The 10 Most Important Scotch Whiskies of the Last 25 Years

The story of Scotch in the 21st century started with tremendous growth. As the millennium dawned, Scotch was at the beginning of a renaissance, with more consumers discovering the joys of single malt. In those early years, prices were reasonable and it was easy for newcomers to make forays into the category.

As Scotch sales grew — almost exclusively single malt rather than blends — aged stocks were squeezed. Distilleries responded by raising prices, dropping age statements, or both. Many also invested in expansion, increasing their output capacity to the tune of millions of liters. And collecting took off, leading brands to create expressions engineered for the resale market, and at ever-higher prices.

New Scotch distilleries began sprouting up, many emphasizing craft, provenance, and unique flavor as points of difference from the establishment. Conversations about transparency swirled, as did growing alarm over counterfeit bottles. All along the way, cask finishes, heavy peat, and limited-edition offerings dominated many brand lineups. And everyone was chasing the luxury consumer.

Below are 10 bottles that encapsulate the major events and trends in Scotch over the last 25 years. These are by no means the best Scotches of the century so far, but rather the most influential — bottles that illustrate and explain the category’s recent history.

Port Ellen 1979 22-Year-Old

One of three whiskies in the inaugural Diageo Special Releases, launched in 2001. Port Ellen Distillery had already been closed for 18 years due to Scotch’s oversupply-driven downturn. As the industry began recovering in the 1990s, Diageo forerunner United Distillers created the Rare Malts Collection, a series of whiskies from mostly closed distilleries, including Port Ellen. Deemed unremarkable in its heyday, Port Ellen’s whisky had been transformed over the decades into something very special, and drinkers took notice.

So did Diageo. At its release, this 22-year-old single malt was priced at 110 pounds, which was expensive for the time. But as word got around about how delicious extra-mature Port Ellen was, consumers clamored for bottles, and prices rose accordingly, both at retail and on the secondary market. Diageo included a Port Ellen offering in the Special Releases every year through 2017 — when the 37-year-old whisky, distilled in 1979, was priced at 2,625 pounds.

2017 was also the year that Diageo announced plans to rebuild Port Ellen, along with Brora, another distillery whose whiskies had become beloved and hyper-valuable since its closure. (Simultaneously, Ian Macleod Distillers announced that it would revive the long-defunct Rosebank Distillery.) The stills are now humming, creating spirit that will eventually age into a new kind of Port Ellen. Time will tell if the reborn whisky measures up to its predecessor.

Compass Box The Peat Monster

In 2003, boutique blender Compass Box was just a few years old and still building its reputation. Michael Goldstein, the owner of high-end New York spirits retailer Park Avenue Liquor, approached Compass Box founder John Glaser to create a custom blend for the store. His customers, avid Scotch fans, were clamoring for ever-peatier whisky.

Glaser went through several iterations, each rejected for not being peaty enough, until he developed one that he described as a “monster.” Goldstein loved it, and eventually Glaser decided to reproduce the blended malt for wider release. Thus The Peat Monster was born, setting a new bar for blends and catalyzing what was then a growing penchant for peat among whisky drinkers.

Over the next decade, several Scotch brands would seek to capitalize on the sensation for smoke, some offering heavily peated whiskies for the first time and others upping PPM (phenol parts per million) levels to outlandish amounts (see Bruichladdich Octomore, below). By now, the Overton window of peat has shifted, and so, too, has The Peat Monster, which officially debuted an updated flavor profile in 2019. It’s no longer the only monster in the closet, but it will always be the first.

Cardhu Pure Malt

In 2003, Cardhu single malt supplies were tight, squeezing sales in its top market, Spain. Brand owner Diageo decided to blend the whisky with malt from Glendullan, creating this “pure malt” as an alternative. The company didn’t anticipate the intense backlash that would follow — but backlash there was.

Besides potential competition to specific brands, the main concern was that a blend of two malts, marketed under the name of just one of the distilleries, threatened the integrity of single malt. A media frenzy ensued, with the Scotch Whisky Association at the center, looking like it didn’t have a handle on its industry.

Eventually, Diageo reverted to selling Cardhu single malt with nothing blended in. But the furor led to a five-year process to create new legislation governing Scotch labeling and production. The Scotch Whisky Regulations 2009 outlawed the use of the term “pure malt” and made clear that blended malts are an entirely different beast from their single brethren.

Kilchoman 100% Islay

Farm distilling has become common in American craft whiskey, but the concept — though ancient in practice — is still relatively unknown in Scotch. The modern industry largely sources grain through commercial suppliers, both because it’s cheaper and because growing barley in Scotland’s fickle climate is a gamble.

Kilchoman, an independent distillery opened in 2005 on Islay, was willing to take that gamble, farming 2,300 acres every year for this expression. It’s the only whisky that is 100 percent produced on the island, from planting the seeds to malting the barley over local peat to bottling the final product. The effort and expense are considerable, but they yield a whisky that’s chock-full of character and provenance.

A handful of other Scotch distilleries farm their own barley, including Lochlea, Arbikie, and Daftmill. Provenance and local sourcing are increasingly important within Scotland’s whisky industry. But Kilchoman remains the only producer to do everything — seed to sip — in one location, proof that it’s possible, even if it’s not easy.

Mortlach Rare Old

At the height of the single malt Scotch boom, it wasn’t unusual to see brands dropping their age statements or raising prices, and often doing both. Whisky drinkers grumbled but tended to take it in stride. Not in this case.

Before 2014, Mortlach had been available as a moderately priced 16-year-old expression in Diageo’s Flora & Fauna range, which featured whiskies that were usually only employed in blends. Mortlach 16 was a cult favorite, but suddenly the Flora & Fauna bottling disappeared, and was replaced by three new expressions: Rare Old, 18-Year-Old, and 25-Year-Old.

All were packaged in 500-milliliter bottles rather than full size. Coupled with prices that were aggressive even by the standards of the time (55 pounds for the non-age-statement whisky up to 600 pounds for the 25-year-old), the move made a lot of faithful fans quite angry. The lineup, which debuted to great fanfare, flopped.

A few years later, Diageo withdrew the three expressions and relaunched Mortlach yet again — this time with 12-, 16-, and 20-year-old offerings in full-size bottles priced from $50 to $200. It was a rare acknowledgement of a misstep from a big producer. Mortlach still hasn’t caught fire with a wider audience, but it seems to have settled into an equilibrium.

Bruichladdich Octomore 08.3

As more drinkers discovered single malt Scotch in the early 2000s, the audience for peaty whisky also grew. Whereas previously the most heavily peated Scotches were the likes of Lagavulin (35 PPM), Laphroaig (40 to 50 PPM), and Ardbeg (55 PPM), demand for ever-smokier pours ramped up. The trend led to the creation of whiskies like The Peat Monster (see above), Ardbeg Supernova, and, eventually, this gut-punch of a peat bomb, at 309 PPM, released in 2017.

The Octomore series was in the works from the early 2000s, shortly after Bruichladdich Distillery reopened. Master distiller Jim McEwan asked Baird’s Malt, which supplied the distillery’s barley, to push phenol levels as high as they could go. The process yielded imprecise results, which McEwan didn’t mind: Octomore was expected to vary from batch to batch.

Each release of Octomore proclaimed the malt’s PPM on the label — a first for whisky, and a bit of a tease to other distilleries, daring them to do the same. Discussion of PPM is now commonplace in Scotch circles. Bruichladdich is also open about Octomore’s age — just 5 years old — which has helped normalize bottling young single malt, and especially young peaty single malt. No one, including the distillery itself, has been able to top 309 PPM yet, but peat freaks looking for a fix know they can always count on Octomore.

Macallan 1878

In July 2017, a tourist at the Devil’s Place bar in St. Moritz, Switzerland, paid around $10,000 for a pour of Macallan distilled in 1878. It was reported as the most expensive single serving of Scotch ever sold. Days later, news broke that the whisky was likely a fake, a fact that was later confirmed through analysis by a lab at the University of Oxford.

The event cast a spotlight on the problem of fraud, something familiar in the wine world but hitherto mostly unknown in whisky. This particular bottle had come from an Italian collection, part of a raft of allegedly antique Macallans that popped up for sale in the 1990s and early 2000s. Macallan itself bought about 100 of these bottles, intending to create a series of replica whiskies modeled after the profile of the 19th-century examples.

But suspicious label inconsistencies, and the fact that experts said the whisky tasted “remarkably fresh,” made the distillery look closer. It took steps to verify the authenticity of several bottles, eventually determining that none of them contained liquid distilled before 1950. (The replica series, however, went ahead as planned.) Fraud continues to run rampant through whisky today, touching Scotch, bourbon, and every other category with high-value brands. But at least the problem is now better known.

Macallan Valerio Adami 1926 60-Year-Old, Bottle #12

When this whisky was bottled in 1986, it was then the oldest Macallan ever produced. Just 40 bottles were created, including 12 with labels designed by Italian painter Valerio Adami. Interesting details, but they’re secondary to the fact that this specific 700-milliliter bottle of whisky was the first to break $1 million at auction.

It was not the last — the record has since been broken several times, almost always by other Macallans, including itself — but when it sold for a bid of HK$8,636,250 (about $1.1 million) on May 18, 2018, this bottle set a benchmark. Auction prices for high-end whisky had been rocketing up in the preceding few years, driven by genuine rarities like this one as well as, increasingly, limited editions created specifically for the secondary market.

These types of offerings, which include the likes of Dalmore The Rare and Macallan The Reach, are de rigueur nowadays, but the likelihood any of them will reach $1 million is far from guaranteed. Hammer prices at Scotch’s high end have been falling lately, due in part to savvier buyers and perhaps oversaturation of such so-called rare whiskies. The era of the $1 million Macallan may be in the past.

Compass Box This Is Not a Luxury Whisky

In 2015, luxury was the goal of seemingly every Scotch, embodied by fancy packaging and an aura of high net worth. Flavor, if it came into the marketing equation at all, was secondary. Noticing the disconnect, Compass Box created this expression to poke holes in the concept of luxury, positing that it means different things to different people — if it even exists. (The name, This Is Not a Luxury Whisky, nods to surrealist artist René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images.)

That alone might be enough to merit inclusion on this list. But This Is Not a Luxury Whisky ended up making an even bigger statement about transparency in Scotch. At release, Compass Box published the recipe for the blend, which included whiskies aged 19 to 40 years. (It published a recipe for the fifth edition of Flaming Heart at the same time.) In doing so, the company violated European Union regulations dictating that a whisky can only state the age of the youngest component in the blend. The Scotch Whisky Association (SWA) cracked down and Compass Box was forced to withdraw the information.

But the company didn’t go quietly. A few months later, founder John Glaser announced a campaign to challenge the regulations, urging other whisky companies and consumers to push for change by signing a petition and speaking out publicly. Compass Box continued to publish the recipes for its whiskies, minus information on age, and it was joined by Bruichladdich Distillery, which created a web tool that revealed specific recipes for each batch of its Classic Laddie expression.

Eventually, Compass Box and the regulators hit upon a compromise: Scotch companies can’t publish age information, but if asked, they’re allowed to share all the details. It’s not a perfect solution for those advocating full transparency, but it will have to do for now.

Ardnamurchan AD 9.20:01

The late aughts and 2010s saw a surge in new Scotch distillery construction, spurred by the category’s heady growth. Places that hadn’t seen whisky production in decades, like Edinburgh and Glasgow’s inner cities, began welcoming mostly small distilleries, as did rural areas across the country.

There are many newcomers that deserve attention, like Nc’nean, Isle of Harris, Lochlea, Isle of Raasay, Dornoch, and Torabhaig. Most are still in the nascent stages when it comes to the whisky itself, with releases at single-digit ages. And there are more small, independent distilleries under construction, all promising to create unique whisky that puts flavor first.

In this new school, Ardnamurchan, which opened in 2014, has stood out from early on. It released spirit at under 3-years-old — not yet legally whisky — that showed tremendous potential. When its first official whisky debuted in 2020, it had been in barrel for five years, nearly double the maturation length of most first-time brands. And it was reasonably priced at 45 pounds, a contrast to many new distilleries’ debuts, which are often priced high as potential collectibles. Plus, it tasted excellent — mature beyond its years.

What’s most important about this whisky, however, is what it represents: a new chapter in Scotch. The industry is facing challenges currently, and there will be more to come. The next quarter-century is likely to look very different from the last. But as long as distilleries like Ardnamurchan are committed to offering delicious, well-made, affordable whisky, the future is bright.

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