Glenturret Peated

This is the third episode in this series so I will leave out the bit about who I am and why I am doing it and get straight to some other things.  I am also not going to talk about bottle prices as I find it can be a distraction and misleading - but when a bottle sells at £65k it does suggest something…

When I was a very young child I had a sip of my uncles whisky mac, it put me off ginger but I was not put off whisky.  This was my first experience of what became a great passion in my life.  We often remember our firsts and my first distillery was Glenturret.  It was back in the last millennium and was part of a spontaneous decision to suddenly pack our bags, put the children in the car and drive to Scotland.  Before the days of having the internet we somehow found a place to stay in the town of Crieff and during our stay we visited the distillery.  In many ways this was one of the main factors in me choosing to look at whisky with more of a focussed interest.

I have a strong suspicion that this may be a whisky that many haven’t tried - especially not on a cruise ship so why am I mentioning this whisky in this series?  Part of the reason for me doing this is to help people discover some hidden gems and this is one of them.  I have often felt that cruise ships, namely Celebrity Cruise Ships, have a poor selection of peated whiskies.  I am always surprised by this as a peaty whisky goes well with sea spray - although modern ships seem to focus less on the sea and more on being a venue in their own right.  Whilst doing a mixology class on the Celebrity President’s Cruise 2025 I was amazed to see a bottle hiding away on the shelf.  The bottle has a distinctive shape and I asked for it to be bought forward - This was the Glenturret Peat Smoked and it was a major find for a number of reasons - reasons I will share with you.

My mind can wander off when I think about whisky and when I think about Glenturret I wander to thoughts about a bird and an animal.  The bird is a grouse - A famous Grouse.  For  a long time the distillery was the home of The Famous Grouse Experience - I will confess that I visited the distillery long before that was there.  Famous Grouse is a well known and best selling blend with a selection of expressions.  It is one I have had on many occasions and it would be easy to get side tracked into talking about it to the point that it dominates this episode.  I am going to avoid doing that as there is so much else to focus on - so having mentioned it lets move on and have a quick look at the animal.  The animal in question is a cat.  Not just any cat but Towser for whom there is a statue at the distillery.  Born in 1963 Towser lived for just under 24 years and defended the distillery’s grain by dispensing with almost 29 thousand mice, which she kindly laid out on the distillery floor - earning her the Guinness world record of the world’s greatest mouser.

The distillery is also known for another claim - Scotland’s oldest distillery.  Whilst there are Irish distilleries that are older and whilst there are other Scottish distilleries that might wish to challenge the claim, there can be no doubt that Glenturret has a long history.

The distillery has changed its name a few times over the years.  It was first known as The Thurot distillery and this is recorded in a rental agreement dated in 1763.  However, there are reports of illicit distilling in the area happening before that, as is not uncommon in the whisky world.  In 1814 the distillery was sold and changed its name to the Hosh Distillery, Hosh meaning the ‘foot of the Glen’. It was during this era that in the 1860’s that tragedy struck the distillery.  This was a time when women working in the whisky industry was different to how it has become, a time when women’s position in society itself was very different. The distillery employed a woman within the production staff.  Her name was Grace Gow and her body was found in one of the fermentation vessels.  It is easy to underestimate how dangerous a distillery can be, especially before modern health and safety.  Even if you put aside the temptations of sampling the product, and there are many tales from many distilleries of people doing so - it is where the term ‘bootleg’ comes from, and when you understand that it was once common practice for the workers to be given regular daily amounts of new make spirit to drink, there are many dangers within such a workplace.  The amount of physical labour in humid and yeast ridden air can cause problems.  The milling of grain can fill the air with a mist of flammable particles, the stills become hot and will heat the entire room and the warehouse is filled with heavy and round casks stacked on top of each other.  For Grace it was the fermentation area.  Fermentation can smell wonderful.  Go to any such area and you will certainly take in an enjoyable gulp of air that warms the soul.  It is a similar smell to the one that some bakeries pump out to encourage customers in.  However, over time and in close quarters they are a soporific combination of toxic gases that lull a person into slumber and deprives them of oxygen.  It is why these areas are now carefully vented. Grace’s death was a tragedy. The unusual thing, and maybe a testament to her popularity, is that it was reported in the press.  This was a time when a woman’s death would not normally be reported as news, a man’s passing would be but a woman’s would be a side note rather than a feature.  Grace made the papers and a place in history.  Jumping forward in time and her name has been given to limited releases of whisky as well as a scholarship program. It was this scholarship that was awarded to Fiona Mac Donald which, in turn, enabled her to become the first female member of the production team at Glenturret since Grace Gow. 

Returning to the timeline and 1825 when they secured the rights to use water from the Loch and local peat, two factors that some would claim gave a specific identity to the whisky, and a relevant factor considering that we are interested specifically in the peat smoked expression.  Then in 1873 it changed its name again, this time to The Glenturret.  Originally owned by Sir Patrick Murray, then sold to Thomas Mcinnes and then, in 1825, to John and Hugh Drummond the distillery changed hands again in 1890 to the Mitchell brothers, a name known to many in the whisky world. The Mitchell brothers had formed a dynamic and developing company that was to become a giant presence throughout the world.  Dark times, however, were ahead.  A threat of temperance at home and prohibition in America. High taxes and fierce competition, and people being tempted by more consistent and reliable blends which came with a cheaper price tag were all having an effect - then there was the globally impacting horror of a world war.  In 1923 the distillery stopped and the stills went cold.  This is not to say that it disappeared or stopped to exist, there was in fact around 96 thousand gallons of whisky in storage, slowly maturing away and being cared for.  The distillery was asleep and remained so until 1957 when James Fairlie bought it, restored it and woke it from its slumber.  ‘Fairlies light Highland Liquor’ is no longer in production but the occasional bottle comes up in auction houses.  Being a distillery with such a long history and Scottish heritage the bottle was labeled and impressed with the image and paw prints of Towser the famous cat. In 1980 he opened up the visitor centre which had its millionth visitor in 1991 - about 3 years after I had visited it.  The distillery was then sold to Edrington who invested a quarter of a million pounds in establishing ‘The Famous Grouse Experience’ - an award winning visitor centre that secured the Distillery’s place on the tourism trail and gave it a clear link with a world famous brand.  On the one hand this was great news and secured the distilleries existence - but some would argue that it also diminished it.  I am a great believer in blends - they are the result of immense skill, they breathed life into the industry and made it more accessible to many more people, and they can also taste wonderful.  However, while all this is true they can also represent an industrial aspect that can diminish the individual character of smaller distilleries.  I have to be careful what I say here as I have enjoyed many a Famous Grouse and I never visited the experience, but I find it hard to imagine the almost One Person character of an old traditional distillery, and the massive force of an industry leading global blend sitting so close to each other without one of them slowly being eroded.  Despite high acclaim and a string of famous visitors Edrington announced that they were going to close the experience in 2018 and sell the distillery.  The press saw this as a major blow to the tourism trade and a threat to local jobs. But the role in Famous Grouse had had an affect on the whisky that is relevant to this episode -

Back in the 1800’s, and with the agreement in place to be able to use local peat, the whisky produced had a peated flavour profile.  However, over time the distillery had been moving away from that to a lighter and fruitier form.  A peated form was still in production but it was the non peated that was the main expression.  This is interesting to me as my memories of tasting Glenturret over the years has always left me with two main thoughts - one being that it is a whisky that benefits from age and the other being that it is unpeated.  However, when under the ownership of a major blend it had to fulfil certain roles.  In the case of Glenturret it was providing a heavier peated whisky that would give that edge and character within the blend, and this it did very well.

There were the usual concerns when a company is up for sale and its future was in question. In 2019, however, they were bought by a joint venture between the Lalique group and Hanjorg Wyss.  With this came a confidence and significant changes.  They employed Bob Dalgarno, world renown whisky maker with 30 years experience at Macallan, a distillery with a history of working with Lalique crystal decanters.  They focussed on keeping the whisky making process slow and small batch - giving them a great flavour profile and the ability to make changes quickly. The visitor centre changed, returning to be about the distillery.  In addition to a slow fermentation and a slow pace of distilling one should also mention the actual stills, these are distinctive.  The shape and size of a still makes a big difference in the outcome of the spirit.  The copper cleans the liquid as it makes contact with it.  The purity of the vapours can be refined by increasing the height of the still so that the vapours have to work harder to get over the top.  Glenturret’s still has a tall neck but it also has a reflux bowl, a constricted bulge at the base of the neck that encourages more contact with the copper.  The skill level is also apparent, when the spirit passes through the spirit safe (see my other YouTubes for more details) the act of switching to make the cut is done by eye and in person rather than relying on a computer based system.  The focus of the distillery moved, with the announcement that the peated expressions were going to stop production and be gone by 2026 - meaning that that bottle hidden away on the bar of the cruise ship is becoming even more of a rare find.  When you see it you are not only seeing a bottle of good whisky but one that is vanishing, an endangered species if you will.  There are reasons for this.  One reason is choice concerning how they want the whisky to be, the flavour profile.  There is no doubt that they know about this, having won major world awards since the new ownership.  Another is sustainability, I love the smell and taste of a peated whisky but the truth is that there is only so much peat and it takes thousands of years of wild and endangered habitat to create.  The distillery has won major awards for sustainability throughout its business and premises.  To give an indication to how this is going I want to look at the experience of visiting.  Many distilleries have visitor centres, some will also have places to eat - but how many can say that they have a restaurant with, not one but two Michelin stars?  That says something about the quality and direction that they have.

So, as you ask for a glass of the Glenturret peat smoked notice the unique bottle, consider its history, appreciate its goals and its individuality.  Understand how lucky you are to have this opportunity that will soon be lost forever, ask yourself why there aren’t more like this on the ship.  And maybe give a small toast to those that dared keep to the dream, that carried on and found a way, a toast to famous cats and beyond a famous grouse, a toast to Grace Gow and to the number of women who have raised whisky to higher levels, and a toast to the appreciation that you have managed to discover and explore a hidden treasure that enhances your life beyond the routine and ordinary. And consider the distillery’s motto - ‘By Hand and Heart’.