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Day 5 - KWM 2025 This Is Still Not An Advent Calendar

Posted on December 7, 2025

The recap tasting video for Days and Doors 1 thru 5 is up on YouTube and can be found here.

by Evan

Okay – hands up if you are sick of me mentioning Pernod Ricard in these blog posts? The French spirits company has played a role in shaping the brands and whisky we have talked about over the past three days for KWM’s 2025 Still Not An Advent Whisky Tastings. That changes for Day Five! As far as I can tell, Pernod Ricard has had nothing to do with the creation of the Ardnahoe Infinite Loch.

This is the second year in a row we are featuring Ardnahoe Distillery in our KWM Advent Whisky tastings. On Day 4 of the 2024 KWM This Is Not An Advent Calendar, we tasted the distillery’s 5 Year Old Inaugural Release.

Ardnahoe is the youngest of 10 currently operating distilleries on Islay to have released whisky. Here are the currently running and upcoming Islay Distilleries as of December 2025, listed based on founding date:

Bowmore — 1779
Ardbeg — 1815
Lagavulin — 1816
Laphroaig — 1820
Caol Ila – 1846
Bunnahabhain — 1880
Bruichladdich — 1881
Kilchoman — 2005
Ardnahoe — 2019
Port Ellen – 1825 / 2024
Portintruan – 2026 ish?
Laggan Bay – 2026 ish?
Gartbreck – 2027 ish?

Owning and operating a distillery on Islay so hot right now, as the cool kids would say. The only place in Scotland that would be sexier for having one is probably Campbeltown. Because who doesn’t love the idea of operating a distillery where you are so remote the costs go up significantly due to having to ship your equipment and malt from far away? It is even harder to distill on Islay now, thanks to Diageo seemingly keeping all of Port Ellen’s malt production to themselves. Maybe that will change now that the Scotch Whisky market seems to be in a downturn.

Regardless of economics, Ardnahoe is no longer the new kid on the block and will soon look as experienced as Kilchoman Distillery relative to newcomers Port Ellen (revivied), Portintruan, Laggan Bay, and Gartbreck.

Spirits behemoth Diageo is behind Port Ellen revival. The Distillery was shuttered in 1983 and has been revived completely rebuilt. Diageo and is already selling casks collectors and has dollar signs (or British Pound Sterling signs?) in its eyes at the prospect of gouging whisky geeks everywhere when it eventually releases new Port Ellen Single Malt once more.

Portintruan was supposed to have opened by now, but hit a stumbling block last year when the company building it went into receivership.

Laggan Bay is being jointly planned by a group called the Islay Boys and Ian MacLeod Distillers. Ian Macleod are the owners of Glengoyne and Tamdhu, as well as...

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Day 4 - KWM 2025 This Is Still Not An Advent Calendar

Posted on December 7, 2025

The recap tasting video for Days and Doors 1 thru 5 is up on YouTube and can be found here.

by Evan

Canadian Club Whisky Is one of the best known and best-selling Canadian Whisky brands around. Only Crown Royal is known more and sold more world-wide. It is also the oldest Canadian Whisky brand in use today. It was first launched by Hiram Walker in 1882 as ‘Club Whisky’, with the ‘Canadian’ part of the name amended in 1888.

Historically, Canadian Club has always been linked with the Hiram Walker Distillery of Windsor, Ontario. However, the Canadian Club brand and the Hiram Walker Distillery have been owned by separate companies for two decades now. In 2005, French company Pernod Ricard acquired Allied Domecq, owners of The Hiram Walker Distillery and the Canadian Club Brand. This was also when and how Pernod Ricard acquired Scapa distillery, which we talked about yesterday, along with the Ballentine’s whisky Brand as well as the Miltonduff, Glenburgie and Tormore distilleries.

Fat and bloated with indigestion and excess brands from the acquisition, Pernod Ricard had to parcel and sell off some of the excess brands and distilleries to avoid competition regulation issues.

One of the brands Pernod Ricard parted ways was Canadian Club Whisky; choosing to focus on Wiser's as the flagship Canadian Whisky brand of the distillery.

The buyer of Canadian Club Whisky was called Fortune Brands. Fortune Brands split off its liquor division in 2011, which was dubbed Beam Inc. As in Jim Beam. Beam Inc was acquired by the Japanese company Suntory Holdings in 2014 for a cool 16 Billion dollars. The company that owns Canadian Club is now called Suntory Global Spirits. The only distillery owned by Suntory Global in Canada is Alberta Distillers, right here in Calgary, Alberta.

Canadian Club whisky has some... difficulty when it comes to being honest about how and where the whisky is made - at least if you go by what is shown on the canadianclub.com website.

Case in point: check out this image from their website below, which shows an impressive row of copper pot stills.

The problem is: I am pretty damn certain that those stills have absolutely nothing to do with Canadian Club Whisky.

From what I can tell, the still house in that photo does not even reside in Canada. My best guess from a bit of Google searching is that is a picture taken of the interior of Ardmore Distillery's still house in Kennethmont, Scotland. Ardmore Distillery is owned by Suntory Global, who also own the Canadian Club Whisky brand.

That is where the Ardmore and Canadian Club connection ends as far as I can tell. I doubt the Scottish Ardmore Distillery is producing whisky for Canadian Club, though. So what gives?

This is only the second time ...

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Day 3 - KWM 2025 This Is Still Not An Advent Calendar

Posted on December 22, 2025

The recap tasting video for Days and Doors 1 thru 5 is up on YouTube and can be found here.

by Evan

Day 3 is here for our KWM 2025 Still Not An Advent Calendar tasting series. For this very special Day 3, we are breaking new ground. Brace yourselves, for this marks the first time in this year’s Advent tastings where we will NOT be tasting whisky from a distillery whose name starts with Glen. That’s right, folks, we are changing things up! Today’s whisky comes from independent bottler Gordon & MacPhail. Say hello to the G&M Connoisseurs Choice Scapa 2000 Canada Cask.

If my records are correct, this Is the first time that Scapa Distillery has been featured in a KWM Whisky Advent Calendar. A bit surprising that it hasn’t been used in any of our 12 calendars before this one, but there are not exactly a bunch of Scapa bottlings around. There are a few official bottles, but indie bottlings of Scapa are about as rare as hen’s teeth. Gordon & MacPhail is the only bottler to put out Scapa that comes to mind.

Scapa is not a large distillery, and sadly, it does not get the focus and attention it perhaps should by its parent company. Whisky from Scapa is well respected and sought after by many whisky geeks. There just isn’t a lot of it around.

The Distillery was founded in 1885. Production from opening remained fairly consistent until around 1919, when it was damaged in a fire. Sounds like just about every other centuries-old distillery so far, right?

Lack of money forced the ownership of Scapa into liquidation in 1934 and production was halted until it was purchased in 1936 by the Bloch Brothers. That is the Bloch Brothers company that resided at 138 Renfield Street in Glasgow, which also owned the Glen Scotia and Glengyle distilleries in Campbeltown at the time. Not to be confused with the Bloch Brothers in Ohio who were famous for their chewing tobacco at around the same time. Those Bloch Brothers would be discussed in an entirely different type of Advent Calendar.

Also, the Glengyle Distillery referred to is the old Glengyle distillery, which shut down permanently in 2014. The current Glengyle Distillery came to being in 2004 and produces the Kilkerran Single Malt Scotch. But I digress.

Back to Scapa. Thanks to the 20+ year whisky downturn that started in the 1980s, Scapa ended up at a point was barely limping along operationally. By 1994, the distillery was only used occasionally for spirit runs, and that was only thanks to staff from the nearby Highland Park distillery being contracted to do so. The Scapa 14 Year was released in 2004 – marking the first time a distillery bottling was given a marketing push. A sizeable renovation of the distillery took place the same year. In 2005, Chivas Brothers/Pernod Ricard became the owners of Scapa when they acq...

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Day 2 - KWM 2025 This Is Still Not An Advent Calendar

Posted on December 7, 2025

The recap tasting video for Days and Doors 1 thru 5 is up on YouTube and can be found here.

by Evan

We are back on the blog for Day 2 of Kensington Wine Market’s 2025 Still Not An Advent Calendar tastings. Today, we will be diving into the GlenAllachie 15 Year Old.

One could argue that this isn’t a tremendous shift in style versus the SMWS Glenfarclas we just tasted on Day One. Perhaps that is a fair assessment. Both that bottle and this GlenAllachie 15 Year are sherry-driven drams from distilleries that have a heavy focus on the use of sherry casks for maturing their whisky. Also, they both start with Glen and reside in the Speyside region of Scotland. What are the odds!?! We will get to tasting this dram in a bit to see if it is a veritable clone of Day One’s dram. My guess is that it won’t be, but who knows at this point? Let’s talk about GlenAllachie before we find out.

Compared to Glenfarclas, the GlenAllachie Distillery is quite young. This plucky newcomer wasn’t even around when the Pattison Whisky Crisis nearly made Glenfarclas fold. Glenallachie Distillery was founded only last century, in 1967, by a subsidiary of the Scottish & Newcastle Company. The distillery started producing spirit in 1968 and operated for nearly two decades until it was purchased and mothballed by Invergordon Distillers in 1985. The distillery was sold to Campbell Distillers in 1989 and restarted production. Campbell Distillers eventually became part of the company now known as Pernod Ricard. Under Pernod Ricard’s slash Chivas Brothers' wing, Glenallachie’s output was used almost entirely for blending, but that would change significantly in 2017.

8 years ago, on October 2nd of 2017, a group headed by Billy Walker. His first order of business? To capitalize the A in GlenAllachie in a similar move to what he pulled off previously at the BenRiach and GlenDronach distilleries. It must be some sort of fetishistic impulse. The man must be stopped! The next move in Billy’s playbook, of course, was to improve the whisky creation and maturation regime at the distillery and focus on getting the best sherry casks possible to mature GlenAllachie’s whisky in.

A lot of time was spent carefully checking the distillery’s stock of maturing whisky inventory and re-racking a good deal of it in newer or better casks. This has been paying off tremendously over the near decade of Billy Walker & co’s stewardship of the distillery and launching of GlenAllachie as a serious Single Malt Scotch Whisky brand.

GlenAllachie Distillery is located Aberlour, Scotland. It is only about a 7-minute drive North and East from Glenfarclas Distillery, along the A95. Its closest neighbours include Aberlour Distillery itself, which is just another few minutes drive North and East on the A95. Being in...

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

Posted on December 7, 2025

The recap tasting video for Days and Doors 1 thru 5 is up on YouTube and can be found here.

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.

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) ...

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