Scotland, Speyside. Distillery operational. Owner: Brown Forman

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Benriach is a distillery that has reopened on more than one occasion. The first was in 1898 at the initiative of John Duff, who built the distillery before, just ten years later, being forced to close it down following the Pattison Crash. The second was in 1965 at the instigation of Glenlivet Distilleries Ltd (the future Chivas Bothers), who completely rebuilt the distillery in order to produce a “blender's malt”. Finally, in 29 April 2004, the distillery came into the hands of Billy Walker and his South-African partners and began operating again in September of the same year. In the meantime, only a few independent bottlers, including Gordon & MacPhail, released expressions of the Benriach malt. When it comes to in-house expressions, a 10 year old version was released by the Seagram Group in 1994. Despite its 120 years of history, Benriach is a distillery only now coming to the foreground of collectable whiskies, and connoisseurs are no longer under any allusions as to its worth. The now-frequent single cask vintages are immediately seized upon as soon as they released.

A Benriach distilled in 1991 and matured for 28 years in a second-fill sherry butt. This is a limited edition of 387 bottles for the Scotch Malt Whisky Society. The Scotch Malt Whisky Society (SMWS) was founded in Edinburgh in 1983 by a group of friends with a particular passion for whisky. The club selects casks whose bottles are then only available to members. The name of the distillery is not mentioned on the label but each distillery is given a number as the malt is bottled. The first cask selected by the SMWS, for example, was Glenfarclas, and it therefore uses the number 1. The second number refers to the number of bottlings from each distillery. The club was sold to Glenmorangie in 2004 and then to a group of investors in 2016.