LOT ID: 0523-493
End Date : Jul 05 2023 08:00 PM
Bowmore 1980 - 2004. 23 Year Old. Cask number 5777. One of 236 bottles. 700ml. 52.6%. In presentation box with copper pot still decanter.
This cask of 1980 Bowmore was bottled by an independent cask owner. When these were sold around 2005 Morrison Bowmore tried to recall all bottles and forced the cask owner to cease selling anymore as the label interfered with their Trademark name without permission.
We're not entirely sure what happened to the stock that was held back but this is a rare opportunity to acquire one of the originals.
FILLING LEVEL
High Shoulder
Constructed in 1779, Bowmore is Islay’s oldest distillery and dominates the island’s capital. After changing hands several times early in the 20th century, Bowmore distillery was bought by Stanley P. Morrison in 1963 and embarked on a golden era. This lasted until the early 1980s, when a strangely soapy character took hold in Bowmore’s spirit, before another run of extraordinary quality in the 1990s. The Japanese firm Suntory took full control of Bowmore in 1994, the year after the first release of Black Bowmore, a legendary whisky that catalysed the prestige whisky market.
Early official bottlings of Bowmore are highly sought after, particularly the Sherriff’s bottlings, the stunning Bicentenary editions, and the 1950s-70s vintage editions that appeared from the early 1980s. The modern Bowmore 1964 Trilogies and subsequent prestige bottlings are also fiercely contested by deep-pocketed fans, as are the numerous fabulous old indie bottlings of 1960s vintages by Samaroli, Giaccone, Duncan Taylor, Signatory and others.
A private bottling is a cask of single malt or single grain whisky that has been bottled privately by its owner or owners, and usually bottles are not released for public sale. Private bottlings may sometimes be bottled for their owners by the distillery of origin, but are not official bottlings by that distillery.
Alternatively, if the cask is not housed at the distillery where it was made, it may be bottled either by another distillery or private cask storage facility, or transported to a third party commercial bottler.
Private bottlings used to be relatively common, a legacy of the whisky lake of the 1980s, when distilleries had excess stock and were desperate to offload their inventory. These kinds of casks rarely make it to private bottlings nowadays - casks that were very inexpensive twenty or thirty years ago have shot up in value, and distilleries have scrambled to buy back privately-owned casks of their own spirit, while cask owners are rarely short of offers from brokers or independent bottlers.
BID | DATE | TIME | |
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£675.00 | 5th July 2023 | 15:56 | |