Glenury was the vanity project of Captain Robert Barclay Allardice, the celebrated pedestrian and Regency sportsman who once walked a thousand miles in a thousand consecutive hours for a thousand guineas. He founded the distillery at Stonehaven in 1825, and through a friendship at court contrived to obtain the right to use the prefix Royal — one of only three Scottish distilleries ever granted the privilege, the others being Brackla and Lochnagar. Whether King William IV ever actually drank the stuff is a matter for the antiquarians.
The distillery passed through various hands before landing with DCL and eventually Diageo, and like so many of its fellows it did not survive the 1980s rationalisations. The stills fell silent in 1985 and the buildings were largely demolished to make way for housing — a particular indignity, that. What remains is a finite stock of casks, now increasingly elderly, dispensed at intervals by Diageo.
At thirty-six years, this Glenury shows what the old coastal Highland distillates could do with patient sherry-cask maturation. The nose is rich and layered — dark honey, fig, polished oak and marmalade — with a genuine whisper of North Sea salt in the background. The palate follows through with stewed fruit, toffee and dried orange, carried on an oily, mouth-coating texture that long-aged Glenury is known for.
The finish is long, warm and drying, with dark honey and oak tannin giving way to bitter orange and a faint saline echo. It is a fine dram and a quietly moving one — the last of the Royal houses, drinking its way toward its own conclusion. Captain Barclay would approve.
