Edradour 2010-2020 - 10 Year Old - The Whisky Barrel - We Have Arrived - Single Cask 0160

Edradour in the picturesque Highland town of Pitlochry is one of Scotland’s smallest and most charming whisky distilleries. Founded in 1825, the distillery was taken over in 1982 by Pernod Ricard, who sold Edradour to Andrew Symington’s Signatory Vintage in 2002. Symington wanted his own distillery to offset supply risks and give his company a source of new make spirit to trade with other distilleries.

Edradour distillery was truly tiny in 2002, with a production capacity of less than 100,000 litres per annum, but the success of the Symington era enabled expansion, with a second distillery opening onsite in 2018 and an increased capacity of around 250,000 litres per annum. Aside from the official 10-year-old and a new peated Edradour whisky named Ballechin, Symington has bottled hundreds of Edradour single cask whiskies from his inventory, the majority finished in different wine casks.

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.