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History In A Bottle Day 17: Berry's 40 Year KWM Blended Scotch

Posted on December 19, 2022

This post is Bonus Content. It has information on one of the KWM Cask bottles that are featured on the back of our 2022 KWM Whisky Calendar box. You can find the blog post for the mini bottle for Day 17 of our 2022 KWM Whisky Calendar here.

by Andrew

This was the most unexpected of our 25th Anniversary bottlings, in fact, I forgot it was even coming until it arrived. So how do you forget about ordering a couple of hundred bottles of Blended Scotch with your logo on it? You can have too much of a good thing!

Berry Brothers & Rudd is a 325-year-old family-owned firm, which has been based at the same address, No.3 St. James Street in central London, ever since its founding. The old shop which you can still visit, with its slanted floors (owing to a fire), and pockmarked exterior (owing to the Blitz), is a stone’s throw from St. James Palace, and around the corner from the Pall Mall. This is one of the most desirable streets in London and a street with strong diplomatic links. Many embassies are found in the area, Canada’s is only a few blocks away. Berry Bros leased a room to the Texas Legation for a few short years in the middle of the 19th century during which it was an independent country. Berry Bros & Rudd is primarily a wine merchant, but also a blender and independent bottler of Scotch whisky. It is an old-school firm, in the best sense. Business is all about relationships, mutual respect, and shared history. Something the big beverage companies have long ago forgotten about.

Once a year or so I’ll make a trip to London, to pay homage to the chaps and Berry Bros, and a few other partners. The visits usually start the same, in the pub, catching up over beers. Usually, it’s just a couple, on a few occasions, it’s been rather more. I was visiting them in 2017, on a rather moreish occasion, when after beers we retired to the office from the pub to review samples. We worked through at least a dozen samples before Doug McIvor, the Reserve Spirits Manager and Blender for BBR, said, you have a 25th Anniversary coming up, don’t you? Dougie had a treat for me, he had six cask samples of 25-year-old mystery Blended Scotch whiskies. I remember working through them, selecting the one I thought was best to be bottled for KWM to celebrate our 25th Anniversary. But it seems I also sampled another whisky that day… which they were keen to offer KWM as an exclusive.

I had completely forgotten about that other whisky until the morning my importer called me to inform me that both of my exclusive blends had arrived. “Both? I said, “I only remember a 25-year-old!” It seems I had also requested 300 bottles of 40-year-old Blended Scotch Whisky, bottled exclusively for KWM… I had vague memories of the whisky, and it seemed like the sort of thing I’d be interes...

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KWM 2022 Whisky Calendar Day 16: GlenDronach 12 Year Old

Posted on December 16, 2022

BONUS CONTENT: Andrew's write-up for today is on our Compass Box Kensington Wine Market 25th Anniversary Blend. Read about it here!

by Evan

Welcome to Day 16 for the 2022 KWM Whisky Calendar! We have had a palate workout with two cask strength whiskies in a row over the past two days, so maybe we should go for something a little more approachable today? Let’s talk about the GlenDronach 12-Year-Old!

Even though the 12-Year-Old GlenDronach has been the distilleries flagship bottling for ages, it is an interesting bottle to get for this year’s Whisky Calendar. One of the reasons for this is that the 12-Year-old has not been steadily available in our market for a few years, up until very recently when it made a long overdue return.

Why was that? That story starts with GlenDronach being sold to Brown-Forman, which happened back in the spring of 2016. After the purchase of BenRiach, Glenglassaugh, and GlenDronach, Brown-Forman decided to change a few things regarding the distribution of their newly obtained Scotch Whisky brands in different regions. Mainly, they decided to bring their new brands into their own distribution portfolio. This move, unfortunately, left the Canadian company that imported the three brands, and that had worked with those three brands for years, high and dry. As sometimes happens when two companies don’t play nice with one another, a legal squabble came into play and one of the bottles that were contested was GlenDronach 12-Year-Old.

This dispute ended up keeping the GlenDronach 12 Year, and a few other bottles, out of the Canada and Alberta market for a few years. Brown Forman eventually worked around this by creating a GlenDronach bottling that was exclusive to Canada: A 2009 vintage 10 Year Old, bottled at 43%. It was a very good whisky, and we still sell the 10 year today, though it has just become a 2011 vintage which may be even better than the 2009.

On a more global scale, the bottlings of BenRiach and GlenDronach have also undergone some changes since coming under the Brown-Forman Umbrella. Billy Walker was in charge of all things coming from the distilleries for more than a decade up the sale, and he stuck around until about 2017 when he went out and purchased GlenAllachie Distillery and went to work reviving it in much the same fashion as he did with BenRiach, GlenDronach, and Glenglassaugh. Before Billy Walker left, he picked industry veteran and Master Blender Dr. Rachael Barrie to succeed him. Barrie has been in charge of all bottlings of GlenDronach, BenRiach, and Glenglassaugh since Walker left. Barrie was responsible for the very good 10-Year-Old Vintage GlenDronach bottlings we have been seeing in Canada to hold us over from the GlenDronach 12 Year Old’s absence.

Anyhow, if my memory serves, the GlenDronach 12-Year-Old was gone from the shelves in Ca...

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History In A Bottle Day 16: Compass Box KWM 25th Anniversary Blend

Posted on December 16, 2022

This post is Bonus Content. It has information on one of the KWM Cask bottles that are featured on the back of our 2022 KWM Whisky Calendar box. You can find the blog post for the mini bottle for Day 16 of our 2022 KWM Whisky Calendar here.

by Andrew

This is a longer writeup than most of the others, but this is a very poignant whisky for me. I remember the day one of our customers sent me a link to an auction site in the UK. One of our Compass Box KWM 25th Anniversary bottlings sold at auction for nearly £400. Kind of cool, considering that was more than 3 ½ times what we sold them for. The craziest part though was that we still had stock of the whisky on our shelf!

I’ve been a fan of Compass Box for at least the last 15-16 years, and I consider its founder John Glaser to be one of the most influential people in whisky. For a while they were almost singlehandedly making Blended Scotch Whisky sexy and relevant again. I’d be bugging John for years about collaborating to create my own bespoke blend for KWM. In 2016 I was in London to meet with John at their offices when he said: “You have a significant anniversary coming up, don’t you? I think its time we finally make that blend!”

You need to appreciate how much of an honour this was and still is. Compass Box was at the height of their fame, and John was in high demand. Our bespoke blend was one of only a handful ever made for a retailer at this time, and since there haven’t been many more. Though we did get a second… more on that later.

My favourite expressions of Compass Box were Flaming Heart and Spice Tree, so that was the starting point for our creation which was tweaked over the course of a year until it was exactly how we wanted it. At one point we toyed with the idea of adding the line wash from the recent release of The Circus to the blend, but it didn’t quite work out. I love how John knew that something quirky like that would just add to the story of the final product.

In the end, we created an elegant, moderately peated whisky, composed of single malts from Clynelish, Caol Ila, Dailuaine, and Teaninich, blended with grains from Cambus and Cameronbridge. It was a hit, and we still have people asking for it. John wanted to call it the “Fort Whoop Up Blend,” after the notorious whiskey smuggling fort in Southern Alberta I’d told him about at some point. We ended up deciding on the boring and long, but concise: “Compass Box Kensington Wine Market 25th Anniversary Blend.” But John still found a way to include a mention of Fort Whoop Up on the back label (more on our website).

I am grateful for the nearly 20 year long relationship I’ve had with many wonderful people, and firms over the last 20 years. They have been instrumental to my own success, and tha...

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KWM 2022 Whisky Calendar Day 15: Dubh Glas KWM Cask

Posted on December 17, 2022

BONUS CONTENT: Andrew's write-up for today is on a one-of-a-kind Glen Scotia Single Cask we had a few years ago. Read about sadly long-gone Campbeltown Single Cask here!

by Evan

Before we get into this monster of a cask sample, here is a note from Andrew on the amount of whisky in this mini bottle:

"We are very sorry that one of the whiskies in this year’s Calendar, the Dubh Glas KWM Cask, is not 50ml as labelled on the bottle, but rather between 35 and 40ml. Having spoken to the producer I can assure you this was an honest mistake. The distillery ordered, and thought they had filled 50ml bottles, and accordingly labelled them as such.

For our part, though the bottle did look small-ish, we didn’t think to confirm the size. I thought that it might just have been thinner glass.

In any case, it was the 25th and final whisky put into this year’s Calendar and without it we would not have been able to complete the 2022 Whisky Calendars until Wednesday of this week (December 14), when one of the 5 extra products we ordered as insurance for this year’s Calendar finally arrived in-store. The 4 others, despite being ordered 6-12 months ago, have to the best of our knowledge never even shipped from their respective producers.

I am still excited to have this whisky in this year’s Calendar, it is the first time that many people outside of BC will have had the opportunity to sample whisky from the Dubh Glas Distillery. And further, this is a teaser from our own KWM Cask, which is maturing at the distillery, and will be bottled in the years ahead. It is also an incredible 75.4%ABV."

Sincerely,

Andrew Ferguson

Owner

Kensington Wine Market"

--

Buckle up and brace yourself for the whisky behind Door Number Fifteen in the 2022 KWM Whisky Calendar, because it’s gonna be a doozy. Weighing in a cask strength of 75% ABV, this is a KWM cask sample of a whisky we have maturing at Dubh Glas Distillery in Oliver, BC!

CLICK HERE to watch a live tasting of this whisky with Andrew and Dubh Glas Distillery owner Grant Stevely

Founded in 2015 by Grant Stevely, The distillery celebrated its 7th Anniversary in June 2022. As part of the new wave of craft distilleries that have been joining the ruckus over the past decade, Stevely’s first product to market was a gin. The distillery’s Noteworthy Gin has won many awards since its first release and is still going strong while being joined by a Navy Strength version as well as an oak-aged bottling.

If you haven’t been to Dubh Glas distillery, I highly recommend the trek to visit. The distillery is a small building that houses both the brewing and distilling equipment as well as much of the maturing barrels of whisky.
...

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History In A Bottle Day 15: Glen Scotia 1999 KWM Cask No. 359

Posted on December 15, 2022

This post is Bonus Content. It has information on one of the KWM Cask bottles that are featured on the back of our 2022 KWM Whisky Calendar box. You can find the blog post for the mini bottle for Day Fifteen of our Whisky Calendar here.

by Andrew

Campbeltown whisky is so hot right now, in no small part because there are only a handful of distilleries, and none of them have much in the way of output. The region has a coastal, oily style if we are to generalize. The most famous distillery is Springbank, and it has basically become the new Pappy Van Winkle with demand dwarfing supply so much that the secondary market is making some people act silly. Glen Scotia was for at least a few years a great alternative for those wanting a Campbeltown malt, but even it starting to become a hot potato.

Glen Scotia has a very oily profile, that can range from clean to dirty, and as it ages it can develop soft tropical fruits. We were lucky to bottle a Glen Scotia cask a few years back, and it was a beast. Distilled in 1999, the spirit was filled into an ex-Sherry cask, where it matured for just shy of 20 years, before bottling at 53.6%. The whisky displayed an almost violent tug of war between the sherry, peat and dirty engine oil. Off to the side, tropical fruits were pushing hard to make themselves seen. It was a very layered whisky, and a hit with our customers.

We have been asking to do another Glen Scotia cask for a while, and while we haven’t had any luck with another official bottling yet, we are expecting a new Glen Scotia Cask from Gordon & MacPhail next year!

Glen Scotia 1999 KWM Cask No. 359

Our first exclusive Glen Scotia is from an ex-sherry cask (likely a Hogshead) filled in July of 1999 and was bottled in March of 2019 after 19 years at 53.6%. 227 Total Bottles. The first official bottling of Glen Scotia ever to come to Canada, possibly North America.

Andrew's Tasting Note

Nose: cola cubes and old-fashioned root beer; delicate smoke, a touch of wasabi-ginger and salted caramel; a touch of the classic Glen Scotia dirty engine oil, honeydew melon, mango and brown sugar round out the nose.

Palate: big, rich, herbaceous and oily, very oily; this is classic Glen Scotia with a fine balance between the dirty engine oil-soaked rags, subtle maritime smoke and delicate fruits; more salted caramel, root beer cola cubes and chinotto; melons, mango and Granny Smith apples make way for wasabi, sliced ginger, clove and nutmeg.

Finish: long, coating and oily; like the palate, it moves in layers, with traces of fruit, spice and dirty engine oil; creamy and fruity for the finale.

Comment: This is a cracking Glen Scotia; it was made at a time when the distillery was severely neglected, almost decrepit; I have long marvelled at how this di...

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