Cuvée presentation
A Port Ellen distilled in 1974 and bottled by independent bottler Gordon & MacPhail. 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. Gordon & MacPhail has also owned the Benromach distillery since 1993.
The distillery Port Ellen
Founded in 1825 by A. K. Mackay & Co. on the southern coast of the Isle of Islay, Port Ellen came under the control of John Ramsay in 1836, a period during which the site notably contributed to the development of whisky exports to North America. The distillery became part of the Distillers Company Limited (DCL) in 1925 and subsequently underwent a prolonged period of closure before returning to production in the late 1960s. Primarily operated to supply malt whisky for blends, Port Ellen ceased distillation in May 1983 as part of a broader rationalisation of Scotch whisky production capacity. Stocks distilled before the closure continued to mature and were subsequently bottled, notably through Diageo’s Special Releases, which included seventeen annual Port Ellen editions between 2001 and 2017. After more than forty years without production, Diageo officially restarted distillation at Port Ellen in March 2024. The rebuilt facility incorporates two pairs of stills: the “Phoenix Stills”, designed to replicate the stills used before the 1983 closure, and the “Experimental Stills”, combined with a spirit safe designed to allow more precise separation of the different fractions of the spirit run. Bottlings drawn from historical stocks therefore originate exclusively from spirit distilled up to 1983, while production resumed in 2024 represents a distinct new period in the chronology of Port Ellen.
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