Claxton's Speyside 1998 - 25 years old

Speyside Distillery, tucked away near the hamlet of Drumguish in the shadow of the Cairngorms, was one of Scotland's smallest and least-famous working distilleries — running two of the tiniest copper pot stills in the country and drawing its water from the pristine River Tromie — yet its spirit was anything but small in character. In 2025 the distillery was permanently closed and its stills dismantled, its CEO declaring it a "lost distillery" — meaning every surviving bottle is now a piece of genuinely irreplaceable history. This single cask (C24109), distilled on 20 October 1998, received its finishing touches in a Refill Oloroso Sherry Octave — a compact cask format that integrates sherry influence with quiet precision — emerging with a nose of iced fruit cake and Christmas spice over dry sherry notes, a rich and chewy palate of aged sherry, dried fruits and warming spice, and a long, fruit-laden finish that keeps giving. Bottled at Claxton's Dalswinton Bond at 53.8% cask strength, natural colour, non-chill filtered, in just 65 individually numbered bottles — from a distillery that will never run again.