Ailsa Bay, 48.9%, £55
Given the plethora of recently opened and planned distilleries within the Lowland area of single malt Scotch whisky production, there should be many contenders for this award in a few years. For now, however, most new releases from the region are independent bottlings of old favorites and innovation has been at a premium. So it was a great pleasure to see William Grant & Sons do something truly radical when it came to the first bottling from their Ailsa Bay Distillery at Girvan, in Ayrshire.
The Grant’s team threw the rulebook of what a Lowland malt...
