Aultmore 1982-2006 - 23 Year Old - SMWS 73.20 - A Lot To Discover

Aultmore is a Speyside distillery founded in 1896. The distillery was purchased in 1923 by John Dewar & Sons, who amalgamated with Diageo forerunners DCL soon afterwards in 1925. Aultmore was rebuilt and modernised in 1971, when the distillery was expanded to four stills. In 1998 Aultmore was one of the five Dewar’s distilleries sold to Bacardi as part of the deal with the Monopolies and Mergers Commission that approved the creation of Diageo.

Aultmore has spent most of its life making single malt for Dewar’s and other blended whiskies. A 12-year-old official bottling appeared sporadically throughout the 1970s and 1980s before being reincarnated in United Distillers’ Flora & Fauna range in 1991. Vintage cask strength Aultmores were released in the 1990s for Flora & Fauna, the Rare Malts and for the distillery’s centenary. Under Bacardi, the 12-year-old Aultmore was rebranded again before Aultmore's first official full range was finally launched in 2014. Independent Aultmore is abundant.

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.