Our latest Club Bottle is from a distillery that was demolished fifteen years ago, giving us an opportunity to taste and enjoy something that is slowly disappearing. Built by the Macfarlane family in 1811 at the highest point in the city of Glasgow, which at the time had become “the blending powerhouse of Scotland, ” Port Dundas began life as a malt whisky distillery.

Grain distillation started around 1845 and Port Dundas quickly became one of the most important producers of grain whisky for blending.

With its prime location in the city on the banks of the Forth & Clyde Canal providing it with transport links to reach locally, nationally and internationally, Port Dundas grew in size to become the largest distillery in Scotland.

In 1859 a 138-metre brick “Mega Chimney” was built on site to rival the height of Cologne Cathedral (157.38m), making it one of the tallest human-made structures in Europe at the time and largest chimney worldwide. In 1860 it merged with a neighbouring distillery, Cowlairs, and by 1885 its three Coffey and five pot stills were producing over two million gallons a year.

In 1877, Port Dundas was one of the founding members of the grain distillers’ conglomerate DCL, which would become today’s Diageo.

In 1902 Dundashill distillery, which at the time was at that time the largest pot still distillery in the world, was also absorbed, which brought with it one of the largest dairy farms in the country, home to a thousand cows supplying fresh milk to the entire city, and a piggery with four hundred pigs, all fed by draff (leftover grain from distillation). Their liquid manure was pumped through pipes straight to farms in Possil, while the massive yeast output supplied local bakeries, ensuring a circular economy long before the term existed.

The distillery had to be rebuilt after major fires in 1903 and 1916, and was silent in World War II. In the 1970s a large modernisation programme was undertaken, when a new grain intake, spirit store, still house, boiler house and dark grains plant were opened, allowing it to produce 39 million litres of spirit each year, which would go into blends such as Bell’s, Black & White, Haig, J&B, Johnnie Walker, Vat 69 and White Horse.

On 1 July 2009, Diageo announced the closure of the Port Dundas distillery, with all production shifting to the company’s other Scottish Grain distillery at Cameron Bridge in Fife, as well as the North British Distillery in Edinburgh, which is jointly owned by Diageo and The Edrington Group. Production ceased in 2010 and the distillery was demolished in 2011, 200 years after it opened.

For our Club Bottle, your whisky has spent nineteen years in refill barrels, which slowly round off the sharp notes of young grain whisky, providing an excellent foundation of flavour. I then re-racked the liquid into Recioto Della Valpolicella casks, sourced from the Zyme vineyard during my trip to Valpolicella two years ago.

Recioto is a sweet, unfortified red wine, which until Amarone’s emergence in the 20th century, was the pinnacle of Valpolicella wine making. Recioto is made using the same ‘appassimento’ process as Amarone but the fruit is left to dry for an extra month.

Once pressed, after at least 1st January following the harvest, fermentation is deliberately halted while residual sugars remain, creating the wine’s characteristic sweetness.

Recioto casks are extremely rare in whisky, and I am only aware of two other bottlings that have used them, however I hope you agree that they work extremely well with our whisky.