BenRiach 19 Years Old 1997 Cask #96962 (LMDW)

BenRiach sits on the Elgin plain in Speyside, founded in 1898 by John Duff. Through much of the late 20th century the distillery operated quietly as a filler for Chivas blends, with single malt releases rare until the Billy Walker era from 2004 onwards. The casks from this period are now finite, held mostly by independent merchants who laid them down when the stock was originally destined for blending. This release was bottled by La Maison du Whisky, the Paris merchant and independent bottler founded in 1956 by Georges Bénitah. LMDW's long-standing relationships with distilleries and brokers give it early access to casks rarely seen elsewhere. It comes from BenRiach's Single Cask Bottling programme, a small-outturn series of individual cask releases. Drawn from cask #96962 and bottled in 2016, this 1997 vintage totalled 209 bottles for the French market.

BenRiach distils on two pairs of copper pot stills, with ogee-shaped wash stills feeding onion-shaped spirit stills under steam heat. Fermentation runs between 48 and 100 hours in stainless steel washbacks on Mauri liquid yeast, with new make collected at 68% ABV before filling to cask. After 19 years in oak, the cask was bottled at cask strength of 54.3% ABV.

Ex-Bourbon American white oak (Quercus alba) was charred for the original bourbon fill, breaking down lignin into vanillin and syringaldehyde and releasing whisky lactones from the wood. The fresh-fill bourbon strips extracted much of the most aggressive oak character, leaving the BenRiach spirit to draw on the secondary layers of soft oak, vanilla and coconut.