Longrow 1990-2007 - 17 Year Old - SMWS 114.6 - A Dragons Dram

Longrow is the name given to the heavily-peated, double-distilled single malt whisky made at Springbank distillery in Campbeltown. The barley used to distil Longrow is peated to around 50ppm and production of Longrow is currently about 10% of Springbank’s output. Longrow was made at Springbank for the first time in 1973 and 1974, and these vintages are considered classics and fetch the highest prices at auction. 

Longrow’s first standard bottling was the 10-year-old, which ran from 1985 until 2011; a popular 14-year-old was launched in 2004, followed by bottlings of Longrow aged in a variety of wine casks. The most popular of these is Longrow Red, which was first bottled in 2012, is usually aged between 10-14 years and receives an extended finish in red wine casks. 18-year-old and 21-year-old Longrows have also been bottled in recent years.

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society (SMWS) began in late 1970s Edinburgh when founder Pip Hills persuaded a group of friends to chip in for a cask of Glenfarclas, and was officially formalised in 1983. Today the SMWS has two venues in Edinburgh, a London bar and a string of international partnerships serving its 35,000 members. 

The Society’s whiskies are known for their unique SMWS coding system. Each cask bottled is assigned two numbers, representing the distillery and the bottling number, so 1.45 is the forty-fifth cask bottled from the first distillery and 33.27 is the 27th cask from the 33rd distillery.

Glenmorangie bought the Society in 2004, but sold it in 2015 to a private consortium who floated the SMWS on the stock market in 2021 via their holding company Artisanal Spirits Co.