Caol Ila | The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails

, the largest-volume malt whisky distillery on the Scottish island of Islay, was built in 1846 by Hector Henderson on the Sound of Islay, from which the distillery took its Gaelic name (pronounced cull-EE-lah). “Caol Ila Distillery stands in the wildest and most picturesque locality we have seen,” Alfred Barnard rhapsodized in his exhaustive 1887 survey of the United Kingdom’s distilleries. “It is situated … on the very verge of the sea, in a deep recess of the mountain, mostly cut out of the solid rock. The coast hereabouts is wild and broken, and detached pieces of rock lie here and there of such size that they form small islands.”

Six years after Caol Ila’s founding, it was sold to the owner of the Jura distillery on the neighboring island, and then again in 1863 to the Glasgow firm of Bulloch, Lade, & Co., which operated the distillery for the next fifty-seven years. In the 1920s, it was acquired by distillers company limited (dcl), the predecessor to Diageo, the giant spirits conglomerate that owns Caol Ila today. See Distillers Company Ltd (DCL). The old distillery was demolished and then rebuilt and expanded in the early 1970s. The expansion tripled the number of stills from two to six, which are housed in a glass-fronted structure that offers visitors spectacular views across the sound to the rounded hills known as the Paps of Jura.Throughout the DCL/Diageo era, the lion’s share of Caol Ila’s production has gone toward Johnnie Walker and other Scotch whisky blends. It wasn’t until 2002 that an official single malt bottling was released. See single malt. Although the malt used by Caol Ila for its standard twelve- and eighteen-year-old offerings tends to be heavily peated, the smoky flavor component of these whiskies is relatively tame by Islay standards.