Tobermory 1994-2020 - 25 Year Old - Single Cask 514/19

Tobermory distillery on the Isle of Mull was founded as Ledaig in 1798 but has had a turbulent history with long periods of closure - Ledaig distillery was operational for a total of less than six years between 1930 and 1989. 

After four decades of silence, a brief post-refurbishment spell between 1972 and 1975 produced the Ledaig distillery’s greatest ever malt whiskies, dense and heavily peated.  In 1979 the distillery reopened as Tobermory, but production was sporadic and both quality and peating levels were very inconsistent; the distillery was closed again between 1982 and 1989. 

In 1993 Burn Stewart bought Tobermory and reinstituted the production of both unpeated spirit (Tobermory) and heavily-peated spirit (Ledaig). Finally under stable ownership, Tobermory slowly began to thrive, particularly after Distell’s 2013 acquisition of Burn Stewart, and the heavy, uncompromising Ledaig now has a cult following.

A private bottling is a cask of single malt or single grain whisky that has been bottled privately by its owner or owners, and usually bottles are not released for public sale. Private bottlings may sometimes be bottled for their owners by the distillery of origin, but are not official bottlings by that distillery. 

Alternatively, if the cask is not housed at the distillery where it was made, it may be bottled either by another distillery or private cask storage facility, or transported to a third party commercial bottler.

Private bottlings used to be relatively common, a legacy of the whisky lake of the 1980s, when distilleries had excess stock and were desperate to offload their inventory. These kinds of casks rarely make it to private bottlings nowadays - casks that were very inexpensive twenty or thirty years ago have shot up in value, and distilleries have scrambled to buy back privately-owned casks of their own spirit, while cask owners are rarely short of offers from brokers or independent bottlers.