Glen Scotia 1992-2019 - 27 Year Old - Cadenheads Authentic Collection - Single Cask

Glen Scotia is often overlooked, being the ‘other’ Campbeltown distillery, but there has been renewed interest in the brand in the last few years following the successful slimmed-down 2015 range and tasteful design revamp by Exponent Equity (now owned by Hillhouse Capital) which revived Glen Scotia’s fortunes after various unfortunate decisions by the previous regime. 

Glen Scotia’s former obscurity was due to a string of owners uninterested in marketing the distillery as a single malt during the crisis years of the 1970s-’90s, when the distillery was twice closed for five year periods and official bottlings were both difficult to find and variable in quality. Thankfully, independent bottlings of Glen Scotia have always been relatively easy to obtain, with high quality examples from reliable sources including the SMWS, Malts of Scotland and Signatory Vintage.

In 1842 George Duncan established a wine merchant and distillery agency business in Aberdeen. Duncan was joined in the early 1850s by his brother-in-law William Cadenhead, who took over the business after Duncan’s death in 1858, changing the company’s name to Wm. Cadenhead. When Cadenhead died in 1904 the company passed to his nephew Robert Duthie, who developed the spirits side of the business.

Duthie died suddenly in 1931, and employee Ann Oliver was put in charge of Cadenhead’s. Sadly, Oliver’s tenure ended in financial difficulty and on her retirement in 1972 the business was forced to sell its entire inventory. Cadenhead’s was acquired soon afterwards by J & A Mitchell, proprietors of Springbank distillery, who relocated the business to Campbeltown. Cadenhead’s has flourished under Mitchell’s stewardship, releasing many legendary single malt bottlings in the 1980s and 1990s and now has outlets in Edinburgh and London as well as Campbeltown.