Glen Ord 1965-2005 - 40 Year Old - Royal Mile Whiskies

Glen Ord is a classic Highland distillery, originally built in 1838 and now producing an enormous 11 million litres per annum, making it one of the largest distilleries in Scotland. The distillery is also home to a huge industrial maltings facility supplying malted barley to various other Diageo distilleries including Talisker.

Sadly, Glen Ord’s characterful but easy-drinking single malt has been unavailable in the UK since 2006 when it was withdrawn and repackaged for Asian markets as the Singleton of Glen Ord. This tragedy notwithstanding, the distillery’s official bottlings have a good reputation among whisky drinkers, with the old 12-year-old and the long-aged Special Release bottlings from 2003-2005 particularly popular; however, the most famous Glen Ord is undoubtedly the Samaroli 1962 Ord Bouquet 22-year-old, one of the greatest single malt whiskies ever bottled.

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.