Kininvie 1990-2006 - 15 Year Old - Hazelwood Janet Sheed Roberts 105

Kininvie distillery was built in 1990 by William Grant & Sons in a space around the back of their Balvenie distillery. The purpose of Kininvie was always to supply Speyside single malt for Grant’s blended whiskies, principally Grant’s and the Monkey Shoulder blended malt, but over time a few official bottlings of Kininvie’s single malt whisky have started to appear.

The first official Kininvie single malts were a pair of 1990 vintage bottlings released in 2006 and 2008 as Hazelwood, a name Grant’s have used for blended malts and blended Scotch whiskies both before and since. To put an end to the confusion this caused, Grant’s switched to the Kininvie name for the small batch vintage Kininvie half-bottles that have appeared since 2013. In recent years, a series of experimental distillations from Kininvie have been bottled as Kininvie Works, including a single Kininvie blend.

Distillery bottlings are, as the name suggests, bottled by or for the distillery from which the whisky has originated and are thus often referred to as Official Bottlings or OBs. Distillery bottlings are generally more desirable for collectors and usually fetch higher prices at auction than independent bottlings. They are officially-endorsed versions of the whisky from a particular distillery and are therefore considered the truest expression of the distillery’s character.

This ideal of the distillery character is regarded so seriously by the distilleries and brand owners that casks of whisky that are considered to vary too far from the archetype are frequently sold on to whisky brokers and independent bottlers. When this happens, it is often with the proviso that the distillery’s name is not allowed to be used when the cask is bottled for fear of diminishing or damaging the distillery’s character and status.