Longmorn 1993-2014 - 21 Year Old - Coopers Choice - Single Cask 0854

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.

Cooper’s Choice is a long-running range of independently-bottled single malt whiskies from The Vintage Malt Whisky Company. Vintage Malt was set up in 1992 by Brian Crook, a former director at Morrison Bowmore, and the first Cooper’s Choice bottlings were introduced the following year, bottled at 43% initially with the first cask strength releases appearing in 1994. 

Early Cooper’s Choice bottlings of note included 1970s vintage casks from Ardbeg, Port Ellen and Scapa, and a large number of top class drams appeared under the label throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Cooper's Choice’s standard bottling strength was increased to 46% around 2012 but many releases are at cask strength. Alongside Cooper’s Choice, Vintage Malts also have their own proprietary Islay whisky brands including Finlaggan, The Ileach and Islay Storm.