Finealta — Gaelic for 'elegant' — was released in 2011 as the second of the Private Editions and is the most historically minded of the run. Dr Bill Lumsden drew the recipe from a Glenmorangie production record dated 1903, when the Tain distillery, like many Highland houses, was still using lightly peated malt as a matter of course.
The whisky is matured in a combination of American white oak ex-bourbon barrels and Oloroso sherry casks, and bottled at 46% without chill filtration. The peating level is restrained — Glenmorangie has never been a smoke-driven distillery, and Finealta does not pretend otherwise — but the whiff of woodsmoke is unmistakable, sitting alongside the honey and citrus that define the house style.
It is, in effect, an act of distillery archaeology. By the early twentieth century the Scottish malt industry was already shifting away from peat in the eastern Highlands as coal became cheaper to transport, and lightly peated Highland malt of the sort Finealta replicates is now a rare commodity. The release prompted a small wave of historically themed bottlings from other distilleries, but few were drawn so directly from a documented recipe.
The pleasure of Finealta is in the tension between familiarity and strangeness — recognisably Glenmorangie in its honey and orchard fruit, yet shaded by a smoke the modern drinker does not expect to find in a Tain bottle.
