Scotland, Highlands. Distillery operational. Owner: Beam - Suntory

The second distillery to have joined the Stanley P Morrison Ltd team (which had owned Bowmore since 1963) in 1970, Glen Garioch is a leading name in the world of collectible single malts. This renown was the work of Stanley P Morrison, who, in the late 1970s, offered its distributors outstanding limited editions, including Glen Garioch 1971, produced for Samaroli. In the same time period, an 8 year old version was also released in a stocky, brown bottle. Then, in the mid-80s, several 21 year old versions from 1965 were released in various sherry and bourbon cask bottlings, some cask strength. It would not, however, be until the arrival in 1994 of the Japanese company Suntory, who bought Morrison Bowmore, that things would really pick up, notably with the Individual Cask Bottling range and the two exceptional vintages 1968 and 1970.

A Glen Garioch distilled in 1993 and bottled by Murray McDavid with neither filtration nor artificial colouring after 13 years of maturation in a bourbon cask, finished in a Banyuls cask (Grenache Noir), a sweet wine produced in the south of France in the Pyrénées-Orientales. Murray McDavid is an independent bottler founded in 1996 by Mark Reynier, Simon Coughlin and Gordon Wright, the former director of Springbank. They specialized in ageing whiskies in unusual casks, particularly wine casks, adding the term “ACE-ing” to their labels, standing for “additional cask enhancement”. After being bought by the Rémy Cointreau group at the same time as the Bruichladdich distillery that had been reopened by Murray McDavid in 2000, it is now owned by the broker Aceo Ltd and continues to operate from the former Coleburn distillery in Speyside, whose warehouses it uses. A limited edition of 500 bottles.