like these make the argument well.
Both expressions are exclusive to the Jura distillery during Fèis Ìle 2026 (22–31 May). The 40th Anniversary Release will also be available in specialist whisky bars across Scotland. Check Jura’s website for distillery visit details.
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