Kininvie

Wrongly dismissed as nothing more than a shed, Kininvie is a fascinating – and little-explored – distillery.

It was pressure on stock that prompted William Grant & Sons to build a third distillery on its Dufftown site in 1990. Glenfiddich’s success meant that its production had to be ring-fenced for single malt, but there was still a need for the firm to produce single malt in-house for its blending requirements. In more recent years, Kininvie has provided the backbone for Grant’s blended malt brand, Monkey Shoulder . There have been very occasional bottlings – as Hazelwood – but in 2013 a limited edition 23-year-old was released, initially for the Taiwanese market. The next year it was followed up with a 17-year-old for global markets. In 2019, the distillery’s newly-established innovation arm, Kininvie Works, released three ‘experimental’ Kininvie whiskies, including a triple-distilled single malt, a single grain using a rye and barley mash passed through its copper pot stills, and a single distillery blend comprising the latter and double-distilled malt.