Innholdsfortegnelse for Scotch Whisky 1 i Scotch Whisky

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Glenallachie Distillery is located a mile and a half south of the village of Aberlour, in the heart of Speyside whisky-making country. Unlike neighbours such as Aberlour and Glenfarclas, however, it has led an extremely low-profile life. Until now. In July 2017, it was announced The GlenAllachie Consortium had signed an agreement to purchase Glenallachie from Pernod Ricard, with the Glenallachie brand, and also the McNair’s and White Heather blended Scotches. Majority shareholder in The GlenAllachie Consortium is a certain Billy Walker, previously of BenRiach Distillery Company fame. The trademark capitalised central ‘A’ tends to give the game away. Billy boasts more than 40 years in the Scotch whisky industry and, in 2016, US-based Brown-Forman Corporation paid £285 million for the BenRiach business, giving Walker and co a sizeable pot…

There is something intriguing about derelict buildings; that whiff of decay, rust, patina and cobwebs among the shadows. However, in the case of Rosebank, there is also the light of hope – hope for a bright future and halcyon days begun anew. Before Ian Macleod Distillers began to bring this ‘King of the Lowlands’ back to its former glory, the company sent in a photographer to capture the time capsule of a mothballed distillery, where things (other than Mother Nature) have stood still since 1993. What has been captured by the photography firm Contagious is amazing. Washbacks, with their switchers rusting slowly; abandoned warehousing, with the dust dancing in the wintry sunshine; and the peeling paint and smashed window of the workshop. If you are a fan of whisky, there…

As might be suspected, Scotland’s most populous city has long associations with whisky and today it is home to the headquarters of a number of prominent brands. But it wasn’t always this way. During the medieval period, Glasgow was little more than a small agricultural settlement and, later, an academic hub after the founding of its namesake university in the mid-15th century. At that time, the town had a few thousand inhabitants and the River Clyde, which one day would be pivotal to the area’s development, was so shallow in places that people could wade across it at low tide. In fact, upstream of Dumbarton the water was only navigable by small boats or barges. To make matters worse, Glasgow’s position on the west coast of the country made it…

When spirit first flowed from the stills of Lindores Abbey Distillery on 13 December 2017 a historical connection going back more than 500 years was triumphantly restored. For Lindores was once home to the famous Friar John Cor, who features in the earliest known reference to Scotch whisky, dating from 1494. The Exchequer Rolls record – in translation from the original Latin – says, ‘…eight bolls of malt to Friar John Cor wherewith to make aqua vitae for the king’. The monarch in question was King James IV and eight bolls equates to around 500kg in modern terms. It is estimated that this would probably have been sufficient to produce the equivalent of 400 bottles (70cl) of whisky. Lindores Abbey had been founded in 1191 by David, Earl of Huntingdon,…

How does one become the CEO of a respected Scotch whisky business? For Moji Shand, who now heads up the Huntly-based independent bottler Duncan Taylor Scotch Whisky (DTSW), it was a case of choosing to make a career change in order to do what she truly loves. Of Persian descent and born in Iran, after the 1978 revolution Moji’s family fled the country and settled in the USA. In time she went to law school, became a lawyer, worked for an AV-rated law firm for 12 years and at another for four years. However, in 2006 she decided to quit her job without telling anyone, even her family; sell her house and move to Spain. Never mind that she didn’t speak any Spanish! A chance conversation revealed that a friend…

The story of Benromach Distillery is a tale of two parts, with its first chapter starting in 1898. It was an important year for whisky making in the small Morayshire town of Forres as it saw licences granted for Benromach and also its neighbour Dallas Dhu. This was no coincidence, as both had a link to the prolific Speyside distiller Alexander Edward who, among other exploits, also built the famous Craigellachie Hotel. Both of the Forres distilleries were constructed on land owned by Edward, and Dallas Dhu, which was founded by him directly, would be producing spirit just a year later. Benromach, however, was something of a non-starter and took much longer to get going. It didn’t begin production until 1900 and, even then, the new distillery was almost immediately…

We are all aware of the many threats posed to wildlife in our increasingly fragile world, but who would have thought that grouse would cease to inhabit an area of Perthshire just a couple of miles from Crieff? Yet the 20-feet-tall grouse, okay, a statue, that presided over the car park entrance to Glenturret Distillery is no more, along with The Famous Grouse Experience, which nested at Glenturret from 2002 until early 2019. However, though the grouse is gone, visitors to the distillery remain most welcome indeed. The reason for this departure of all things grouserelated is due to the sale of Glenturret Distillery in December 2018 by the former owners, Edrington Group, to Glenturret Holding, a company formed by luxury glass specialist Lalique and its second-largest shareholder, Hansjörg Wyss…

In 2016, Tamnavulin Distillery celebrated its 50th anniversary by launching a new single malt. It was really more a case of launching a single malt, as few people could remember the last time one was on the market, though apparently it was a 12-year-old expression and sold well in France, achieving annual sales of some 30,000 cases. In many businesses, half a century in existence would be an impressive feat worthy of celebration, but this is Speyside, this is the Scotch whisky industry, and you will find 20 distilleries with origins in the 19th century within 20 miles of Tamnavulin. As brewer Sam Douglas puts it, “We are very much teenagers as far as Speyside is concerned!” “The charm and elegance of a Speyside single malt with raisins, sultanas, figs…

These days, discussions about the effects of terroir, barley variety and provenance; yeast type and fermentation times; and the importance of age versus maturity can now be found in less formal settings than the pages of Scotch Whisky Research Institute papers, niche books and, indeed, Whisky Magazine. Consumers’ curiosity is being fuelled by a wealth of online resources, distrust of large brands, and the scepticism that characterises the zeitgeist of our post-modern society. This step up in consumer education, along with the demand for new products, has led to calls for greater innovation in the category. In response, a growing number of distillers are beginning to gently test the edges of what can currently be defined as Scotch whisky by experimenting with non-traditional cask types and non-standard (for Scotch) grains…

On a steep hillside with breathtaking views over the Highland town of Dingwall, a distillery has appeared in rather unusual circumstances. Over 3000 investors, most from the local area, have come together to fund the new eco-friendly site, named GlenWyvis, which exists for the sole purpose of reinvigorating the local economy. The brainchild of local farmer John McKenzie, a helicopter pilot to trade and a ‘local Dingwall guy’, GlenWyvis Distillery is the result of his desire to create something that would revive his local community, which had sadly seen a downturn in recent years. A conversation with industry veteran Stuart Nickerson, the former managing director of Glenglassaugh Distillery Company who has recently had a hand in a number of distillery launches including Saxa Vord on Unst, Shetland, and Tipperaray Boutique…

Over the years, the folk of Speyside must have watched many new distilleries rise up from the ground, noting their progress from foundations to flowing whisky. Few, however, can have caused such head-scratching as the creation of the ‘new’ Macallan distillery. Built in what has irreverently been dubbed ‘Teletubby style,’ the subterranean four-domed structure has taken distillery architecture in an entirely new direction. Macallan’s former creative director Ken Grier explains its inspiration: “We were looking at the Great Wineries of the World book and there was a picture of Bodega Ysios at Laguardia in Spain, which was very individualistic and even futuristic, and we decided to dream,’ he says. ‘We launched a competition to design the new distillery with the notion of bringing alive a broch – an ancient Scottish…

The romantic, community-owned isle of Raasay is a rugged and atmospheric strip of rocky coastline and muscular hills, about 14 miles long and three miles wide, that boasts spectacular views across the Sound of Raasay toward Skye and the inner sound to Applecross on the mainland. The island has a population of around 150 people, though many of those are seasonal, and over the years it has become a popular destination for Outward Bound excursions. Once held by the Macleod Clan (not the Macleods of Skye but relations of the Lewis Macleods), the island was sold in the 1840s as the ruling family never truly recovered financially from the fallout of the Jacobite Rising a century earlier. An iron mine operated at Inverarish from 1913–1919 and the village that can…

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Willie Cochrane took on his first role at the Isle of Jura Distillery in 1977 and eventually became manager in 2005. After nearly 40 years of service, he retired in late 2016 but not before completing a European tour to promote a special bottling released in his honour. Willie was replaced as manager by Graham Logan, who has himself worked at the distillery for more than 28 years and started as a trainee mashman in late 1991. Now that Willie has had a little while to enjoy some well-earned time off, I took the opportunity to catch up with him, ask about his life on Jura and find out how the distillery, the island, and the whisky industry have changed over the years. How did you end up moving to…

BenRiach is one of those unfortunate Speyside distilleries that came on stream just too late to capitalise on the great Victorian whisky boom, and just in time to be closed down as boom turned to bust. The wonder is that it survived and thrives today. The fact that it does owes much to its historical association with neighbouring Longmorn, which had been built by John Duff & Company during 1893–94. As the good times in the world of Scotch whisky rolled on, Duff decided to construct ‘Longmorn No.2’, otherwise known as Benriach, as it was originally spelt, in 1898. However, 1900 saw both distilleries close, with John Duff & Company filing for bankruptcy, as those good times abruptly stopped rolling. The collapse of the prominent – but fraudulent – blenders,…

I’d made it. After a six-hour drive north from Edinburgh and a short hour aboard the MV Pentalina from Gills Bay in Caithness, I was finally in Orkney – South Ronaldsay, to be exact. The sun was shining, the car’s windows were down, Ella Fitzgerald was crooning from the stereo, and I was ready for my first visit to Highland Park Distillery. Why had I made the long jouney north from Edinburgh? Simple: I was in search of Highland Park’s ‘Viking soul’. By this point I’d watched the original concepts for the brand’s new packaging evolve from a few mood boards to the final, aesthetically pleasing bottle that’s now hitting the shelves. I knew that the swirling designs of the glass and those embossed in the box were inspired by…

It’s fair to say that Tullibardine has had some ups and downs over the years. The brainchild of famed distillery developer William Delmé-Evans, who was also responsible for the Jura and GlenAllachie distilleries, it was completed in 1949 and is often said to be the first distillery to be built in Scotland after the infamous ‘Pattison crash’ of the late 19th century. While it’s true that this event precipitated a slump in the industry that led to many closures and an end to that particular wave of distillery building, there are in fact two 20th-century projects that predate Tullibardine – Malt Mill (1908) and Inverleven (1938). The site chosen by Delmé-Evans was that of an old brewery in Blackford, a village in Perthshire that’s just off the A9. The area…

The sleepy Borders town of Hawick has a long history of manufacturing and was once one of the United Kingdom’s most productive textile towns. In fact, by 1870 more than one million pounds of wool was being brought to the town from the surrounding pastoral landscape to be transformed into hosiery, tweed cloth and more. This raw material was worked by the numerous mills located along the banks of the River Teviot, which provided the valuable resources of power and process water. As arguably the first manufacturing town in the South of Scotland, Hawick came to be at the heart of the wider textiles industry for which the Scottish Borders became famous. The legacy of that industry, though diminished since those halcyon years came to an end in the latter…

Fife has become something of a hotbed for Scotch whisky distilling in recent years, with the historic Cameronbridge Distillery (1824) being joined by Daftmill (2005), Leven (2008), Eden Mill (2012, distilling began 2014), Kingsbarns (2014), Inchdairnie (2016) and Lindores Abbey (2017), with a micro distillery at Bowhouse, by St Monans, founded by former John Dewar & Sons malts brand director Stephen Marshall, planned to come into production in late 2019. Whisky fans have waited eagerly for the chance to taste the spirits running from these new stills and, like those standing patiently at the proverbial bus stop, many bottlings seem to have turned up almost at once. May 2018 saw the first releases of single malt from both Daftmill and Eden Mill, then came the release of New Make Spirit…

Something very interesting has happened on the rural Morvern Peninsula. To the west of Lochaline and almost opposite Tobermory across the Sound of Mull, an unusual distillery has been born. Nc’nean Distillery (pronounced Nook-nee-anne) began mashing in March 2017, but has thus far maintained a low profile despite opening its doors to the public. This quiet emergence could be something to do with its location, which is rather rural to say the least. Although only a few miles from Ardnamurchan Distillery, which is located on the adjacent peninsula as the crow files, the two are separated by a drive of about two hours and the nearest large settlement is the tourist town of Fort William, which is about two hours away by car and ferry. “As soon as we realised…

TASTER BIOGRAPHIES Rob Allanson Rob is editor of Whisky Magazine and formally held the position as a global brand ambassador for William Grant & Sons' whisky portfolio. Christopher Coates Christopher has been honing his palate as a member of the team at Whisky Magazine since 2013. In 2017, he was named as the title’s Scotch whisky editor. Sam Coyne Sam is editor of Gin Magazine and a writer for Whisky Magazine. Through these roles, he has been well immersed in the drinks industry. Lyndsey Gray Lyndsey is manager of the world famous Quaich Bar at the Craigellachie Hotel in the heart of Speyside. She enjoys creating world-class tastings and events. THE PROCESS • All samples are tasted blind, with ABV, region and style the only information disclosed. e.g Highland Single…