The Teaninich distillery was built in 1817 in the Highlands of Scotland by Captain Hugh Munroe, who inherited the estate in 1877 upon the death of his father, Royal Navy Captain James Munro, Laird of Teaninich. After passing through the hands of various owners, including the blenders Munro & Cameron in Elgin in 1895, Teaninich was sold to the Distillers Company Limited (DCL) in 1933. In the 1960s and 1970s, in a rapidly developing industry, it underwent various periods of expansion, with the replacement and then addition of new stills with a higher capacity, and the construction of a new distillery. The old distillery closed in 1984 in the midst of the Whisky Loch crisis. Teaninich primarily produced whisky for blends and only a handful of single malt bottlings can be found, either in the Rare Malts or Flora and Fauna range, or from independent bottlers.

A Teaninich distilled in 1976 and bottled in 1995 by Gordon & MacPhail for the Connoisseurs Choice range. Gordon & MacPhail is one of Scotland’’s oldest independent bottlers. It 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. The Connoisseurs Choice range is one of Gordon & MacPhail’’s spearhead collections. Created for the Italian collector and importer Edoardo Giaccone in the early 1970s, it became part of the permanent range in 1979 and has remained so ever since, despite changing greatly, from red and black labels to map labels and today’’s design, as well as the gradient label. Older editions were bottled at 40% and coloured artificially. Today, the whiskies in the range display their natural colouring and are often cask strength.