Kininvie Whisky

The Kininvie whisky distillery lies in Dufftown in Speyside’s spiritual home. One of William Grant and Sons three distilleries in Dufftown, the trio sit on the Conval Hills. The earliest was Glenfiddich, followed in quick succession by Balvenie and roughly a century later, in 1990, the Kininvie distillery was founded and production began on the 4th of July of the same year.

In accordance with its recent conception, Kininvie is a rather modern distillery, indeed the distillation is computer controlled. William Grant and Sons deemed it to be a mistake to release a Kininvie single malt Scotch whisky and directly compete with their other, decidedly leviathan distilleries, they intended it from the beginning as a source of whisky for their blended products; Kininvie Scotch whisky is a component in Clan MacGregor. Kininvie is also a component of the premium vatting, Monkey Shoulder. The raison d'être for Monkey Shoulder was to proffer an approachable whisky, the other two components being Glenfiddich and Balvenie.

To prevent anyone releasing a single malt from Kininvie, William Grant only offers the whisky for sale vatted with a miniscule amount of whisky from another distillery. Despite these drastic measures, a 15 year-old single malt has emerged, Hazelwood 105, bottled in 2006 for Ho Cheng. There is no mash house at Kininvie, thus Balvenie pipe the mash some 200 metres to the distillery.