Glen Scotia 14 Year Old - 1990s

Glen Scotia is often overlooked, being the ‘other’ Campbeltown distillery, but there has been renewed interest in the brand in the last few years following the successful slimmed-down 2015 range and tasteful design revamp by Exponent Equity (now owned by Hillhouse Capital) which revived Glen Scotia’s fortunes after various unfortunate decisions by the previous regime. 

Glen Scotia’s former obscurity was due to a string of owners uninterested in marketing the distillery as a single malt during the crisis years of the 1970s-’90s, when the distillery was twice closed for five year periods and official bottlings were both difficult to find and variable in quality. Thankfully, independent bottlings of Glen Scotia have always been relatively easy to obtain, with high quality examples from reliable sources including the SMWS, Malts of Scotland and Signatory Vintage.

Distillery bottlings are, as the name suggests, bottled by or for the distillery from which the whisky has originated and are thus often referred to as Official Bottlings or OBs. Distillery bottlings are generally more desirable for collectors and usually fetch higher prices at auction than independent bottlings. They are officially-endorsed versions of the whisky from a particular distillery and are therefore considered the truest expression of the distillery’s character.

This ideal of the distillery character is regarded so seriously by the distilleries and brand owners that casks of whisky that are considered to vary too far from the archetype are frequently sold on to whisky brokers and independent bottlers. When this happens, it is often with the proviso that the distillery’s name is not allowed to be used when the cask is bottled for fear of diminishing or damaging the distillery’s character and status.