Annandale 2017

John Sykes Gardner took over Annandale Distillery from the Donald Family in 1883. Gardner was a wine and spirits merchant in Liverpool. Back in the day, Liverpool and Annan were connected by a scheduled sailing service where ships cast-off from the great seaport of Liverpool, sailing up the North West coast of England and into the Solway Firth, dropping-off and picking-up cargo and passengers at various small ports in Cumbria and Dumfries & Galloway, including Annan of course, before returning to Liverpool. John Sykes Gardner was one such passenger and casks of Annandale Distillery’s finest Scotch whisky would doubtless have been part of the cargo. During his tenure at Annandale, Gardner invested heavily in new distillery equipment, including a, then very modern, steam engine for milling his home-grown barley. ‘The Whisky Distilleries of the United Kingdom’, authored by Alfred Barnard and published in 1887, provides a wonderful, lyrical snapshot of Gardner’s modernised Annandale Distillery, as it was in the late Victorian era. Annandale Distillery produces both unpeated and peated Single Malt Scotch Whisky, in a unique, modern plant designed by the late Dr Jim Swan and built by Forsyths of Rothes. We’re so confident that John Sykes Gardner would have approved of this that we’ve named our unpeated portfolio The Gardner Unpeated Portfolio to honour ‘Gardner the moderniser’.