Glenlivet 85 Year Old: the story of the world’s oldest single malt
Independent bottler Gordon & MacPhail is famed for its long-aged single malts, but this is something different: Gordon & MacPhail 85 Years Old from Glenlivet Distillery, the oldest single malt yet bottled, with 125 decanters available, priced at £125,000 each. Richard Woodard gives it a taste.
The Speyside winter of early 1940 was hard in more ways than one: the onset of the Second World War had led to a drastic reduction in the output of Scotch whisky distilleries, including perhaps the most famous of them all: The Glenlivet. Most plants had already cut distillation by half; The Glenlivet by two-thirds.
At such a difficult time, The Glenlivet owner Bill Smith Grant welcomed the prospect of filling a few casks for Gordon & MacPhail (G&M), the Elgin-based grocer that was also the licensed bottler for the distillery. On 3 February 1940, G&M’s John Urquhart and his son George, only 21 at the time, oversaw the filling of five ex-Sherry hogsheads, including cask number 336 – destined to become the oldest single malt in history.
“The Glenlivet relished getting an income for their spirits, and they also got some storage revenue,” explains Stephen Rankin, director of prestige at G&M today, and a member of the fourth generation of the owning family. “We stored the cask with them until 1968, when it was transferred to Elgin.” That constituted only the first stage of cask 336’s long journey through time.
Back in 1940 – even more so than today – Scotch whisky was dominated by blends, the household names established in many cases by grocers and shopkeepers like Gordon & MacPhail: Johnnie Walker, Ballantine’s, Bell’s, Dewar’s. Unusually at the time, G&M focused on bottling single malts, and single malts of some age; still, neither John nor George Urquhart could have foreseen that the whisky inside cask 336 would lie undisturbed for eight-and-a-half decades.
On 5 February 2025, precisely 85 years and two days after being filled into cask, that whisky was finally bottled; and now, months later, it is ready to be sold: Gordon & MacPhail 85 Years Old from Glenlivet Distillery, 125 decanters, priced at £125,000 each.
Ageing a whisky beyond the average human lifespan is a complex and delicate business. Will enough of the liquid survive, and will it be of the required quality and alcoholic strength? Rankin estimates that only about 20% of the original spirit remained in cask 336 when it was bottled, at a strength of 43.7% ABV (the legal minimum for Scotch is 40%). “It’s a real challenge when the whisky gets down to that level,” he explains. “That process of evaporation is going to slowly start to accelerate – so it’s important to catch that exact point. As the whisky grows older, the frequency of our sampling increases.”
That sampling doesn’t take place in isolation. Each cask is compared to its brethren – the other casks of similar age and provenance lying alongside them. And the G&M liquid library of maturing whisky in the company’s Elgin warehouses is more extensive than most, spanning 112 different distilleries, plus a host of different ages and cask types. “You’re comparing the whiskies to the last time you tried them,” explains Rankin. “You’re creating a three-dimensional picture of how this whisky is maturing. Our philosophy is to give every cask a fate or destiny, but that destiny can change.”
Eighty-five years is an impressive number, but it’s an irrelevance if the quality of the whisky doesn’t match the drinker’s expectations. Rankin is at pains to emphasise that this Glenlivet “hasn’t been bottled because it’s very old – it’s been bottled because of its outstanding quality. We know because we’ve been monitoring it for so long”.
Safeguarding that quality isn’t mere serendipity; it needs the right cask. Cask 336 began life as a ‘transport cask’, used to ship Williams & Humbert Rich Oloroso from Jerez in Spain to G&M’s Elgin store; once the Sherry was sold, the empty cask was ready for its second, and considerably longer, life.
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Cask 336 was coopered from tight-grained Quercus alba, or American oak, with big, thick staves to survive the voyage from Spain to Scotland. These factors all helped to slow the maturation of the whisky filled into the cask to a snail’s pace.
And the whisky itself? “If you had given me that blind…” Rankin begins. His first impression is of a “fresh, vibrant” quality more readily associated with something about 40 years old. But then: “I get these little clues of a little bit of cold coal smoke, from when they were making it [The Glenlivet] with direct-fired stills – those old-school flavours seeping in subtly.”
Rankin recalls the launch of a previous G&M Glenlivet – a mere 70-year-old – and a vertical tasting of Glenlivet whiskies from the 1930s to the 1990s conducted in the presence of ex-Glenlivet master distiller Alan Winchester. “The one thing that came through right from the early ones was this wonderful orange note,” Rankin says. “But also a sooty, industrial kind of smoke. When you taste whiskies from this period, you get this wonderful nuance of smoke coming through, and in time it becomes more and more integrated, more subtle.”
Bottling an 85-year-old whisky in 2025 necessarily comes with quite a lot of fanfare: the 125 decanters – with the title ‘Artistry in Oak’ – were designed by American architect Jeanne Gang, incorporating four bronze branches that cradle the decanter itself. The concept is a continuation of cask 336’s long journey – the whisky may have been bottled, but the oak still stands guard.
Of the 125 decanters, 124 will be available direct from Gordon & MacPhail via expressions of interest on the company’s website (there have been more than 800, Rankin reports, when we speak in late August). Decanter #1, signed by Gang, will be auctioned by Christie’s New York online from 7-21 November.
With a pre-sale low estimate of US$160,000, the lot comprises the decanter, the head of cask 336 mounted and framed, Gang’s pre-design oak tree sketch and a whisky experience and tasting with either Stephen Rankin or his cousin, G&M sales director Richard Urquhart. The proceeds, minus costs, will go to American Forests, a leader in forest restoration and the oldest nonprofit conservation organisation in the US.
The release of Gordon & MacPhail 85 Years Old from Glenlivet comes just over a year after Macallan launched the previous record holder, the 84-year-old Time:Space single malt. It raises the obvious question: how high can you go? After all, we’ve already had House of Hazelwood announcing its plan to bottle the world’s first 100-year-old grain whisky via its One for the Next concept.
We’ll have to wait until 2065 for that release but, given the riches contained in the Gordon & MacPhail warehouses in Elgin, might there be yet older releases still to come from the company? Rankin won’t be drawn on that. Time, as ever, will tell.
Tasting Note
Gordon & MacPhail 85 Years Old from Glenlivet Distillery
£125,000/70cl; 43.7% ABV. Enquiries to gordonandmacphail.com
There’s scarcely a thimbleful of liquid in the glass, but already the aromas of vibrant fruit, spun sugar and the merest whisper of coal smoke are apparent. While the fruit note – orange zest one moment, stewed plums the next – permeates both nose and palate, the sooty smoke is more elusive, drifting in and out of view. What began delicately is putting on muscle through the mid-palate, with dry spice and that hard-to-pin-down tang of whisky rancio. After so long in the dark, this needs to time to find its feet… come back to it and there’s some bitter orange, then tobacco leaf and cigar box; ancient leather and the earthy scents of a deep cellar. In time, various aspects of this whisky’s long life are apparent, from the zesty fruit of its youth to the darker flavours that only come from decades of gentle maturation. Most of us can only dream of having such dignity and grace at such a venerable age.
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