North of Scotland 50 Years Old 1970 (The Whisky Agency)

Bottled by the German independent The Whisky Agency, this 1970 vintage was held for a full 50 years. The grain comes from the closed Cambus grain works in the Lowlands, where George Christie produced a more flavoursome style of grain whisky before the plant shut in 1980, with an outturn of 76 bottles.

Christie's habit of taking a broad spirit cut kept more character in the grain, building in the depth that let it reach half a century in cask. Fifty years in refill ex-Bourbon casks places this deep in the ethereal stage, the whisky fragile and waxy, the strength reduced close to the legal floor by decades of slow evaporation.

Bottled at 40.6%, this is grain at the very edge of its lifespan. The broken down lignin has become vanillin and a soft vanilla, a coconut note comes from the oak lactones, and caramelised hemicellulose lends toffee. Long oxidation brings beeswax, old polished oak and a faint dried fruit sweetness, the tannins restrained and the finish long and quiet, a deeply aged survivor from a name that no longer exists. Bottled in Germany where old grain whisky has a devoted following, it is a fine half century snapshot of a distillery that no longer stands.