Nov. 9: Online Tasting with Glenturret's Distillery Manager Ian Renwick...
Fellow Drammers!
On, Saturday, Nov. 9th starting at Noon Pacific / 3pm EST in the US, and 20:00 in Scotland, we’re excited to welcome Ian Renwick, the Distillery Manager for The Glenturret Distillery for a special online tasting working our way through their full range of single malt Scotch. The distillery is a fascinating one, as Ian has said “We’ve got 260 years of history but we’re like the new kid on the block at whisky festivals.” That’s due in part to an ownership change that occurred in 2019, when Edrington sold the distillery to luxury goods specialist Lalique Group and Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss. Edrington had championed it as the home of the blended Scotch The Famous Grouse, but now the new owners are only using the distillery’s whisky for single malts, so for a lot of whisky enthusiasts, the distillery might as well be new. And certainly, we’d be hard pressed to find someone in a better position to tell us the story of how Glenturret evolved — Ian started working at the distillery a few times a week in the 1980s, at the time for a maintenance company that serviced the facility, and became a formal employee of the distillery in 1996. From there he worked his way up, becoming Production Supervisor in 2000 and Distillery Manager in 2017. If you want to hear how things really are at The Glenturret, or certainly any detail of how the whisky is made and has evolved, he’s the person you’d want to talk to.
And so we shall on Nov. 9th! And we’ll be drinking some delightful whiskies to go along with our discussion:
Glenturret 25yo (2022 edition). This pour alone is worth the cost of admission — very few of these bottles are released, and the ones that do his stores retail north of $1,500/bottle. We’re looking forward to trying this for the first time! 42.2% abv
Glenturret 12yo (2023 ed.). Created from a combination of under 60 casks, this batch features a mix of American oak hogshead casks and European oak. 46% abv
Glenturret Peated 10yo (2023 ed.). Next up, we’ll compare the 2022 vs. the 2023 editions of Glenturret’s 10yo peated to show how this spirit is evolving. While we don’t tend to think of Highland Scotch as being peated, like many old Highland distilleries it was long part of Glenturret’s history (records show that The Glenturret dug peat from the mosses at their water source for whisky production in the early 1800’s). The whisky is matured in both first fill and second fill European and American oak casks. 50% ABV.
Glenturret 10yo (2022 ed.). Again, the goal here is to compare different vintages from this distillery, which can show real variation. That is doubly true for their peated expressions, now that The Glenturret uses a range of peat sources. 50% abv.
Glenturret Peated 7yo (2023 ed.). Finally, we’ll also take a look at what a younger version of their spirit tastes like, peated no less, and at a lower abv than the 10yo at 46% abv.
That’s our lineup, we hope you can join us! Please let us know if you have any questions!