Independent whisky bottlers have played a vital role in the history of whisky and were crucial to the development of single malt whisky as a category.  The early independent bottlers such as Cadenhead’s and Gordon & MacPhail were pioneers of taste, promoting single malt whisky at a time when blends accounted for almost the entirety of the overall whisky market .

Even today the greatest ever bottlings from most distilleries have been from independent companies rather than official distillery bottlings, and without independent bottlers many of Scotland’s distilleries might no longer exist as the interest in single malt whiskies they generated has sustained and given impetus to the whisky industry as a whole.

It was the independent bottlers who set the trend for older cask strength single malt whiskies from little-known distilleries in the 1980s and '90s. This soon led to official bottlers getting on board with the creation of Diageo’s Rare Malts Selection and then the annual Special Releases, fuelling the rapid growth of the prestige whisky phenomenon and eventually leading to the revival of classic lost distilleries including Port Ellen, Rosebank and Brora.

Even if you’ve never bought a bottle of independently-bottled whisky, if you’re a whisky fan you have a lot to thank them for. We can’t know what the whisky world would look like if independent bottlers didn’t exist, but we can be sure that it wouldn't be as interesting as it is today.