Glenury Royal 1984-2006 - 22 Year Old - Duncan Taylor - Rarest Of The Rare - Single Cask 3046

Glenury Royal was a high class Highland distillery in the portfolio of Diageo forerunners Scottish Malt Distillers, but fell victim to the whisky crisis of the 1980s and was closed in 1983. The distillery had been founded in 1825 by Captain Robert Barclay Allardyce, who achieved great fame in 1809 by walking 1000 miles in 1000 hours for a bet, and later acquired the ‘Royal’ suffix for his distillery from his friend King William IV.

Glenury was extensively modernised in the 1960s after Diageo forerunner DCL purchased the distillery in 1953. A sherry-influenced 12-year-old official bottling of Glenury Royal appeared in the 1970s under DCL’s subsidiary John Gillon & Co., but the famous bottlings now are the four superb Rare Malts editions that appeared 1995-1999 and the subsequent Diageo Special Releases, the best of which is the Glenury Royal 1968 36-year-old bottled in 2005.

Duncan Taylor was founded in 1938, originally as a cask broker. The Glasgow-based company was acquired in the 1960s by the American blender and entrepreneur Abe Rosenberg, who amassed a large stock of maturing casks. Following Rosenberg’s death in 1994 the Duncan Taylor business lay dormant until the early 2000s, when the trustees offered some casks to businessmen Euan Shand and Alan Gordon. 

Shand and Gordon were so impressed with Duncan Taylor’s stock that they bought the company in 2002 and began bottling some of Rosenberg’s best casks. A string of extraordinary bottlings of Longmorn, Macallan, Bowmore and Springbank were released under the now defunct Peerless range and today Duncan Taylor, with Shand in full control since 2006, is established as one of Scotland’s most interesting independent bottlers.