Glen Moray 1985-2014 - 28 Year Old - SMWS 35.109 - A Class Act

One of Speyside’s larger distilleries, Glen Moray was the black sheep of Macdonald & Muir’s portfolio for decades, where it was understandably overshadowed by Glenmorangie (and later Ardbeg). The distillery was sold by Glenmorangie plc’s owners LVMH to French company La Martiniquaise at the end of 2008, since when it has supplied fillings for Label 5 blended whisky, which is unknown in the UK but one of the top ten Scotch whisky brands worldwide.

Away from the bottom shelf wine finishes first popularised in the Glenmorangie era, official bottlings of Glen Moray have included some superb old vintage editions, with the 1959 40-year-old and several excellent 1960s-70s vintage bottlings demonstrating what the distillery was really capable of. La Martiniquaise have not changed the formula much but deserve credit for releasing further prestige editions including the recent Glen Moray Mastery.

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.