Speyburn 1974-2004 - Gordon & MacPhail - Connoisseurs Choice

A large Speyside distillery with a low profile, Speyburn produces a clean, straightforward single malt whisky, the vast majority of which goes to blenders. Official bottlings in the last few decades have generally been safe to the point of anodyne, leading to Speyburn’s rise as a meme - an ironic but affectionate in-joke within certain quarters of the whisky nerderati.

Independent cask strength bottlings of Speyburn, however, are a very different matter, with sought after classics including 1970s vintages by Cadenhead’s and the SMWS, and a famous 1967 bottling by Moon Import. Speyburn themselves defied their bland image with a pair of superb 1978 vintage 21-year-old casks released in 1999 and the later Speyburn 25-year-old Solera, which won Best Highland Single Malt at the World Whisky Awards in 2012 - a fantastic, old school style, elegant whisky that still goes for very reasonable prices.

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.