Port Ellen closed its doors in 1983, a casualty of the whisky loch and the cold arithmetic of the DCL rationalisations. For twenty years it slept in warehouse silence, its name half-forgotten by all but the obsessive. Then Diageo, in the early 2000s, began the annual Special Release programme, and Port Ellen — alongside Brora — became the cornerstone of that series. Each autumn bottling was watched, traded, hoarded; each was a little closer to the last.
This 39 year old sits near the outer edge of what remains. Distilled in the final years of the old regime and bottled at cask strength, it is the work of spirit that has had the luxury — or the misfortune — of spending nearly four decades in wood. The peat, once a defining swagger, has softened into something altogether more complex: herbal, waxy, medicinal in the old apothecary sense rather than the surgical one.
The nose rewards patience. Cold ash, seaweed and beeswax give way to lemon oil and old leather, the kind of smell one finds in a Victorian solicitor's office. On the palate the oiliness is still there — Port Ellen was always a greasy, coastal spirit — but the fire has gone out of it. What remains is brine, candied peel, tobacco and a polite oak framework that lets the distillate speak.
The finish is the proof of the pudding: extraordinarily long, drying, with that final echo of an extinguished bonfire that only genuine Islay peat, genuinely aged, can provide. It is not the Port Ellen of its youth. It is something rarer — a ghost, well dressed, and not much longer for this world.
