Edradour

Region: Southern Highands

Owner: Signatory Vintage Scotch Whisky Company

Founded: 1825

Edradour is a pretty little distillery and therefore must subscribe to the afore mentioned Goodrum Law of the prettiness of its whisky, well, if you ignore its infatuation with wood obliterated ‘Straight from the Cask’ bottlings. The distillery reeks of tradition, from its open raked mash tun, wooden Oregon pine washbacks through to its tiny stills and 100 year old plus worm tubs. This set up gives a pleasantly rich, thick and honeyed malt which is filled mostly into first and second fill casks, the unpeated spirit sees a lot of sherry cask, but the peated spirit, bottled as Ballachin goes mainly into first fill ex-Bourbon casks.

The 10 year old is a very popular malt, probably due to its richness and sweetness and if that was it for the distillery I would probably have given it a B rating, but since its purchase by the independent bottling company Signatory in 2002, they have become almost as obsessed with wine cask finishing as Murray McDavid was and still is! Now, given the robust character of the spirit, it should, in theory stand up to a judicious finishing time in ex-wine casks, but in my limited experience of tasting them, that is far from the case. Maybe the finishing time is too long, maybe the spirit is a touch too young, but of the ones I have tasted they seem to have a rawness and the character of the malt is pretty much always swamped by the finishing cask. Maybe if I had tasted more of them, I would have found some balanced gems. However, all that aside I think the 10 year old does the job nicely, as they say!