The Flora & Fauna range, launched in 1991, was United Distillers' way of putting names and faces to the dozens of working malts that fed its blends. Twenty-six distilleries received a single official bottling, each label illustrated with a local creature or plant. For collectors and blenders alike the series became the de facto reference: one bottle per distillery, chosen to show the house style honestly.
Dailuaine sits at Carron on the Spey, founded in 1852 by farmer William Mackenzie. Under his widow's stewardship and the partnership that followed, it became the first distillery in the Highlands to fit a pagoda roof — Charles Doig's now-iconic design made its debut at Dailuaine in 1889. The plant was for a long time the largest malt distillery in the Highlands. It is, and always has been, a Johnnie Walker fillings malt, and the spirit is built for the job: heavy, sulphured, meaty, almost always matured in sherry casks to give Walker its characteristic dark backbone.
The 16 Year Old Flora & Fauna is, with rare exception, the only official Dailuaine you will encounter. It is unfashionable in the modern "clean sherry" age — there is sulphur, there is meatiness, there is the savoury weight blenders prize and casual drinkers sometimes flinch at. But this is what Dailuaine is supposed to taste like, and the F&F bottle remains the most honest single-malt portrait of a distillery that pours millions of litres into Walker every year.
