Taste Test: Inside Gordon & MacPhail’s Record-Breaking 85-Year Glenlivet Scotch

(Photos: Gordon & MacPhail)

When Gordon & MacPhail announced the release of its Glenlivet 85 Years Old earlier this year, it instantly made headlines as the world’s oldest bottled single malt. Distilled on Feb. 3, 1940, and bottled on May 2, 2025, this whisky has rested longer than most human lifetimes — yet it shows a freshness and vibrancy that surprised us when we tasted it.

This month, the company revealed the sculptural decanter designed to hold this record-breaking release. Read more about the decanter here.

But while the breathtaking bronze-and-glass vessel draws the eye, the whisky inside is what we were most interested in. We sat down with Gordon & MacPhail Director of Prestige Stephen Rankin — the great-grandson of George Urquhart, the man who filled the cask back in 1940 — to talk about how a whisky can survive eight and a half decades in oak — and we opened our own sample to see what 85 years of patience tastes like.

Our Tasting Notes

Nose: The first impression is wood smoke, but not the overpowering oak you might expect from 85 years in cask. Instead, there’s spice and sweetness: cardamom, brown sugar, honey, melting butter. A soft leather note runs beneath brighter fruit tones — pear, apricot, melon, orange blossom.

Taste: A rush of orange sherbet leads, layered with lemon peel, rosemary, leather and vanilla wafers. That butter note from the nose carries through, giving the whisky a plush texture.

Finish: Long and evolving. Dark chocolate, tannin and oak give way to tobacco and smoked wood before settling into charred mango, orange peel and a faint meatiness. The final impression is sweet, smoky and savory all at once.

Read our complete review here.

Why It Works at 85 Years Old

The natural concern many (including us, we’ll be honest) would have with a whisky of this age is that it could lack balance. The best whiskies have a perfect balance of oak from the aging and notes from the fermented and distilled grains. For a whisky that spent 85 years in oak, concerns that it would lose itself in the oak were natural — but that wasn’t our experience.

Gordon & MacPhail Director of Prestige Stephen Rankin

If you were poured this blind, Rankin believes you’d guess it were somewhere between 25 and 35 years old. “It’s not until the back of the nose it evolves a bit more,” he opined.

So why isn’t it an oak bomb? Rankin points to four factors:

1. The craftmanship of both the spirit and cask,
2. the environment,
3. the ability to identify when a spirit has reached peak maturity, and
4. “Patience,” Rankin said. “Put in brackets: bravery, courage, etc., but patience is vital.”

Several technical details also shaped this whisky and its ability to maintain balanced character despite being the oldest bottled whisky in the world:

The cask was American oak, filled with sherry in Spain before being sent to Scotland, emptied and filled with Glenlivet new make spirit.

• It was a sherry butt, which at more than 500 liters is larger than your standard barrel used for, for example, bourbon, meaning less wood contact per liter of liquid, which slows maturation.
• That sherry butt was made from staves Rankin describes as “very thick.”ub
• It spent 27 years at Glenlivet Distillery before moving to Gordon & MacPhail’s warehouses in Elgin, where it matured for nearly six decades more under careful monitoring.

“It’s not that we opened the cask after 85 years and go, ‘Hey everybody, what good luck; it’s amazing!’” Rankin explained with a chuckle. “We’ve been following it, and like many other casks, the reason this has got here and other casks were bottled is because they were right then, and they wouldn’t have been right now.

“It’s having that skill, ability and knowledge and courage to not just wait but to go: No, this is ready now. I’m bottling this now.”

Scarcity and Value

This incredibly rare whisky is priced at £125,000 ($168,700). That’s a lot of money, obviously, but Rankin says some actually expected a higher figure, considering what similarly aged spirits have retailed for. He pointed to The Macallan’s 84-year-old, which hosted a suggested retail price of £150,000 ($190,000).

“But I think that’s Gordon & MacPhail,” he said. “It’s us just being a little bit more humble, a wee bit more modest.”

The release is framed as “Artistry in Oak” for a reason. “As my grandfather always says, it’s the wood that makes the whisky,” Rankin said. Oak helped shaped this spirit, but so did time, environment and watchful stewardship across four generations.

At 85 years old, this whisky is less about a record and more about experience. It’s astonishingly fresh, layered and alive — a reminder that when handled with care, whisky can transcend age.

As Rankin put it: “The reason it’s rare is not because it’s old; it’s because it’s amazing.”