We are still accepting orders to UK destinations for Christmas delivery!
We’re extending the deadline until 4pm on Tuesday December 22nd GMT.
DISCOVER
Merry Christmas to all our members near and far. There is no doubt that this year has been challenging but it has brought us together in many wonderful ways. Thanks for being with us, you really do make us #alltogetherunique. Just take a look at all our whisky adventures this year…
A YEAR UNLIKE ANY OTHER, BETTER DAYS AHEAD
Members have always been at the heart of the Society, and we kicked off 2020 by reinforcing our commitment to put you at the heart of everything we do as a club.
The Society’s MD and Chief Member Champion, David Ridley, reflects on this year and looks forward to more whisky adventures in 2021. Click over to our website to read more.
The Scotch Malt Whisky Society, The Vaults, 87 Giles Street, Leith EH6 6BZ
Contact: sales@smws.com or call 0131 555 2929 (Mon-Fri 9am-4.45pm). Visit the Society at here for membership information
This is your chance to join and to take advantage of their great offers!
Spot the SMWS bottles in this amusing You Tube video
Brand new bottles at Loch Fyne: Chinese New Year special bottlings from Johnnie Walker, a magical cask from Compass Box, and new drams from Benromach, Paul John, Westland and more!
Compass Box Magic Cask
£157.00
A blended malt made up mostly of whisky from the closed Imperial Distillery, drawn from 1st-fill bourbon barrels and blended with a younger Speyside whisky, which was re-racked into Oloroso-seasoned butt casks. Behold, the Magic Cask!
Can’t be there in person? Our ‘Message in a Bottle’ service allows you to add a video message to selected single malts, completely free of charge. Upon receiving their dram, the whisky fan in your life will be able to scan a QR code that will reveal your video message – a truly personal touch!
A missing link on Orkney
Wideford distillery – Islands Single Malt Scotch Whisky. Wideford distillery was located about two miles from Kirkwall on the slopes of Wideford Hill and on the Burn of Hatston, which was likely its water source. Wideford was licensed to Mr W. Traill in 1813 and he distilled there until its closure in 1825. In 1825 it closed, cannee find much info about it. A missing whisky link to our past, has anyone got more details of this lost distillery?
What I did find; Wideford Hill Chambered Cairn – built some 5,000 years ago on an artificial terrace on a steep hillside. It’s placed in a location with views out across Wide Firth and other Orkney islands. The nearby Cuween Hill chambered cairn is also visible. The cairn was intentionally in-filled during prehistory, though when and by whom is unknown, it had been opened and robbed of any contents before any antiquarians were able to investigate it in the 1800s. Its layout comprises: a narrow entranceway, a central chamber, with side walls reaching almost 3m in height, three complex side cells. Today entrance from the cairn is no longer through the low, narrow passage. Visitors now have to enter by descending through a modern roof. Part of the original roof survives and the large lintels forming the passage’s roof and the cells were constructed with architectural expertise, think about that, built so long ago, who had the brains?. The form and architectural techniques here are similar to Maeshowe. On the tomb walls there are still rare examples of Neolithic art. The presence of such imagery reinforces the relationship between tombs such as Wideford Hill and other settlements such as Skara Brae, where similar marks have been found. The Wideford Cairn faces west and as such is bathed in the light of the setting sun from the end of February. The entrance to the cairn is very low and small, unlike Maeshowe’s grand entrance to welcome the light of the midwinter sunset. The name “Wideford” probably comes from the Norse “vide-fjord” referring to the hill’s proximity to the stretch of sea known as the Wide Firth.
A few miles to the west, and facing the Wideford Hill tomb, is the Cuween Hill cairn. The name “Cuween” derives from the Old Norse, “kúa-eng”, meaning “Cattle Pasture”. The current spelling of the name “Cuween” is a fairly recent corruption. In the early years of the 20th century the hill was still written as “Kewing”, in common with other “Kewing” placenames in Orkney. Like many others in Orkney, the Cuween Cairn was thought to be the home of fairies. As a result, the local name for the cairn was simply “The Fairy Knowe.” Building a chambered cairn required considerable effort. Working only with stone tools, the Neolithic craftsmen erected structures that are estimated to have taken between 10,000 and 100,000 man-hours to complete. The sheer manpower required for the structures confirms their significance to the Neolithic people of Orkney. Stone blocks and flagstones had to be quarried, often from sites some distance from the site of the cairn, and where the chambers were cut into hills, such as Cuween, the main chamber had to be carved from solid bedrock before work on the roof could begin.The builders’ work, even by today’s standards is impressive. Their drystane walls are neat and level and the interiors today, after many thousands of years, are still stable and dry.
Orkney-Cromarty cairns: These are made up of a single long chamber, divided into stall-like “compartments” by stone uprights, found in Orkney and the Scottish mainland. Although the Orkney-Cromarty tombs do not have side cells, a few hybrid chambers, such as Unstan in Stenness, have incorporated them in their designs. Maeshowe-type Cairns: This style is unique to Orkney. The tombs have one main central chamber that is reached by a low, long entrance passage. One, or more, side chambers branch of from the main central chamber. Regarding the Maeshowe-style cairns, their construction, with larger, well-cut and fitted stones, is more monumental.
For our 12th day, originally for travel retail, but we know how hard they’ve been hit this year, We understand this retails around £110 in ‘Airport venues’.
NOW ONLY £60
We’ll keep all our deals of Christmas open until the stock is finished, even if you miss the previous day,
Celebrate the festive season in style! The latest drams to drop at whiskyshop.com are the perfect tipples to toast Christmas, Hogmanay and Chinese New Year.
As we’re fast approaching the end of the year, we would like to take this opportunity to reassure our EU members about their Society membership.
There will be no change to the way you order from us, whether it is whisky, our Single Cask Spirits or any of our other products, these will all still be available to you and it is very much business as usual. In terms of delivery, we expect some small changes to be put in place alongside new regulations coming into force on Friday 1, January 2021 once the UK leaves the European Union but this will not impact your Society orders being delivered from Edinburgh to your door with tracking visibility.
We will continue to share a dram with you at local tastings and festival events and you will still have full access online to our Unfiltered magazine and wider whisky community.
We’ve been working hard behind the scenes to ensure there is minimal disruption and change and we feel we are in a great position for a seamless transition. With this in mind, we’d like to highlight a few changes and developments.
DELIVERY TIMES
To ensure that all EU members still have full access to all the whisky on offer, post Brexit, we need to ship consolidated orders weekly to duty warehouses in six countries. From here we will redistribute with local couriers like DHL to members’ houses, this means that delivery times will be around 2-3 weeks on average. We will always endeavour to minimise this and look to prioritise the EU shipments on certain occasions. We felt that the alternative of warehousing smaller, limited pockets of stock in the local hubs to reduce delivery times does not give the best member experience.
In the next few months, as the EU and UK commence trading in a new way, there may be additional delays, as we start a completely new border and logistics process as a UK supplier to EU countries. There may also be additional delays due to a reduced capacity in transport provisions. However, we have been planning for over 12 months and believe our processes for delivery are solid and secure.
LOCAL WEBSITES
For the initial Brexit move, in phase 1, all members will continue to use www.smws.com as a single English language website, since we have already made significant developments and modifications to successfully fulfill EU orders. In this phase we mainly focus on the legal compliance of VAT and Duty calculations for local markets. Members will see very little change. However, with a further phase 2 development we look to offer local language websites for Germany, France and possibly Sweden.
PRICING
Whilst we transition, this first phase will see us hold the same pricing as the current site in British Pounds. Further development will see local pricing and currency being introduced depending on local VAT and duty rates.
CHRISTMAS ORDERS
Orders for deliveries in time for Christmas in the EU will need to be with us before 12 noon (UK time) on 17th December.
We will look to honour any last orders made on our current website, please make sure to do this before 12 noon (UK time) on 21st December, with deliveries being made before 31st December.
Sorry, any orders placed after this date will need to be refunded as we cannot legally accept orders for shipment to non-UK countries to arrive post Brexit date of 31st December, until our new EU site is live. We anticipate this to be Tuesday, 8th January 2021. We will aim not to release any new bottlings in UK or EU until the EU site is live, but if we do, we will ensure we save stock for the EU members. At this stage we anticipate the January Outturn to go on sale on Friday, 15th January 2021.
The Scotch Malt Whisky Society, The Vaults, 87 Giles Street, Leith EH6 6BZ
Contact: sales@smws.com or call 0131 555 2929 (Mon-Fri 9am-4.45pm). Visit the Society at here for membership information
This is your chance to join and to take advantage of their great offers!
Spot the SMWS bottles in this amusing You Tube video
1997 Hebridean Mulligan (Ledaig) 23 Year Old “Old Malt Cask” K&L Exclusive Single Hogshead Cask Strength Blended Malt Scotch Whisky (750ml) $119.99 View
The Isle of Mull’s only distillery was originally founded as Ledaig back in 1798. It has had a rocky history ever since with many repeated closures, sometimes decades long. But in 1993, Burn Stewart Distillers saved the day and the distillery. They rechristened it Tobermory and established today’s practice of distilling unpeated malt for half of the year and heavily peated malt for the other half. In its modern incarnation, the Tobermory name applies to the smoke free spirit and the Ledaig name for the peated variety. Here we have a gorgeous expression of the Ledaig at 21 years old aged in a hogshead that allowed all that peat to mature without being overpowered by the wood. While we had hoped to teaspoon all of the years blended malt casks with a nearby distillery, there aren’t any. Using Tobermory spirit wouldn’t technically declassify Ledaig because it’s the same distillery and therefore still a single malt. We had to look to the other Hebridiean Isles for mature spirit that could sustain this 21 year old age statement. In the end, our second shot landed on the Isle of Skye and we were able to eye-dropper a tiny amount of 23 year old Talisker into the barrel before bottling and save everyone a huge chunk of change.
Doc Swinson’s 15 Year Old “Rare Release Batch #9” K&L Exclusive Exploratory Cask Series Nonchillfiltered Small Batch Cask Strength Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey (750ml) (Pre-Arrival) $149.99 View
Doc Swinson’s has become an absolute sensation in the bourbon world. The skeptics have been silenced and countless bourbon lovers have fallen in love with their exceptional exploratory cask 15 year. It would be negligent not to mention that for those paying attention the first batch of 15 year old (batch #6) has now become a serious collectors item. It’s successors, batch #7 & #8, sold at record speeds and have been received with equal gusto by aficionados and amateurs alike. Amazingly, our friends at Doc’s have secured this new batch of 15 year. It’s the same exact bourbon as the first three batches. As the supplier for this bourbon is extremely concerned with the preventing its source from being disclosed, the 29 barrels that went into this excellent small batch bourbon were dumped in KY before being truck in inert containers to Washington for bottling. This batch was slightly larger than the last three at 4200 bottles, an increase of 240 bottles/two barrels. The gorgeous truth about these awesome bourbons is that each batch has its own amazing character built around an amazing core of classic bourbon flavors. Except a richly textured mature bourbon character with aromas of leather, baking spice, brandied cherries, chocolate and fresh wintergreen. Perfect balance between sweet and savory on the palate with a long warming finish. Sadly, according to the bottler, this is the last of these 15 years, although they assure us they’re pushing for more. We’re prayin’ they succeed.
1993 The Road to Elgin (Linkwood) 27 Year Old “Old Malt Cask” K&L Exclusive Single Hogshead Cask Strength Blended Malt Scotch Whisky (750ml) $149.99 View
Teaspooning this exceptional whisky was a very nerve-wracking endeavor. While we inherently believe that the innocuous act of adding the tiniest possible quantity of another malt to a single barrel of Scotch does nothing to diminish the quality of a particular whisky, there is an intellectual argument to be made for keeping the sanctity and purity of a single cask intact. In the end, we’ve made the decision that in almost every case the more important factor for our customers is value over image. So while we had wanted desperately to be able to name this excellent distillery and could have likely sold every bottle for much more than the 25% premium that avoiding tariffs would have afforded us, we believe that it is in the best interest of our customers to offer them the very best whiskies at the best possible prices regardless of perception. That is indeed what this special cask represents. Even years ago, when whisky was plentiful and comparatively cheap, we would have been lucky to find a deal as sweet as this one. At this advanced aged, this famous old Speyside exhibits all the finesse and elegance you’d expect. A nose of creamy malt, Seville orange peel and honey candies. Sweet rich malt and stewed fruit on the palate with kisses of toasted vanilla, caramel tuiles and touches of warming wood spice on the finish. While some would’ve paid an extra $50 to show off the famous Linkwood name, we prefer mystery and affordability. We think most of our customers do too.
Let us transport you to the beautiful banks of Loch Fyne this Christmas, with a little help from some of our best-selling spirits.
From spectacular single casks to brilliant blends, our original range of drams can help you find the ultimate gift for the whisky lover who already has everything.
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