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 1981 and bottled in 1997 by Gordon & MacPhail for the Connoisseurs Choice range. Gordon & MacPhail is one of Scotland’’s oldest independent bottlers. It 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. Gordon & MacPhail has also owned the Benromach distillery since 1993. The Connoisseurs Choice range is one of Gordon & MacPhail’’s spearhead collections. Created for the Italian collector and importer Edoardo Giaccone in the early 1970s, it became part of the permanent range in 1979 and has remained so ever since, despite changing greatly, from red and black labels to map labels and today’’s design, as well as the gradient label. Older editions were bottled at 40% and coloured artificially. Today, the whiskies in the range display their natural colouring and are often cask strength.