Glen Scotia 1990-2002 - 11 Year Old - Signatory Vintage - Single Cask 272

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.

Signatory Vintage Whisky Company was founded by Andrew Symington in 1988 after a spell as assistant manager at the Prestonfield House Hotel, where he had the opportunity to buy a cask of Glenlivet 1968. A robust and canny businessman, Symington had soon acquired some outstanding parcels of casks from great distilleries, and quickly established a reputation among single malt fans for good value, high quality single casks, the majority of which were released at full strength.

Throughout the 1990s and beyond, Signatory released outstanding whisky from Ardbeg, Glenfarclas, Springbank and many more, with frequently remarkable examples of lost or obscure distilleries. Soon established as one of the leading new wave independent bottlers, Symington was also an early exponent of bottling whiskies without colouring or chill filtration, a policy that has also served Signatory well at their Edradour distillery, which was purchased in 2002.