Glen Mhor 1980 (Bottled 2007) Gordon & MacPhail / 43%/ 0.7l

It has been over 30 years since the last distillation at Glen Mhor Distillery and the whisky there is slowly fading away. It is possible that the next generation of consumers will not have the chance to taste it.

Too bad. Glen Mhor made a huge impression on Neil Gunn, the Scottish poet and writer who briefly worked at the distillery as an excise officer. “Until you’ve had the good fortune to taste a perfectly mature whisky, you don’t really know what it’s like,” he wrote of Glen Mhor single malt.  

Glen Mhor began in 1892 as the third distillery in Inverness (the others being Millburn, established in 1807, and Glen Albyn, established in 1846). It had three stills, two of which were used for the first distillation, and had a production capacity of one million litres of alcohol per year. By the standards of the 1980s, the plant was outdated and, due to the ongoing decline in the whisky market, DCL decided to close it.

In 2007, Glen Mhor returned to the headlines with an extraordinary find. Several cases of whisky abandoned by British explorer Ernest Shackleton were discovered in the Arctic ice. Analysis revealed it was Glen Mhor. The 2007 edition presented here contains whisky distilled in 1980 and bottled by Gordon & MacPhail in the prestigious Rare Vintage collection.

Aroma: fruity and slightly grassy, ​​a bouquet of dry flowers, lemons, oranges, apricots, pear candy, vanilla, notes of tobacco and damp gravel and a trace of pencil shavings.

Palate: sweet and spicy, honey, vanilla, milkshake, pepper, ginger, licorice, herbal liqueur, lemongrass, orange peel, grapefruit and light oak bitterness.

Finish : medium long, with notes of dry herbs, hay, bitter oranges, lemon peel, ginger, pepper, oak and a touch of vanilla.