Glen Ord stands at Muir of Ord on the Black Isle, north of Inverness, and is the only operational single malt distillery on the peninsula. Founded in 1838, it has been owned by Diageo and its predecessors since 1923 and remains a substantial producer, much of its output going into Johnnie Walker.
The Singleton brand was created by Diageo in 2006 as a strategic single malt portfolio aimed at growing markets, originally drawing on Glen Ord, Dufftown and Glendullan, with each distillery's Singleton sold into different regions. Glen Ord became the Asian market expression and has been particularly successful in Taiwan, where the brand consistently features among the top-selling single malts.
The 12 Year Old is matured in a combination of American and European oak, deliberately styled towards approachability: sweet, fruity and unintimidating. It is not a whisky designed to challenge the drinker, and reviewers who arrive expecting peat or pyrotechnics will leave disappointed. Read on its own terms — as an introductory Highland malt with the polish that distillery scale allows — it does its job perfectly well.
