YOU WILL NOT MAKE MONEY IN WHISKY! You may be the greatest salesman on earth, but the fact is that if you buy yourself a cask of whisky and keep it for a decade, you won’t be able to get it bottled and sell it to a whisky shop for masses of cash. You might offload a few cases to your friends, but you are going to be left with more whisky than you could ever imagine and you’ll be drinking the same liquid until you shuffle off this mortal coil. Leave whisky to the distillers, they know what they are doing.But there is another sector of the market that also knows what they are doing, and they are called independent bottlers. There are two main types, those that buy barrels of whisky from all sorts of sources and bottle them, and those that take a risk that the whisky might go bad, and get empty cask filled by a distillery and control it’s evolution from as near as birth as they can get, right through to bottling. To understand it easier, imagine the first type as a person who buys free range pork, adds herbs and produces a sausage that sometimes is good, and other times not so, depending on the quality of the pork. Nothing wrong with that sort of company, but imagine the second as a person who buys a baby pig, rears it on a special diet of finest root vegetables, tickles it's ears (pigs like that!), allows it to grow in perfect conditions, takes it to a slaughter house, has it despatched and then adds the herbs and produces a good sausage with the pig's name on the packet. That is the sort of company I like.
Gordon & Macphail (G&M) are such a company. Based in Elgin, they have an unbelievably large selection of whiskies available under their own label, from many famous distilleries, as well as owning the Benromach distillery. Gordon & Macphail’s independently bottled whiskies tend to offer a different choice of style to the consumer. They may use sherry casks for a whisky that the distillery only uses bourbon, or they will experiment with other casks that contained tokaji, burgundy or rum. In doing so, and the fact that they are production led so they release what is ready for drinking, regardless of what it actually is, it means that alongside, for example, the half dozen distillery releases of Caol Ila, you may have something as strange as a sherry/zinfandel/rum casked thirteen and a half year old Caol Ila, unchillfiltered and bottled at cask strength by G&M! They also can offer older whiskies at a fraction of the price of a distillery bottling, an example being when Highland Park released their 30 year old at £300, and G&M’s was £90!
Old Pulteney is a distillery near Wick in the far north of Scotland. G&M’s 1970 Old Pulteney (refill sherry), bottled 2008 at 43% was very clean, with toasted corn and vanilla, with citrus peel, some sea salt and a long, lingering light finish of lemon and grapefruit skin. The distillery’s whisky now is, to me, has too much sweet vanilla elements, and isn’t as good as their older style which was all about freshness, sea air and citrus. This harks back to the good old days of the distillery, with that delightful lightness, despite spending 38 years oxidising in a barrel. And at £90, this is a steal, 8/10.
And things get better with a 1969 Glenrothes, heavily sherried, bottled at 39 years at 43%. Insanely sweet on the nose, lots of furniture polish, almonds and some orange coming through. Lots of herbs on the palate, with dried fruit and some dried orange as well. A bitter element on the finish, reminds me of a bitter digestif. £80 per bottle, and whilst I preferred the Old Pulteney, this is a good, rich, sweet malt. 7/10.
To a lot of people, Macallan is whisky, and old Macallans usually involve lots of Christmas cake aromas, dried fruit, chocolate and leather. This whisky, a 1972 Speymalt Macallan, bottled 2008 at 43% from 1st fill sherry casks, however was very fresh. Yes it had fruit cake, but much lighter, cloves coming through. Vanilla toffee mixed with some citrus. A very different Macallan, and also showing G&M’s ability to bring a thirty six year old whisky to the market for a third of the price of Macallan’s own bottling! 8/10
Finally, the best whisky of the day. A 1971 Longmorn Glenlivet, bottled in 2008 from first and refill sherry casks at 43%. This sweet, luscious, Christmas cake in a glass, with dried fruit, subtle aromatic spices and citrus and muscovado sugar aromas. The palate has bitter sweet flavours, some tar and dry tree bark, but then honey, sweet candied orange and blood orange juice coming through a malt loaf palate. This is devine and £90 per bottle. 9.5/10
Please don’t think that everything G&M produces is old or outstanding quality. They do release some whiskies of dubious quality, but in their defence, these are usually from distilleries that shouldn’t be seen outside of a blended whisky. Their 10 year old Miltonduff is pretty poor, as is their 10 year old Glenburgie, but, if you are a whisky enthusiast, the G&M bottling is probably the only time you will get to see these whiskies as a single malt, so G&M are certainly doing whisky geeks a favour here. But for every Miltonduff, there is a very good Glentauchers 1991, a Glenturret 1997 (far better than the distillery’s 10 year old!) and a Glen Grant 25 year old.
So if you see a leaflet enticing you to buy a cask of whisky, please don’t. You are wasting your money and are more than likely going to have some hideous liquid to drink in ten years. By buying a cask, you are trying to be a sausage maker when you can't operate the machine that fills the sausage skin. Leave it to Gordon & Macphail, they make good sausages...
... and whisky.
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