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History In A Bottle Day 8: Glendronach 1972 KWM Cask 711 39 Year

Posted on December 8, 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 Eight of our Whisky Calendar here.

by Andrew

Like a parent forced to choose their favourite child, I am not sure I could say for certain which of our 145 KWM exclusive casks and counting is my favourite. But backed into a corner, and forced to make Sophie’s choice, I’d likely pick our 39-year-old GlenDronach. The whisky is the 4th oldest cask we’ve ever had the privilege of bottling for KWM, and it came about almost by chance.

The year was 2011, and I had a group of whisky collectors with me on a tour of the Speyside region. One of the highlights of the tour was going to be a warehouse tasting at GlenDronach. We spent well over an hour sampling our way through the warehouse with the distillery manager Alan McConnochie. Even if nothing more came from the experience, this was going to be one of the highlights of the whole trip… but something serendipitous happened!

In the old times, employees would often steal drams of whisky from casks with a bit of sealed copper tubbing which hung discretely down one of their pant legs. These were known as ‘dogs’, and the practice of stealing a like whisky from a cask was known as ‘walking the dog.’ I can clearly remember asking Alan near the end of our time in the warehouse: “if you were the sort of person to walk the dog… which cask would you most want to pull a dram from?” Without hesitation, he walked us over to a 1972 GlenDronach, cask 711.

The colour was something else, but it was the moment the vapours from the spirit hit my nose that I knew I was in trouble… The lady and gents on this trip were all serious whisky collectors, and they were going to want me to buy the cask. Hell, I wanted to buy the cask, but this was a full Oloroso Sherry Butt full of 39-year-old whisky, and it wasn’t going to be cheap. It also wasn’t my money on the line. What would my boss say?

That night over dinner, after some phone calls and a little bit of math, I made a proposal. If the 9 customers travelling with me collectively committed to purchasing 50 bottles, I would have half the cask, or at least 300 bottles of it, bottled for KWM. The rest as they say is history, the bottles came in, they didn’t last long, and the only thing left was a twinge of regret on my part for not purchasing all 500 of them!

Glendronach 1972 KWM Cask 711 39 Year

Andrew's Tasting Note

Nose: browned and bruised fruit, melons: cantaloupe and honeydew; brown sugar, Highland toffee, cinnamon butter and tropical fruits; the deepness of the sherry notes and the magnitude and complexity of its fruits is approaching that of the Black Bowmore 1964 42 Year (one of, if not my favourite whisky of all time!); it's as though a box of Christmas spices and another of cocoa powder have been spilled into a bowl of mixed fruits.

Palate: brandy-soaked cherries, sticky toffee pudding with treacle sauce; maple syrup, Pedro Ximenez Sherry notes and round Christmas cake notes with marzipan, molasses, and more festive winter spices; layers of nuts: candied almonds and beer nuts with tropical fruits: mango, papaya, melons and figs; rich chocolate notes too including dark goat milk and unsweetened baker's chocolates.

Finish: drying and long with more notes of dark chocolate, melons, sweet spices and licorice; the drying oak starts to make the whisky's age felt here but it is restrained by dark fruits and tobacco.

Andrew Ferguson

Owner

Kensington Wine Market

This entry was posted in Whisky, KWM Whisky Calendar 2022, KWM Single Cask

 

 

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