I started drinking Single Malts in the early 2000’s and I have always had a place in my heart for the Bunnahabhain Distillery. I thought Bunnahabhain was an underdog vs. the other known distilleries. Bunnahabhain’s older age statements hold up against the best of the others. My thinking is that Bunnahabhain is a bit of a distiller’s distillery.
The Bunnahabhain Distillery is secluded enough to not have a dependable road for business needs until the 1990s. Built on the water with a working pier, Bunnahabhain has always been dependent on the small boats running the Islay Sound for supply and distribution of the malts. The labeling and the story about the boats is attractive, even more so now that I know more about the history.
Bunnahabhain Maturation Warehouse Tour
We took the 2:30pm Maturation Warehouse Tour. We figured that we wanted to be inside their warehouse sampling directly from the barrels. The distillery tastings are special and absolutely unavailable at US retail. In many cases, the warehouse tastings also included a facility tour. The distilleries that still have malting floors will usually combine a full tour of operations and include some special cask tastings.
Sarah Ferguson was our personal tour guide, she also bottled and signed the bottles that we purchased. You’d think since this was our first official tasting that we would rush for the good stuff. Instead, Sarah was so knowledgeable that almost every comment she said led us to ask a detailed question. We sat for 30 minutes going back and forth about the Bunnahabhain history and their Scotch process, and we lost track of our drams. Luckily, back in the store, there were wee bottles from the casks we were supposed to drink in the warehouse.
Speaking of wee bottles, Pro Tip; many of the distilleries sell 200ml and 500ml bottles of their expressions (such as Bruichladdich and Springbank). This allows the price and storage to become more manageable. I highly recommend the smaller bottlings as take-aways. Once I returned home to Zurich, I was able to unpack in an abundance similar to Christmas gifts. Multiple smaller bottles also allowed me to purchase more than a single expression from the distilleries I really liked. Having multiple expressions, such as unpeated and peated, from the same distillery makes for a fun story and better tasting once home.
We stayed in the store for a long while. As we did, we introduced ourselves to more and more visitors and distillery staffers. There was a guide named Scott whom we met both at the beginning and the end of our tour. Then we met another Scott who worked somewhere in production. At one point there were 5 people in the small Scotland distillery store and three of them were named Scott. How could you go wrong?
Once we finally went outside to meet our taxi, we were met with a rainbow over the bay between Islay and the Island of Mull (right side of the photo). If I don’t mention how lucky we were in regards to the weather, I’ll mention it now. We saw a few rainbows during our visit and that’s not just the Scotch talking. https://www.bunnahabhain.com