Lochside 1981 Gordon & MacPhail Cask n°803 - bottled 2009 LMDW

Lot presentation

Lochside 1981 Gordon & MacPhail Cask n°803 - bottled 2009 LMDW

The wine

A Lochside single cask (#803) distilled in 1981 and bottled in 2009 by Gordon & MacPhail, one of Scotland’’s oldest independent bottlers. Gordon & MacPhail was founded in Elgin in 1895 by James Gordon and John Alexander MacPhail. As was often the case at the time, the business started out as a delicatessen and wine merchant. In 1915, John Alexander MacPhail retired and a new partner joined the business, John Urquhart. He was joined by his son George in 1933, a few years after James Gordon died in a car crash. Gordon & MacPhail works with many of Speyside’’s leading distilleries, from whom it has accumulated considerable stocks. It is also licensed to bottle whiskies for many of them, including Glen Grant, Linkwood, Mortlach, Macallan and Glenlivet. The business really took off in the 1970s, acquiring distributors in a huge range of countries and selling casks to several Italian bottlers in selections that would become legends in their own right. Gordon & MacPhail is still run by the Urquhart family today, from the same building, and is one of the most iconic bottlers in the industry, with incredible stocks of sometimes very old and rare whiskies. The company is in complete control of the entire maturation process. A limited edition for La Maison du Whisky.

The Lochside distillery was founded in 1957 by the controversial Joseph Hobbs (also the owner of the Ben Nevis distillery, to which Lochside owed its operating model) and closed in 1992. It was mainly used to produce the blended whisky Sandy Macnab’‘s. Producing both grain and malt whisky on site, it was also one of very few distilleries in Scotland to produce single blended whiskies.