Dallas Dhu 1975-2003 - 27 Year Old - SMWS 45.9 - Cherry On Top

Speyside distillery Dallas Dhu began production in 1899 and was acquired by Diageo forerunner DCL in 1929. The distillery suffered a serious fire in 1939 but was rebuilt and subsequently made malt whisky for blends from 1947 until its closure by DCL in 1983. Dallas Dhu was sold to Historic Scotland in 1986 and converted into a distillery museum with the equipment still intact; although previous plans to resume whisky production came to nothing, in 2024 it was announced that Aceo Ltd would be restoring the distillery to full use.

No official bottlings of Dallas Dhu’s whisky appeared until the mid-1990s when a handful of superb Rare Malts Editions were released. Historic Scotland subsequently bottled a number of Dallas Dhu malt whiskies, including the last 1983 vintage cask ever filled at the distillery. Independent bottlings of Dallas Dhu single malt are becoming very scarce now; the best previous examples are from G&M, Signatory and Cadenhead’s.

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society (SMWS) began in late 1970s Edinburgh when founder Pip Hills persuaded a group of friends to chip in for a cask of Glenfarclas, and was officially formalised in 1983. Today the SMWS has two venues in Edinburgh, a London bar and a string of international partnerships serving its 35,000 members. 

The Society’s whiskies are known for their unique SMWS coding system. Each cask bottled is assigned two numbers, representing the distillery and the bottling number, so 1.45 is the forty-fifth cask bottled from the first distillery and 33.27 is the 27th cask from the 33rd distillery.

Glenmorangie bought the Society in 2004, but sold it in 2015 to a private consortium who floated the SMWS on the stock market in 2021 via their holding company Artisanal Spirits Co.