BALLANTINE’S ENCOURAGES CONSUMERS TO CHANGE THE PLAN WITH NEW ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN

Ballantine’s Finest, Europe’s No 1 Scotch whisky, is aiming to connect the younger generation of Finest fans with the latest addition to its successful ‘Plan Ballantine’s’ campaign – the release of a new television commercial, which highlights the brand’s increased association with music.

The new 30-second television advert entitled ‘Change the Plan’ follows on from the brand’s successful ‘Transformation’ commercial, which was released in 2011 and has now been seen in over 85 countries.

The new advert follows a similar theme to the first, with characters raising questions such as “Follow the crowd?”, “Lower my sights?” and “Keep my feet on the ground?”, followed by the answer “That’s never going to be the plan. Change the Plan. Leave An Impression. This is Plan Ballantine’s”.

Ballantine’s Brand Director Peter Moore commented “Ballantine’s is all about leaving an impression so with this new advert, we’re aiming to do just that by inspiring consumers to change the plan, to really live their lives. We are very proud of this new advert and we’re confident that its strong reference to music will score highly with Ballantine’s Finest’s global target audience, as we know this is something that resonates strongly with them.”

The Plan Ballantine’s campaign features a wide range of global marketing activity, including print, radio and outdoor advertising as well as experiential events, PR, digital activity and social media.

Notes

Click here to view the TV commercial

About Ballantine’s
Ballantine’s is the No 1 ultra-premium Scotch whisky in Asia Pacific and the range sells over 70 million bottles a year worldwide. Ballantine’s has won more than 80 trophies and medals at international competitions in the past 10 years for quality, as a result of its unique richness of character and perfect balance. The range, from Ballantine’s Finest to the iconic 30 Year Old, is the most extensive in the world of Scotch and is maintained by the latest in a tradition of Master Blenders that dates back to 1827.

About Chivas Brothers
Chivas Brothers is the Scotch whisky and premium gin business of Pernod Ricard – the world’s co-leader in wine and spirits. Chivas Brothers is the global leader in luxury Scotch whisky and premium gin. Its portfolio includes Chivas Regal, Ballantine’s, Beefeater Gin, The Glenlivet, Royal Salute, Aberlour, Plymouth Gin, Longmorn, Scapa, 100 Pipers, Clan Campbell, Something Special and Passport Scotch.

For further information visit: www.chivasbrothers.com

The new Speyburn 25 Year Old unveiled

Speyburn Distillery, the producer of Speyburn Single Malt Scotch Whisky, is pleased to announce that the successor of the World Whiskies Awards 2012 Gold-Medal-winning Speyburn 25 Year Old will soon be available in markets around the world featuring exciting new packaging. The relaunch of the much-admired premium expression of Speyburn follows a successful year for the Scottish brand.

The oldest and most exclusive Speyburn yet has been a hidden gem and a favourite for whisky aficionados for years. It didn’t come as a surprise when earlier in 2012 the coveted Speyburn 25 Year Old ‘Solera’ was named by the World Whiskies Awards panel as the best in its category. Now, the new and reinvented premium expression from the iconic Speyside distillery has arrived. It’s simply called Speyburn 25 Year Old.

The Whisky

The whisky for this all-new Speyburn came from American oak Fino sherry and exbourbon casks of the highest quality. The spirit matured entirely on site at Speyburn Distillery, on the banks of Granty Burn. The whisky is bottled at premium strength of 46% ABV. It is unchill-filtered and shows its natural colour.

Speyburn 25 Year Old has a vibrant and bright aroma, rich with lime honey and lemon peel notes, accentuated by fragrant tropical fruit. The taste is rounded and smooth. Sweet to begin with, it opens up with toffee, creamy vanilla and pink grapefruit flavours and drifts gently towards a long and warming finish.

The Packaging

Speyburn 25 Year Old is presented in the new Speyburn bottle encased in a silver wooden box. Two engraved collapsible metal tasting cups are also included making it the perfect gift for an outdoors enthusiast. Each pack is signed personally by the Distillery Manager Robert Anderson.

Recommended retail price: £195

 Notes

· The Speyburn Distillery was founded in 1897 by John Hopkins.
· The Distillery still features unique Henning’s Pneumatic Drum Maltings which are the only example in the world. Although they stopped working in 1967 they still attract regular visitors as a vital part of Scotch whisky’s rich history.
· Speyburn draws production water from Granty Burn famed for its purity and world-class salmon fishing
· Speyburn 25 Year Old ‘Solera’ recently won the Best Highland Single Malt Whisky award at Whisky Magazine’s World Whiskies Awards 2012
· Speyburn is part International Beverage Holdings, the international arm of ThaiBev. Other well-known whisky brands in the International Beverage Holdingsportfolio include anCnoc, Balblair, Catto’s, Hankey Bannister and Old Pulteney.

Bell’s Christmas Decanter 2012

THE BELL’S 2012 CHRISTMAS DECANTER

The Robert Duff decanter is the third and final decanter in the ‘Bell’s Series’

This Decanter is exclusive to the GB market

£80.99

CLICK HERE TO BUY NOW

Single Malts Limited | 36 Gordon Street | Huntly | Aberdeenshire | AB54 8EQ

Whisky Design Awards 2012, rankings with 1 month to go

This is the status of the nominees in the four categories for the final voting after two months with 1 month to go. Category 1 – Bottle, less than € 250 1 – Masterson’s 10 year old Rye Whiskey (41%, … Continue reading →

Glen Garioch 1978, Single Cask

The launch of the exclusive single cask, cask strength bottling for Milroy’s of Soho.

Elegantly fruity with finesse. Notes of pear eau de vie, melon candy and ripe banana fuse with traces of wood-smoke, leaving a gentle finish of heather honey and clean powdery icing sugar.

An extremely rare limited edition of just 144 bottles.

£300

Our mailing address is:

Milroy’s of Soho
3 Greek Street
London, England W1D 4NX
United Kingdom

Bunnahabhain Discovers Rare 40 YO Islay

Bunnahabhain has announced that it will release a one-off rare single malt that has lain undiscovered for four decades at the Islay distillery.

Bunnahabhain distillery, which is located on the north-east of the isle, will release only 750 bottles, which will be individually numbered and hand signed.

Hidden for 40 years, the whisky quietly matured until Master Distiller, Ian MacMillan, discovered the casks listed in the distillery ledgers: “It was an exhilarating moment to stumble on such a special find,” he said. “There are very few 40 year old Islays and unlike any other, Bunnahabhain’s taste is considered unique because the distillery does not heavily peat the fine malted barley.”

The Master Distiller recognised the significance of the discovery after finding the ‘Turney’ casks, which were filled with the precious Bunnahabhain malt over 40 years ago by eminent Glasgow wine merchants, J G Turney, and renowned for being the highest standard of quality.

Michelle Lansdowne, Senior Brand Manager at Burn Stewart, added: “ We are expecting a good deal of market interest in the 40 YO and with such limited availability of this one-off prestige bottling, it is sure to appeal to international collectors of rare malts.”

To capture the extraordinary journey, Bunnahabhain commissioned renowned illustrator, Iain McIntosh, to retrace the voyage through the specially designed labels. Each bottle is presented in a bespoke oak gift box containing a secret compartment that reveals hidden designs replicating the ‘Journey of Discovery.’

The multi-award winning Bunnahabhain is the flagship malt whisky from Burn Stewart Distillers and is exported to over 30 countries globally. Unlike its neighbouring distilleries on the Island, Bunnahabhain embodies “the gentle taste of Islay”, as it is the only non-peated Islay malt.

Bunnahabhain 40 YO
RRP: £1,999
Unchill-filtered (41.7% ABV)

Notes:
• Situated on the northern shore of Islay, Bunnahabhain Distillery was founded in 1881 by William Robertson and brothers James and William Greenless
• Bunnahabhain is Gaelic for ‘mouth of the river’ and the distillery is situated right at the shoreline, close to where the Margadale River flows into Bunnahabhain Bay
• In 2003 Bunnahabhain was sold to Burn Stewart Distilleries for £10million. Today, production stands at 2.5million litres a year. Of this, 21,000 casks are kept at the distillery for maturation and the resultant whisky is used for the Black Bottle blend and for bottling as Bunnahabhain single malt

SERGE AND HIS BELOVED BENRIACH 1976 MEGA-TASTING!

BACK in June, Serge Reijnders, a Belgian BenRiach enthusiast, hosted a unique tasting to sample nineteen BenRiach 1976 Single Cask expressions in one afternoon…and he sold out all forty places in just two days!

Collectors normally collect simply to collect – but Serge had different ideas. Such is his passion for BenRiach, he wanted to share as many of his beloved 1976 expressions as he could with his invited guests.

As 1976 is his favourite BenRiach year, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s also the year he was born. It’s not – he was born in 1978 but justifies his choice by pointing out there weren’t that many outstanding Benriachs from that year!

So where did his obsession for 1976 BenRiachs come from?

Known in the Low Countries as “that guy with all the BenRiachs”, he explained: “Bert Dexters got me started. His enthusiasm was contagious – his explanations about whisky and his insistence on writing down all the tasting notes. I was immediately sold so I joined “Cask Six”, Bert’s whisky club, and my first tasting was a few weeks later at a whisky festival where, as instructed, I noted everything we tasted.”

Serge prefers mainly fruity and sherry-matured whisky. “It took me some time to appreciate peated whisky – although I have always enjoyed whisky with only a hint of peat where the fruit or sherry comes through.”

As with many people, his love of BenRiach was started by the company’s Chief Executive and Master Blender Billy Walker and Serge tasted his first BenRiach at a Lindores tasting.

Serge takes up the story. “Then Bert Bruyneel arranged a tasting and we tasted 11 different BenRiachs including my first 1976 which was specially bottled for the Craigellachie Hotel, the first-ever 1976 bottling. I just adored it – that evening I lost my heart to BenRiach!”

Soon Serge started searching for all the 1976s that had been bottled…and once he had got them all, he found he couldn’t stop.

“I just had to get every new 1976 that was released, wherever that might be. Through Magnus Fagerstrom, currently the biggest BenRiach collector worldwide, I was introduced to his Japanese contact which helped a lot because soon afterwards the first 1976s for Japan were released.

“Magnus also put me in touch with his contact in Taiwan which allowed me to buy two bottles of cask 3033. I took one of them to last year’s Lindores Whiskyfest where everyone had to take and introduce one bottle. Someone else had cask 3557 which was specially bottled for La Maison du Whisky and another had the 1976 for Aston Morris with him. We tasted them and everyone liked the La Maison du Whisky bottling the most.”

It was that day which gave Serge the idea of doing his 1976 mega-tasting.

“Originally I thought I’d keep them for my fortieth birthday in 2018 but every time I told people about my tasting plans, they’d invite themselves over to my house! That’s when I thought: if people are so interested in attending, why not put all the whiskies in a huge tasting, and that’s what happened.”

The tasting was presented by Jurgen Vromas and cost €200 per person. The 19 whiskies were tasted in 4 groups, 3 consisting of 5 whiskies and at the end a blind tasting of 4 whiskies. The whiskies were grouped according to reputation which meant that the tasting would only get better as the day progressed.

Group 1 involved three peated whiskies and two sister casks bottled by Signatory. Journalist Johan van Samang from Whiskypassion magazine also attended the tasting and noted: “They were enjoyable but not exceptional whiskies – although we could taste the amazing character of BenRiach coming through.

“In Group 2, we tasted cask 2013 which hasn’t been bottled yet, but we could compare it with the 2014. Cask 2014 won, and also won this group.”

In Group 3, they tasted three 1976s bottled for Asia and two for Europe. In this category, the Shinanoya bottling stood out for everyone.

And finally, group 4 was the best of the best, blind tasted:

Johan said: “Cask 3557 from La Maison du Whisky was expected to win, but amazingly it didn’t even make it into the top three. Gold was won by cask 3033 for Taiwan, silver for 3029 for Shinanoya and bronze for 3032 for Japan, so Asia won convincingly from Europe.

“But what 3557 and 3033 have in common is that they are really complex, more so than the others. They go deeper, they have more layers and above all they have what makes BenRiach 1976 so special – that fantastic taste of tropical fruit.”

He concluded: “This was probably one of the hardest tastings I have ever done, but it’s also one of the most interesting and definitely the most enjoyable.

“This kind of tasting won’t be repeated very often so our thanks go to Serge for his incredible drive and passion. It’s clear the passion of the few has benefited the many BenRiach enthusiasts in the Low Countries!”

(This feature is based on an article which first appeared in the Dutch Whiskypassion magazine.)

Benromach supports Arts & Business Awards

Speyside’s smallest whisky distillery, Benromach, celebrated two of Scotland’s best assets, whisky and the arts with its sponsorship of the Arts and Business Awards 2012.

As part of the evening a delectable ice cream, using Benromach’s flagship 10 year old single malt whisky, was commissioned by Wild Thyme for diners.

For the last two years, Benromach, in partnership with the National Theatre of Scotland, has sponsored the critically acclaimed The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart which has recently completed a UK tour and is now touring North America.

The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart takes theatre into pubs and other unlikely venues, where stories are told, re-told, sung and passed on. It’s an evening of supernatural storytelling, music and theatre inspired by the Border Ballads, Robert Burns and the poems of Robert Service.

The Arts & Business Scotland Awards celebrate and showcase the best examples of business partnerships with the arts and museums in Scotland. Benromach was commended for its sponsorship of Prudencia Hart in the New or Returning Sponsor category.

Michael Urquhart, Managing Director of Gordon & MacPhail, owners of the Benromach Distillery, said: “This partnership represents Benromach’s first ever arts sponsorship. It’s been a great success story and highlights the real difference a successful partnership can make to both businesses.

“There is no better time to sponsor such a popular arts performance which has become a massive success in the UK as well as overseas. We’re excited to continue this sponsorship and were particularly pleased when we welcomed the cast, crew and audience to Benromach distillery where the award winning artistic performance was delivered for two nights.”

Guests at the award ceremony had the opportunity to try a dram of Benromach single malt whisky as well as taste a specially commissioned Benromach ice cream which has been made by Wild Thyme for the award’s dinner.

Elly Rothnie, Development Director, National Theatre of Scotland, said: “The partnership with Benromach has proven massively successful and has helped The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart to engage in a fantastic international tour taking two of Scotland’s great assets, arts and whisky, to a global audience.”

The awards ceremony took place on Wednesday, 23 October 2012 in Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh.

Notes  

• The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart originally toured Scotland in February 2011 subsequently playing at Latitude Festival, Òran Mór, Glasgow, and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2011.  The production has won three awards, a Critics Award for Theatre for Best Music and Sound, a Herald Angel and an Argus Angel at the 2012 Brighton Festival.
• Benromach sponsored some US dates of the 2012 tour with American audiences being offered the opportunity to share a dram of the Speyside Scotch Malt during the show. This sponsorship covered all US venues where state legislation allows and is part of Benromach’s venturing into the arts and their first foray into international arts touring.
• Benromach and the National Theatre of Scotland are committed to promoting responsible drinking messages within the sponsorship of The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart in accordance with the guidelines provided by the Scottish Government document ‘Alcohol Sponsorship Guidelines Scotland’.

About Benromach

Established in 1898, Benromach distillery changed hands many times and was virtually derelict when bought by Gordon & MacPhail in 1993. Drawing on generations of whisky expertise, the company carried out a painstaking refurbishment, and the distillery was officially re-opened by Prince Charles in 1998.

Just two men hand-craft Benromach using the finest Scottish barely and the purest spring water from the nearby Romach Hills.  They fill new spirit into the highest quality casks before being left to mature at the distillery for many years.  The Benromach portfolio includes the award winning Benromach 10 Years Old and the first fully certified organic single malt – Benromach Organic.

Please visit www.benromach.com for details.

About the National Theatre of Scotland

Since its launch in February 2006, the National Theatre of Scotland has been involved in creating 186 productions in 156 different locations. With no building of its own, the Company takes theatre all over Scotland and beyond, working with existing and new venues and companies to create and tour theatre of the highest quality. It takes place in the great buildings of Scotland, but also in site-specific locations, airports and tower blocks, community halls and drill halls, ferries and forests.  The Company has performed to over 810,000 people across four continents.   www.nationaltheatrescotland.com

The 11th month has arrived and with it comes Movember – the annual celebration of moustaches and men’s health.

http://www.movember.com

To help those growing a mo choose a great whisky to accompany their efforts we’ve matched up a range of different moustache styles with a selection of ‘appropriate’ drams. We’ll also be donating 5% of all the proceeds from whiskies purchased through our Whisky and Whiskers page to Movember at the end of the month.

http://www.thewhiskyexchange.com/selection/movember/

You can let us know how your moustache growing antics are going over on Facebook or Twitter, as well as ask us for more whisky and whiskers recommendations – we’re fairly sure we can match up a dram to any kind of facial furniture…

http://www.facebook.com/TheWhiskyExchange

http://www.twitter.com/WhiskyExchange

TWE Whisky Show 2012 – Gordon & Macphail’s Greatest Hits

Our opening tasting of the second day of The Whisky Exchange Whisky Show was a bit different to the others. Firstly it was a sequel, following up from last year’s incredible Gordon & Macphail Timeline class, and secondly it was … Continue reading >>