Dalmore 1978-1994 - 15 Year Old - SMWS 13.13

One of the Highland’s most famous and prestigious distilleries, Dalmore has for many decades been associated with Master Blender Richard Paterson, one of the whisky industry’s biggest personalities. The distillery has been part of blending giant Whyte & Mackay since 1960 and somehow flourished during that company’s turbulent decades of ownership change and management failure preceding the takeover by Filipino owners Emperador Inc. in 2014.

Dalmore has long been associated with sherried whisky, and the distillery’s spirit is capable of extended ageing, giving Paterson almost unrivalled long-aged stocks to work with. Consequently, Dalmore has consistently pushed the envelope for luxury single malt whiskies, bottling a 50-year-old single malt whisky in the 1970s and the famous Dalmore 64-year-old Trinitas, the first £100k whisky, in 2010 - both of which included small amounts of whisky distilled in the 19th century.

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.