Like a phoenix from the ashes - Glen Moray Phoenix Rising
The Glen Moray distillery has announced the release of a new edition of whisky, likely to win the brand new fans.
Glen Moray Phoenix Rising (40% vol.) is a whisky without an age declaration, the so-called NAS, which was initially matured in bourbon barrels before being transferred to fresh oak barrels fired from the inside for the final stage of maturation.
According to the manufacturer's description, the new whisky from Glen Moray offers accents of coconut, creamy caramel, milk chocolate and a touch of pepper in its aroma. In the taste we can expect notes of caramel, spices, vanilla and sweet ginger.
Glen Moray Phoenix Rising retails for £30 a bottle.
Glen Moray is one of a bunch of malt whisky factories located around the town of Elgin, about halfway between Aberdeen and Inverness, in the Speyside region. Established in 1897, when the brewery that had operated there for decades was converted into a distillery. It was a period of very intense boom in the Scottish distilling industry. The period ended with a crisis and a huge crash in the industry, triggered by the unfair practices of the Pattison brothers. Before that, however, a huge number of whisky factories were launched across Scotland, including such well-known distilleries as Glenfiddich (1896), Aberfeldy (1896), and Tamdhu (1897).
Glen Moray became part of Macdonald & Muir Ltd in 1910 and had the same owner for almost a century. This one was renamed Glenmorangie plc in 1996, but the actual change of ownership did not take place until 2008, when the Glen Moray distillery was bought by the French company La Martiniquaise, which it still belongs to today.
Being for many years a distillery "related", as it were, to Glenmorangie, Glen Moray became an active participant - though perhaps less well known and less often noted in the annals of whisky - in experiments with additional whisky maturation and the marketing of their results. In this context, Balvenie and Glenmorangie are most often mentioned, sometimes Bowmore, but few people remember that it was Glen Moray that, at the end of the last century, had a core range of whiskies finished in white wine casks of Chardonnay and Chenin Blanc. The fine whisky from Speyside, matured in bourbon casks, benefited immeasurably from additional maturation in casks from these fine wines. But perhaps not spectacular enough to make its mark on the Scottish distilling industry on a more serious scale. Today, however, the so-called wood finish in dry white and red wine barrels is not unusual, which whisky lovers owe in no small part to an inconspicuous distillery located on the outskirts of Elgin.
It also had Glen Moray its "five minutes" of fame, when in 2005, at the whisky bottling plant in Broxburn owned by Glenmorangie plc, a certain amount of Ardbeg and just Glen Moray accidentally ended up in the same vat. Despite the fact that from a business point of view this was a real disaster - Ardbeg was incomparably more popular and could be sold for a much higher price, it was decided to bottle up the effect of this mistake. That's how some 16,000 bottles of Serendipity 12yo were made, a blended malt whisky that disappeared from the shelves of specialty aged liquor stores in no time at all. Today Serendipity is considered one of the collector's mistakes, and its price on the secondary market fluctuates around multiples of the £39.99 for which it could have been originally purchased.
The House of Whisky Online offers a whole range of Glen Moray editions, including not a few "finish" whiskies, and even the aforementioned Serendipity (information current at the time of preparing the material). We invite you to visit.
[17.12.2023 / photo: Glen Moray]