Port Charlotte 2002-2007 - 5 Year Old - Alchemist

Founded in 1881, Bruichladdich was taken over in 1968 by Invergordon Distillers, who expanded the distillery to four stills in 1975, but allowed the otherwise unmodernised Bruichladdich to decline in the 1980s. In 1995, with Invergordon now under Whyte & Mackay’s shaky stewardship, Bruichladdich was mothballed. Thankfully the distillery was revitalised under a consortium led by Murray McDavid’s Mark Reynier, who bought Bruichladdich in 2000. 

With the effervescent Jim McEwan on board as distillery manager, Bruichladdich’s fortunes swiftly improved. Bruichladdich's whisky had traditionally been unpeated, but McEwan soon began experimenting with higher peat levels and embraced the wine finishing trend with gusto. In 2012, the revived Bruichladdich was sold to Rémy Cointreau.

Invergordon bottled unpeated Bruichladdich at various ages and strengths from the 1970s onwards, with the earlier bottlings far outshining the later ones. The Murray McDavid regime issued a blizzard of mostly wine-finished casks and introduced the heavily peated Port Charlotte and Octomore malts, which have found an avid fanbase. Independent Bruichladdich is widely available and generally high quality.

The Alchemist Beverage Company was founded in Glasgow in 2005 by Gordon Wright. Wright is a member of the family behind Springbank & Cadenhead’s owners J. & A. Mitchell, for whom he worked as a sales director in the 1990s, and was a co-founder and sales and marketing director of the Murray McDavid indie bottling company that had purchased Bruichladdich distillery in 2000. 

Several dozen Alchemist single malt whiskies were released between 2005-2013, with the expected top class casks from Bruichladdich and Springbank joined by several other superb bottlings from other blue chip distilleries including a 1966 Ben Nevis 42-year-old and younger drams from Highland Park, Macallan and Caol Ila. The original Alchemist company was dissolved in 2013 but Wright founded a new cask broking business with the same name in 2023.