Balvenie, Single Malt Rare Marriages 40YO 42.2%, Speyside

The Balvenie was built in 1892 by William Grant, next door to the Glenfiddich distillery he already owned at Dufftown, and William Grant & Sons has held it ever since. It is one of the few distilleries still malting barley on its own floors — a small share of what it mashes, some of it grown on the distillery's own farm, dried with a little peat — and it keeps coopers on site to work its casks. What comes off its fat, short-necked, boil-ball stills is sweet and honeyed, a different spirit altogether from its neighbour's.

Cask finishing is what Balvenie is known for. David Stewart, who joined the company in 1962 and was made MBE in 2016, began moving nearly-mature whisky into a second cask in the early 1980s. It reached the shelf as The Classic in 1983, among the first Scotch whiskies to be finished in a second cask, and in 1993 as the DoubleWood 12 Year Old, which carried the practice into the mainstream.

Alongside the core range sit the Malt Master's hand-picked bottlings. Tun 1401 was the first of these: four traditional casks and two sherry butts married for several months in the distillery's oak marrying tun, 336 bottles, sold in 2010 at the distillery and nowhere else. Nine batches were released in all, running to 2013, before Tun 1509 replaced the series. The Rare Marriages that followed from 2021 — twenty-five, thirty and forty years old — take whisky matured separately in American and European oak and marry it the same way.