Bruichladdich 1966-2003 - 36 Year Old - Duncan Taylor - Rare Auld - Single Cask 4874

Founded in 1881, Bruichladdich was taken over in 1968 by Invergordon Distillers, who expanded the distillery to four stills in 1975, but allowed the otherwise unmodernised Bruichladdich to decline in the 1980s. In 1995, with Invergordon now under Whyte & Mackay’s shaky stewardship, Bruichladdich was mothballed. Thankfully the distillery was revitalised under a consortium led by Murray McDavid’s Mark Reynier, who bought Bruichladdich in 2000. 

With the effervescent Jim McEwan on board as distillery manager, Bruichladdich’s fortunes swiftly improved. Bruichladdich's whisky had traditionally been unpeated, but McEwan soon began experimenting with higher peat levels and embraced the wine finishing trend with gusto. In 2012, the revived Bruichladdich was sold to Rémy Cointreau.

Invergordon bottled unpeated Bruichladdich at various ages and strengths from the 1970s onwards, with the earlier bottlings far outshining the later ones. The Murray McDavid regime issued a blizzard of mostly wine-finished casks and introduced the heavily peated Port Charlotte and Octomore malts, which have found an avid fanbase. Independent Bruichladdich is widely available and generally high quality.

Duncan Taylor was founded in 1938, originally as a cask broker. The Glasgow-based company was acquired in the 1960s by the American blender and entrepreneur Abe Rosenberg, who amassed a large stock of maturing casks. Following Rosenberg’s death in 1994 the Duncan Taylor business lay dormant until the early 2000s, when the trustees offered some casks to businessmen Euan Shand and Alan Gordon. 

Shand and Gordon were so impressed with Duncan Taylor’s stock that they bought the company in 2002 and began bottling some of Rosenberg’s best casks. A string of extraordinary bottlings of Longmorn, Macallan, Bowmore and Springbank were released under the now defunct Peerless range and today Duncan Taylor, with Shand in full control since 2006, is established as one of Scotland’s most interesting independent bottlers.