Aberlour 15 Year Old Select Cask Reserve

The waters in these parts of Speyside are known not only for their purity but also for their healing powers according to druid priests that lived there in times of the Celts. Later, they used the same water to baptise them into Christianity. So it is no wonder they used nature's best and produced a fantastic product. What is better to make from water than Scotch Whisky!?

True to this legacy and heritage, young James Fleming, a farmer's son who supplied grain to local distilleries had a dream to build a perfect distillery in the 19th century. A daring modernist as he was, he did not let anything differ from his expectations. And his dream of the perfect dram lives to this day, in the Aberlour distillery.

The “regular” Aberlour 15YO Whisky is relatively easy to find … but that not what we are talking about here. Hey, all Aberlours are really good. They’re aged in a combination of ex-Boubon and Sherry casks and filled with all of the glorious Speyside sing-malt loveliness one would expect. But this is Aberlour 15 YO Select Cask Reserve, so there is a difference, and it’s a classic lesson in economics.

You see, this product was originally made for the French market where they love great Whisky, but they want a thicker body and more luscious mouth feel. In other words, they like the good stuff and are unwilling to compromise when there is a lot of great alternative Cognac all over the place. So Aberlour selects the best of the 15YO lot each year for the Select Cask Reserve so that they can sell more successfully in that market. All that makes Aberlour 15YO Select Cask Reserve EXACTLY our kind of dram—and hard to get in the wild—so grab a few bottles before those greedy continentals wise up and take it all back for themselves.

SmartAss Corner
The Aberlour labels proudly claim that they were founded in 1879. But a distillery of the same name has been located on the same site there since 1826. The official company “legend” and “story” go all the way back to the Druids for goodness sake, but skip the distillery’s 18th century history and pick it up again in the 1900s, adding a bit of mystery, don’t you think? I suspect a bit of distasteful legal wrangling.