Having walked the woodland path to Glenallachie from Aberlour last year and hand-filled a bottle (an excellent 2012 finished in a Languedoc red wine cask), it was time for a more extensive experience of the distillery. Glenallachie offers a variety of tours – the Glenallachie Experience for £25, the Premium Experience for £35, and the Connoisseurs’ Tour for £60. The latter is currently only available on Thursdays and so I plumped for the Premium Experience. Like the basic tour, it’s around an hour and includes a tasting of four drams (more premium ones I imagine?), with a greater focus on Master Distiller Billy Walker’s cask management programme. Sadly, I didn’t have my phone with me so there won’t be any photos other than the back of this warehouse below, but I wanted to do a write-up since it was a very good tour.
I appreciated the structure of the tour – a welcome dram to accompany an introduction by the guide, followed by the tour and then the tasting of the last three drams. The introductory dram (the 15 year-old in this case) always puts visitors in a good mood before the tour, and also it means you’re not in a hurry to finish all the whiskies right at the end. The tour was led by Keli, who immediately established a convivial atmosphere during the tasting of the 15 year-old before showing us around.
The tour itself featured the usual fare – a look at the Porteous mill that never breaks and a feel of the barley before ambling to the mash tun, washbacks and stills. Normally this tour doesn’t include a warehouse visit but Keli was kind and proactive enough to give us a sneak peek in one of the huge racked warehouses. As a modern distillery that was established in the 1960s to provide bulk for blends, Glenallachie is dominated by racked warehouses, although since the arrival of Billy Walker in 2017 they have also added traditional style dunnage warehouses. We also got to smell some empty casks – Oloroso, Pedro Ximenez, Bourbon and Port. Or at least we think that’s what the last one was – apparently it’s a ‘mystery’ cask and only Billy Walker knows its full story.
The washbacks are stainless steel and fermentation time is unusually long at 160 hours. I’ve seen distilleries refer to long fermentation times when talking about 70-80 hours, so this is indeed exceptional. Billy Walker has already established Glenallachie as a name to be reckoned with as a single malt, and given how good some of the wood finishes have been I can’t wait to have mainstream releases of spirit distilled and fully matured under his supervision. Another small difference to most distilleries is that Glenallachie have two spirit safes, which allow them to operate each pair of stills individually.
Back in the tasting room, we had the remaining three drams – a 13 year-old Madeira, the latest batch of the 10 year-old Cask Strength, and a 15 year-old Oloroso. The latter was the star of the show, but at 130-odd pounds it was a bit too expensive, and the same can be said for the Madeira, which didn’t impress me as much in any case. Those two were also the hand-fill options so it was looking like I’d go home empty-handed, but Keli had other ideas: after the tasting, she mentioned there was a 13 year-old Oloroso matured distillery exclusive that was a big hit with fans of the core range 15. She was right – the sample she offered immediately hooked me, and it was an easy sell at £70. We were also offered a sample of the 7 year-old Hungarian Virgin Oak – I found that a bit too sweet and woody, which was just as well for my budget!
A successful visit then – a very good intermediate-level tour, fun tasting and above all great hospitality by the team at Glenallachie. Would highly recommend if you ever get the chance.
The Daily Dram 