Pittyvaich 1976-1991 - 15 Year Old - SMWS 90.3 - Dry, lingering Aftertaste

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.

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.