Ledaig 1972 - Single Cask - Private Bottling

Ledaig was the original name of the distillery in Tobermory village on the Isle of Mull, but the distillery was rechristened as Tobermory in 1979 during a troubled period of sporadic production that lasted until Burn Stewart purchased the distillery in 1993. The 1974 vintage of Ledaig is considered the distillery's finest and is highly sought after at auction.

Nowadays, Tobermory distillery produces both the Ledaig (peated) and Tobermory (unpeated) single malt spirits in a 50/50 ratio. Ledaig was officially relaunched as a 10-year-old in 2007, but the brand really took off in 2010 after a pair of wildly successful sherry casks of rubbery, farmhouse-tinged Ledaig 2005 were bottled at cask strength by Berry Bros & Rudd. Ledaig’s quirky flavours and occasionally brutal exuberance have spawned a committed cult following.

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.