Lagavulin

Region: Islay

Owner: Diageo

Founded: 1816

The history of Lagavulin will always be tied to another of those great personalities of the late 1800’s whisky landscape. Peter Mackie was described by author, diplomate and apparently secret agent, Sir Robert Bruce-Lockart as ‘One third genius, one third megalomaniac and one third eccentric’.

In his twenties he went to work for his uncle James’s blending company Mackie & Co. James Logan Mackie worked closely with John Graham who owned the Lagavulin distillery and Peter was promptly sent there to learn the ropes. It is probably here that the famous blended whisky White Horse was created with Lagavulin at its heart.

Peter Mackie went on to become chairman of Mackie & Co in 1895 when it became a limited company and he decided, like a number of other blend owners to embark upon a distillery purchasing spree in order to safeguard supplies. Thus he went on to purchase Craigellachie and construct the Malt Mill distillery on Islay.

Malt Mill was built due to a falling out with the owners of Laphroaig over water rights. Due to this disagreement, he lost the sales agency for Laphroaig and vowed that Malt Mill would make a spirit similar to Laphroaig and he proceeded to poach staff from Laphroaig to do so. One imagines this was proclaimed with much table thumping! Apparently, the spirit that flowed off the stills at Malt Mill had virtually no resemblance to Laphroaig, but it did manage to stay in production until 1963. This of course goes to show that you can attempt to re-create a distillery, even down to the minutiae of copying the dings and dents in stills, but, no matter how hard you try, the resulting spirit is just not quite the same. Whisky sod’s law I guess!

Currently the distillery is owned by Diageo and the 16 year old is loved by millions, even though the company is a big advocate of ‘colour correction’. Thankfully Diageo see no need to ruin, sorry, correct the 12 year old, which to me is the go to bottling if you want to experience the unadulterated glory of the distilleries spirit. However, since Diageo has moved it from the core range to being part of its yearly ‘special releases’ the price has gone northwards quite considerably, so the 8 year old isn’t a bad substitute and at the time of writing, not too badly priced, although it is pricy for an 8 year old.

(Image Copyright James Mortimer Photography)