Glenmorangie | The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails

is a historic, well-respected single malt scotch distillery celebrated for its boundary-pushing wood maturation program and for its towering copper pot stills. Located in the town of Tain, Scotland, about forty miles south of Inverness, the distillery is considered to be in the northern Highlands.

Production started in 1849, five years after a gentleman named William Matheson (ca. 1805–1862) applied for a distilling license for an old brewery at Morangie, near Tain. It wasn’t until 1887, however, that the Glenmorangie Distillery Company Ltd was formed, making whisky in well-used old gin stills brought north from London. Exact replicas of these unique and sinewy stills—an unusual architecture for scotch whisky pot stills—continue to lend the distillery’s hallmark top notes of fruits, florals, and heather.

The brand’s reputation blossomed under the helm of “whisky creator” Dr. Bill Lumsden in the 1990s, when he released a slew of what are now commonly called “finished” whiskies. The term, quite possibly popularized by his team, refers to the process of transferring whisky out of one cask and “finishing” it for flavor in another type of cask. The distillery released Madeira- and cherry-finished whiskies in 1996, and by the end of the millennium, they had also released whiskies aged in Sauternes, port, and cognac casks.When luxury-goods titan Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy (LVMH) purchased the brand in 2004, tensions between scotch whisky loyalists and LVMH reverberated in the media: some thought that the new packaging and label introduced in 2007 was too French. LVMH still owns Glenmorangie, and auld-alliance tensions have since settled, even if fans continue to mispronounce their popular releases such as the Nectar D’or, the Quinta Ruban, and the Lasanta.