Portsoy is named for the small harbour village a short walk east of Glenglassaugh along the Moray Firth coast. The village gives its name to Glenglassaugh's peated core expression, launched alongside Sandend and 12 Year Old in the 2023 range rebuild under Rachel Barrie.
Glenglassaugh is not historically a peated distillery. Its reputation, such as it was before the 1986 closure, rested on tropical fruit character from long bourbon maturation. Portsoy is therefore an adopted style rather than a revival, and the whisky is built by maturing lightly peated spirit in a mix of ex-bourbon, ex-sherry and ex-port casks. The port influence is deliberate, a nod to the village's name, and it provides a dried-fruit layer underneath the smoke.
Bottled at 49.1% without chill filtration, Portsoy opens with the kind of soft coastal smoke that suggests a beach fire rather than Islay's medicinal intensity. Peach and pineapple from the distillery's fruit-forward house style push through almost immediately, which is the unusual trick of this whisky: it feels like Glenglassaugh first and a peated malt second. The sherry and port casks add a faint red-fruit sweetness on the mid-palate, and the finish carries the smoke out slowly alongside salted honey.
Portsoy earned a 92-point score from Whisky Advocate and has been positioned as the smoky counterpart to Sandend. For drinkers who find Islay peat too assertive, it offers a gentler, fruitier approach to coastal smoke, grounded in a distillery that only recently added peated production to its repertoire.
