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Day 1 - KWM 2025 This Is Still Not An Advent Calendar

Posted on December 1, 2025

by Evan

Welcome to Day One in our KWM Still Not a Whisky Advent Tasting journey for 2025!

If you are like me, you have been anxiously waiting for December and this year’s round of Advent tastings since about December 27th of last year.

I could go off on a spiel about how much I missed all of you and these little clear bottles and doing these blog posts and the virtual tastings, but that’s a given. So! Let’s get right down to it and talk about our first of 25 whiskies in for this year’s marathon!

So, crack open that first door on your calendar tasting series, pull out that shrinkflation-induced scale model of a Glencairn Whisky glass and that first sample.

A person looking at a model AI-generated content may be incorrect.

This year, we are starting at a place we have often ended on in past Whisky Advent tastings – with a bottle from the Scotch Malt Whisky Society. Say hello to SMWS 1.300 – MISTLETOE AND WHISKY.

If you are not yet familiar with the Scotch Malt Whisky Society and what they do, here is a brief introduction:

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society is the world's largest whisky club, and also an independent bottler. As a club, it has close to 40,000 members all over the world. It has branches in more than 20 different countries, including right here in Canada. It bottles as broad a range of single cask, single malt Scotch whiskies as any other firm - if not more - and it doesn't stop there. It has also bottled Japanese whiskies, Bourbon, Rye, Grain whisky, Cognac, Armagnac, Rum, and Gin. Whether it is a whisky or another spirit, the Society always bottles the spirit from a single cask, straight from the cask, Unfiltered. Undiluted. Unrivalled.

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society was officially founded back in 1983. Membership to the SMWS is easy and gives you exclusive access to the widest selection of single cask single malt whiskies anywhere in the world. The Canada Chapter of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society celebrated its 10th birthday in October of 2021. Only Scotch Malt Whisky Society members can buy our exclusive single cask single malt whiskies, but anyone can purchase a sample kit for one of the monthly Outturn Tastings we hold online. We're confident once you've had a taste you will want to join the club. For more information on the SMWS and SMWS Canada, you can visit their web page at www.smws.ca.

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society does not put the name of the distillery directly on the bottle or in the tasting notes. Instead, everything is codified. That brings us to the bottle for today. Check out the label, and you will find it says SOCIETY CASK NO. 1.300. What the heck do those numbers mean? The first set of numbers before the decimal (the 63) means that this is from the 63rd distillery ever bottled by the Scotch Malt Whisky Society since its inception. The first distillery that the Society ever bottled a cask from is Glenfarclas, so SMWS Glenfarclas bottles are always labelled as 1.xxx. Glenlivet was the 2nd distillery ever bottled by the SMWS so bottles from it are labelled 2.xxx. The 42nd distillery ever bottled was Tobermory, so SMWS bottlings distilled at Tobermory are labelled as 42.xx. And so on. The .300 of the 1.300 means that this is the 300th cask from Glenfarclas that the SMWS has ever bottled. Quite the milestone, eh?

Many of us are very familiar with Glenfarclas as a distillery and the story of the Grant family behind it. The distillery has been owned by the Grants for six Generations now. To keep things simple for the rest of us to remember the family history, all six patriarchs of the family have been named John or George. The current face of the distillery is John. The family has owned the distillery for more than 150 years.

The Grant's see themselves as curators of Glenfarclas Distillery for future generations of their family. Going legal in 1836 and run by the Grant Family since 1870, Glenfarclas as a brand has been the very model of consistency for quite a long time. This unwavering persistence is refreshing compared to the vast and often confusing changes other Scotch Whisky labels have gone through over the past decade or more. They want to make sure that what has been built remains, so they don’t make big decisions solely based on the boom-and-bust ecosystem of the whisky industry. Change is great, and change is fun, but it is refreshing to find a family and a distillery that doesn’t change everything based on the whims of trends and shareholders.

This perseverance and consistency and long-term planning is a reaction to a crisis that happened for not just Glenfarclas, but for much of the Scotch Whisky industry in the late 1800s. Back then, the Grants were not entirely in control of their own destiny as Glenfarclas Distillery was 50% owned by Pattison, Elder & Co. of Leith. That ended up being a tremendous problem when that company collapsed due to unpaid debts and some creative (fictitious) accounting, and the two owners were convicted and sent to jail for fraud in 1901.

With Glenfarclas Distillery’s very existence at stake, the two Grant bothers in charge at the time – John and George – were forced to sell off current stock and future production to dig the distillery out of debt. Luckily, this scheme worked, and now the family continues to work to ensure that the same thing never happens again.

How about we taste some whisky?

SMWS 1.300 – MISTLETOE AND WHISKY – 57.5%

This 13 year old Speysider spent 10 years in an ex-bourbon barrel before being transferred to a 1st fill PX hogshead, and has an abv of 57.7%.

Evan’s Tasting Note

Nose: This is like smelling cloves and liquorice while drinking mulled wine in front of a fireplace loaded with wood that is just catching and still-burning embers underneath. The nose is full of figs, dark chocolate, and dense fruit cake.

Palate: More figs, dates, raisins, and fruitcake along with roasted hazelnuts and walnuts. Caramelized brown sugar, molasses, candied orange peel, mulling spices, nutmeg, plus an underlying salty note and just a touch of savoury steak sauce.

Finish: Long, sweet and nutty with lingering mulling spices and cloves.

Comment: Both sweeter on the palate and showing a slightly different spice profile than a typical Glenfarclas. This is a big, bold and rich dram that is sure to warm the cockles of any one’s heart.

What a great dram to start our Still Not An Advent Calendar on! Perhaps it helps that it is minus ten centigrade and blowing snow outside as I type this. Regardless, this Scotch Malt Whisky Society Glenfarclas is just what the doctor ordered. I can’t wait to see what the doctor has in store for tomorrow!

There you have it. We are now officially back in the saddle for another December full of Advent Whisky tasting fun! See you tomorrow for Day Two!

A quick note: We do have full bottles of this whisky as I post this. If you want to gift an SMWS membership to somebody that you know enjoys whisky and would love this bottle, you can purchase it for them and they will get their first year of Scotch Malt Whisky Society Membership thrown in for free!

If you have questions on this, feel free to email me.

Cheers,
Evan

evan@kensingtonwinemarket.com

This entry was posted in Whisky, Tastings, Scotch Malt Whisky Society, Whisky Calendars, Tastings - Online Tasting, KWM 2025 Still Not An Advent Calendar Tastings

 

 

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