Longmorn 12 Year Old - Gordon & MacPhail - 1990s

One of the greatest Speyside distilleries, Longmorn was founded in 1894 and today is one of the shiniest stars in owner Pernod Ricard’s Chivas Brothers portfolio of whisky distilleries. Although official bottlings are thin on the ground, Longmorn’s whisky was for many years bottled under license by Gordon & MacPhail, who have released a high proportion of the all-time classic Longmorns and still put out outstanding long-aged Longmorn today.

Longmorn’s whisky sparkles in both sherry and bourbon casks and is capable of withstanding extremely long maturation periods while still retaining (particularly in the older vintages) a superb old-school waxiness and the distillery’s trademark grapefruit and exotic fruit flavours, with the fruitiest examples coming from the mid-1970s and earlier. Older vintages also generally have more prominent threads of smoke and mineral notes among the honeyed fruit and chocolate biscuit flavours.

Founded in Elgin as a merchant grocer and wine and spirits wholesaler in 1895, Gordon & MacPhail are one of the oldest independent whisky bottlers in Scotland. Co-founder James Gordon owned shares in Longmorn, Strathisla and Glen Grant, and Gordon & MacPhail were soon bottling officially licensed single malts from several distilleries and sending empty casks from their wine business to be filled with new make spirit and returned for maturation in their Elgin warehouses.

Gordon & MacPhail pioneered high strength single malts at 100 proof (57%) in the 1950s, and in 1968 the company launched Connoisseurs Choice, one of the first integrated ranges of small batch independent whisky bottlings. After finally becoming distillers themselves with the purchase of Benromach in 1993, in 2010 Gordon & MacPhail bottled the first 70-year-old single malt whisky (a Mortlach 1938) and in 2020 the company released the first ever 80-year-old whisky: Glenlivet 1940.