Gordon & MacPhail’s Private Collection is a prestige range of small batch and single cask whiskies from one of Scoland’s oldest and most important independent whisky bottlers. Around 400 Private Collection bottlings have been released over the last three decades.

The initial Private Collection editions appeared sporadically in the 1990s, and were very limited releases. The first bottling was a 1942 Mortlach 50-year-old, an edition of just 24 bottles that hit the shelves in 1993, and it wasn’t until the turn of the millennium that larger runs of Private Collection bottlings first arrived. Nowadays the vast majority of Private Collection editions are single cask releases.

These early Private Collection bottlings were soon being bottled at higher strengths, usually at 45% or cask strength, and since its inception the series has been a showcase for the oldest and most precious stocks in Gordon & MacPhail’s extraordinary inventory. One of the earliest releases was a 55-year-old Glenlivet 1943, and subsequently dozens of bottlings aged longer than fifty years have graced the series - at the time of writing, the oldest Private Collection edition so far is a 74-year-old Glenlivet 1949 released in 2023.