Founded in the Orkney Islands in 1885 by John Townsend, a distiller from Speyside, the Scapa distillery is, alongside its neighbour Highland Park, the most northerly distillery in Scotland. The distillery was mothballed in 1994 by its then owner (Allied Distillers) and only a few distillations completed by the Highland Park team enabled Scapa to survive. It officially began production again in 2005, after it was bought by the French spirits giant Pernod Ricard.

A Scapa 21 year old distilled in 1960 and bottled by Gordon & MacPhail. In the 70s and 80s, the distillery’’s owner Hiram Walker granted Gordon & MacPhail a bottling license, as it lacked the necessary means to produce its own bottlings. To find Scapa releases from this period, it is at the door of the famous Elgin bottler that one must knock. Gordon & MacPhail was founded in Elgin in 1895 by James Gordon and John Alexander MacPhail. As was often the case at the time, the business started out as a delicatessen and wine merchant. In 1915, John Alexander MacPhail retired and a new partner joined the business, John Urquhart. He was joined by his son George in 1933, a few years after James Gordon sadly died in a car crash. Gordon & MacPhail works with many of Speyside’’s leading distilleries, from whom it has accumulated considerable stocks. It is also licensed to bottle whiskies for many of them, including Glen Grant, Linkwood, Mortlach, Macallan and Glenlivet. The business really took off in the 1970s, acquiring distributors in a huge range of countries and selling casks to several Italian bottlers in selections that would become legends in their own right. Gordon & MacPhail is still run by the Urquhart family today, from the same building, and is one of the most iconic bottlers in the industry, with incredible stocks of sometimes very old and rare whiskies. The company is in complete control of the entire maturation process. Gordon & MacPhail has also owned the Benromach distillery since 1993. The Book of Kells range, named after the famous manuscript kept at the Trinity College library in Dublin, features some of Gordon & MacPhail’’s most prestigious bottlings. Although it contains some younger releases such as this Scapa, more recent bottlings are generally matured for between 30 and 60 years. It was rare to find aged whiskies at the time, before Whisky Loch pushed the trend for older bottlings in the 1990s and 2000s.