North of Scotland 48 Years Old 1971 (Premium Spirits Agency)

Distilled in 1971 and bottled at 48 years old by Premium Spirits Agency, this single grain came in a tiny outturn of just 25 bottles. The grain comes from the silent Cambus plant near Alloa, where George Christie made one of the more flavoursome grain whiskies of its day before the 1980 closure brought the operation to an end.

Christie's wider congener cut on the patent stills gave the spirit the backbone to last almost five decades in oak. At 48 years in refill ex-Bourbon wood the whisky is firmly in the ethereal stage, waxy and delicate, with the strength worn down close to the legal floor by year after year of evaporation.

Bottled at 40.2%, this is grain at its most fragile and refined. Broken down lignin carries vanillin and a gentle vanilla, the oak lactones give coconut, and long oxidation has built beeswax and polished old oak with a faint dried fruit sweetness. The tannins are soft, the body light yet layered, closing on a quiet and elegant finish from a long vanished distillery. With only twenty five bottles filled, this is among the rarest of the surviving 1971s, a quiet survivor of the distillery's final years.