Cardhu 12 Year Old Pure Malt

Speyside Blended Malt Scotch Whisky
Distillery Bottling 70cl / 40%

A bottle of the notorious Cardhu 12-year-old Pure Malt, Diageo's short-lived and short-sighted solution to the supply crisis created for Cardhu single malt in 2003 after their Mediterranean sales and marketing team were too good at their jobs.

To capitalise on the Cardhu brand's unexpectedly massive popularity on the Iberian peninsula - where young people drank it with their preferred brand of cola - instead of just lowering the age statement or putting the price up, the hard of thinking Diageo executives decided to top up their limited stocks of Cardhu 12-year-old with another single malt that was in plentiful supply - the unloved Glendullan was chosen - and simply change 'Single Malt' to 'Pure Malt' on the packaging. An epic sh*tstorm ensued.

After a spectacular and utterly predictable outcry from both fellow distillers and whisky-lovers, Cardhu 12-year-old Pure Malt had to be withdrawn, and the subsequent backlash was so severe that even the hapless clowns at the Scotch Whisky Association were to forced to step in and actually do something. Entirely unsurprisingly, their solution made everything worse.

After faffing about for nearly six years, the SWA eventually came up with the deeply flawed dogs dinner of the Scotch Whisky Regulations 2009, which messed up the classification of the Scottish whisky regions and introduced the stupid and confusing Blended Malt classification while banning the Pure Malt term - which was vague and open to abuse - along with the entirely sensible and precise historical phrase Vatted Malt, which was deemed too unsexy for modern consumers.

This idiocy in turn led to Compass Box's fantastic Last Vatted Malt and Last Vatted Grain whiskies, which were literally the only good things to come out of the whole sorry saga.

Attributes