Speyburn 1977 Gordon & MacPhail Refill Sherry Butts - bottled 2006 Connoisseurs Choice (Brown)

Speyburn was founded in 1897 by John and Edward Hopkins through their company John Hopkin & Co. The distillery was designed by Charles Doig, the inventory of the pagoda roof. It was bought in 1916 by Distillers Company Limited (DCL) and incorporated into its subsidiary Scottish Malt Distillers (SMD). It operated almost continuously until it was bought in 1991 by Inver House Distillers, closing only for four years in the early 1930s. Official bottlings of Speyburn are rare save for one 10 Year Old and a Flora & Fauna bottling from the United Distillers period. A handful of Speyburn bottlings can however be found from independent bottlers.

A Speyburn distilled in 1977 and bottled in 2006 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 and rare whiskies. The company is in complete control of the entire maturation process. 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.