
Scapa Signatory Bottling, 46%
What is going on with Scapa?
Never before with any whisky distillery have I had to search every website in the UK for an interesting bottle of it. Finally, I found a bottle of not so ‘Secret Orkney’ that so happened to be from the distillery, but even then, it took some righteous digging through reviews to confirm it was this modern unicorn distillery.
Scapa seems to have been turned into something super premium without any rhyme or reason. I thought the 16YO was an okay product, but it was discontinued, and prices jumped to £300 a bottle at its peak. Are you actually taking the piss?
It isn’t a large distillery by any means, nor the most famous on the Island of Orkney, so why the jump in pricing? Why the almost impossible to find age stated release, and I’m not a stickler for age statements, but the struggle to even find and indie of it was pretty soul destroying as a whisky fan.
I can hear you all saying that there are plenty of older bottlings to try. Yes, that’s true. But as much as I’d love to sample an 30+YO Scapa, I don’t quite fancy paying the £1,000+ price tag for it.
I thought this would be a really cutting, intense, slightly funny rant about a distillery that just needs some love, but inevitably, it just made me sad. I’m not crying, but what are Pernod doing in this place, and why can’t they run a Scottish distillery effectively that isn’t a household name?
Anyway, watch the video for the review, let me know your thoughts on this expensive cloak and dagger story of why Scapa is now the whisky equivalent of trying to find Lord Lucan riding Shergar over a finish line in Atlantis