Coleburn 1981 Gordon & MacPhail bottled 2008 Connoisseurs Choice ---- (Brown)

The Coleburn distillery was founded in Longmorn by John Robertson & Son in 1897, in the final years of the whisky boom. It was sold in 1915 to the Clynelish Distillery Company, owned by John Risk, John Walker & Sons and Distillers Company Limited (DCL). DCL bought Risk’‘s shares and made Colebrn part of its Scottish Malt Distillers (SMD) subsidiary, giving the license to J&G Stewart. Its whisky was then used for the blends Usher’‘s and Johnnie Walker Red Label. The distillery closed in 1985 in the midst of the Whisky Loch crisis, a victim of its archaic equipment. The site was bought by Aceo, who use the warehouses for its independent bottler Murray McDavid. Coleburn bottlings are found in the Rare Malts range and from independent bottlers.

A Coleburn distilled in 1981 and bottled in 2008 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 whiskies. 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.

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