Dalwhinnie Distillery
Dalwhinnie, Inverness-shire
PH19 1AB
+44 1540 672 219
Owner: Diageo
Creation date: 1897
In 1897, John Grant, George Sellar and Alexander Mackenzie founded the Strathspey distillery. Production started in 1898 but unfortunately the society was bankrupt the same year.
The distillery was sold to A.P. Blyth in 1898 for his son who renamed it Dalwhinnie. Later, in 1905, the American Cook & Bernheimer took control over the distillery. The American distiller was looking for malts to produce blended whiskies for the American market.
This is the very first American investment in the Scotch whisky industry. The American adventure continued until the prohibition in the United States in 1920, and the distillery returned to the Scottish fold by the buying up by Lord James Calder, shareholder of Macdonald Greenlees, a whisky blender.
After macDonald Greenlees has been taken over by the DCL, Dalwhinnie became part of another blenders group, James Buchanan, famous for his Black&White blended whisky.
A fire in 1934 stopped the production for 3 years, and the reopening in 1938 was for a short time, because the second World War made whisky business impossible because of a lack of barley.
Since the reopening in 1947, very few things happened to the distillery, except the suppression of the malting floors in 1968. Dalwhinnie became famous worldwide because its owners, UDV, included the brand in their famous series "Classic Malts", launched in 1988.
Despite this, only 10% of the production is marketed as single malt, the remaining being used among other in the Black & White blends.
