Wm Cadenhead

George Duncan set up as a wine and spirit merchant and distillery agent in Netherkirkgate, Aberdeen, in 1842, and the firm traded from those premises for about 130 years. His friend William Cadenhead joined him and took the business over; the company's history gives 1858 for the takeover and 1863 for the change of name. Cadenhead was better known in Aberdeen as a Victorian poet. His great-nephew Robert W. Duthie built the firm's name on single malt Scotch and Demerara rum.

In 1972 J & A Mitchell bought the firm after its whole stock had been sold at auction at Christie's, and the business moved to Campbeltown; Companies House shows William Cadenhead Limited incorporated in December 1972. The company calls itself Scotland's oldest independent bottler, a claim this entry has not checked against other bottlers' records.

Cadenhead's warehouses and bottling hall are in Campbeltown, on the Kintyre peninsula in Argyll, next to its sister companies Springbank and Glengyle. The company has shops in Campbeltown, Edinburgh and London. Because it is a bottler, its whiskies come from distilleries all over Scotland and beyond, and the place of distillation is printed on each label; only the maturing and bottling happen in Campbeltown.

An independent bottler does not distil. Cadenhead's buys casks from distilleries, brokers and private sellers, moves them into its own bonded warehouses in Campbeltown and records each cask's type, fill level and location. It may re-rack a whisky into another cask or blend casks together, and bottles a cask when its team judges it ready. The Authentic Collection is single casks bottled at natural cask strength without colouring or chill-filtration; the Original Collection is reduced in strength; Chairman's Stock holds rare and aged casks. Enigma bottlings do not name the distillery but still give strength, cask type, region and age or vintage.

There is no single house flavour, because each bottling shows the distillery and cask it came from. The company says it chooses by taste rather than by age or by how fashionable a distillery is, and that it looks for lesser-known distilleries as well as famous ones. For drinkers this makes Cadenhead's a route to single casks of distilleries that rarely bottle their own whisky. A single cask may give only a few hundred bottles, sometimes far fewer.