Bruichladdich 1988-2018 - 30 Year Old - Cadenheads Gold Label - Single Cask

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.

In 1842 George Duncan established a wine merchant and distillery agency business in Aberdeen. Duncan was joined in the early 1850s by his brother-in-law William Cadenhead, who took over the business after Duncan’s death in 1858, changing the company’s name to Wm. Cadenhead. When Cadenhead died in 1904 the company passed to his nephew Robert Duthie, who developed the spirits side of the business.

Duthie died suddenly in 1931, and employee Ann Oliver was put in charge of Cadenhead’s. Sadly, Oliver’s tenure ended in financial difficulty and on her retirement in 1972 the business was forced to sell its entire inventory. Cadenhead’s was acquired soon afterwards by J & A Mitchell, proprietors of Springbank distillery, who relocated the business to Campbeltown. Cadenhead’s has flourished under Mitchell’s stewardship, releasing many legendary single malt bottlings in the 1980s and 1990s and now has outlets in Edinburgh and London as well as Campbeltown.