Port Charlotte is somewhat of a legendary whisky that has a reverence that others do not.... it is very difficult to explain.
With original stone barns and grain stores dating back as far as the 1800s, an extensive restoration project, in partnership with the Dalswinton Estate has been undertaken at Claxton’s Dalswinton Bond to bring the buildings at Sandbed back into full use. The extra effort proved very much worth it, resulting in traditional dunnage-style warehousing alongside more modern racked facilities, perfect for both long-term and short-term whisky maturation in a beautiful Scottish countryside environment.
Quality-focused and deliberately selected, the casks used at Dalswinton Bond are sourced globally from specialist producers with as much care and attention as the spirit that fills them. Variety and individuality are at the forefront when combining spirit and wood for maturation, and every shape, size, and type of cask is used for a specific reason.
The focus given to this process transfers into each bottling and also reflects the forward-thinking energy and ingenuity of the Dalswinton Estate, making it the perfect location for our casks to mature.
Nose : A good cheese shop. Brine – seaweed. Musk.
Palate : Sweet peat at first before oak, vanilla and more brine.
Finish : Long oak-driven with seaweed in the aftertaste
About Port Charlotte
A heavily peated single malt, distilled on the Isle of Islay at Bruichladdich distillery.
Port Charlotte is Bruichladdich’s heavily-peated single malt, with a peating level of around 40ppm. Bruichladdich describes Port Charlotte as having ‘the power of peat with the elegance, complexity and floral top notes for which our Bruichladdich stills are famous’.
The first Port Charlotte release was the five-year-old PC5 Evolution, and successive bottlings have included Port Charlotte Islay Barley 2008 (distilled from barley grown on Coull, Kynagarry, Island, Rockside, Starchmill and Sunderland farms), Port Charlotte Scottish Barley Eòrna Na h-Alba (PC11) and the travel retail exclusive PC12 Oileanach Furachail. The latter marks the retirement of Bruichladdich master distiller Jim McEwan and the succession of Adam Hannett to the role.
The Port Charlotte brand commemorates the former Lochindaal distillery, which operated in the village of Port Charlotte two miles south of Bruichladdich from 1829 until 1929. Initially known as Port Charlotte distillery, the facility was making 128,000 gallons of spirit per annum during Alfred Barnard’s mid-1880s visit, which compared with Lagavulin’s 75,000 gallons and the 250,000 gallons being produced by Ardbeg at the time.
In 1920 Lochindaal’s owner, JF Sheriff & Co, was bought out by Benmore Distilleries but just nine years later Benmore was purchased by the Distillers Company Limited (DCL), which immediately closed Lochindaal.
The plant was subsequently removed although some of the buildings continued to be utilised by the now defunct Islay Creamery until the 1990s, while others were taken over by a garage business and Islay Youth Hostel. Two substantial, stone-built warehouses have remained in use for the maturation of spirit, and it is there that today’s Port Charlotte single malt is aged.
There too Bruichladdich planned to create a new distillery in which to produce heavily-peated whisky, but the plans never came to fruition, and it seems highly unlikely that distilling will return to the village since the acquisition of Bruichladdich by French company Rémy Cointreau in 2012.
The Bruichladdich team notes that ‘following his visit here [to Lochindaal] in 1885 Alfred Barnard wrote ‘Peat only is used in drying the malt, fired in open chauffeurs,’ a testament supported in a few surviving faded photographs showing the huge peat stacks waiting to be fed to the kiln fires. Port Charlotte is in essence a tribute to the men who worked Lochindaal.
Production of Port Charlotte at Bruichladdich commenced on 29 May 2001, and was the very first distillation carried out by the new distillery team after its revival in the hands of Murray McDavid, following five years of silence.
About Claxton's
Claxton’s is a secure Bonded Warehouse facility based in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. With original stone barns and grain stores dating back as far as the 1800s, an extensive restoration project, in partnership with the Dalswinton Estate, has been undertaken at Claxton’s Dalswinton Bond to bring the buildings at Sandbed back into full use. The extra effort proved very much worth it, resulting in traditional dunnage-style warehousing alongside more modern racked facilities, perfect for both long-term and short-term whisky maturation in a beautiful Scottish countryside environment.
Quality-focused and deliberately selected, the casks used at Dalswinton Bond are sourced globally from specialist producers with as much care and attention as the spirit that fills them. Variety and individuality are at the forefront when combining spirit and wood for maturation, and every shape, size, and type of cask is used for a specific reason.
The focus given to this process transfers into each bottling and also reflects the forward-thinking energy and ingenuity of the Dalswinton Estate, making it the perfect location for our casks to mature.
53.2% ABV
70cl
