VAT-69: ONCE A SHACKLETON CHOICE WHISKY
Vat 69 is a young bargain basement whisky with a light, very fresh and slightly spicy taste profile, also used often for cocktails. The current recipe includes some 40 malts and grains, but it is a simple, pleasant blended scotch, lacking in complexity. It is of mid-gold colour in the glass, with plenty of E150A, and the nose is syrupy sweet, with woody notes. On the palate, the syrupy all-spice flavoured sweetness melts off, partially replaced by peat smoke and more woody flavours. The finish isn’t very long, but it is smoky and warm. Sales are reputedly over a million cases a year with key markets being Venezuela, Australia and Spain, and it is also bottled locally in India.
In its heydays, when it was a 9-YO Blended Scotch, it was the Scotch Whisky chosen by Ernest Shackleton to accompany him on his final ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914 'for medicinal and celebratory purposes, subsequent to which event, it was given the Royal Warrant by the Prince of Wales. It was immortalised in the book and TV series Band of Brothers.
In 1882, William Sanderson a liquor manufacturer from Leith, Scotland, prepared one hundred casks of blended whisky and hired a panel of experts to taste them. The batch from the cask (or “vat”) with number 69 was judged to be the best, and this provided the whisky's brand name. The distinctive logo of VAT 69 is a copy of the writing on the original cask. As an assurance of quality it was given the seal of the Talbot Hound, the family emblem of the House of Sanderson. The whisky was at first bottled in port bottles, but today comes in a simple green glass bottle with a metal screw cap at 40% ABV.
In 1884, Sanderson bought the Glen Garioch distillery which was situated in the middle of a barley field. The distillery was meant to ensure the delivery of grain whisky and to break The Distillers Company Limited's (DCL, a leading Scottish drinks and pharmaceutical company) near monopoly on grain whisky. Sanderson, together with Usher and Bell, founded a company to produce grain whisky, which still exists today as the North British Distillery. Sanderson sourced some single malt whiskies used to blend VAT 69 from a friend, John Begg, who owned the Royal Lochnagar distillery, to improve the quality of the 1882 product. On becoming a limited company in 1896, this Leith business was a family firm both on employer and employee sides. William was born in Leith in 1839 and died on 3rd April 1908, by which time the blend was well established. His son William Mark took over.
When Begg died, William Mark Sanderson became director of Begg's distillery. In 1933, Sanderson's company merged with Booth's Distilleries, which merged again with the DCL-Group in 1935.
The iconic Vat 69 bottle with its bulbous neck was introduced to the market in 1909 and has not been changed since. This distillery also markets a genuinely rare and tasteful 12 YO Scotch, Old Antiquary.
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In 1967 Wm Sanderson & Son Ltd won the Queen’s Award for Industry in recognition of their outstanding achievements in increasing exports (by 20.1% over the previous year – 87.4% of output exported to over 180 countries). It was success, not failure, which led to moving out of Leith in 1969 to Distillers Group’s expanded high-output bottling and blending plant at South Queensferry. It is now Diageo owned.
The Vat 69 building was not without mishap. On 24th April 1949, there was a severe fire. Locals were entertained with the sight of a river of alcohol running down the lane. This kept the building closed until October 1952. There was another fire on 7th November 1965. Children were called out of school to witness this fire.
'Vat 69' has appeared in books, television programmes, including 'Dr Who' and 'Yes Minister' and also British, Japanese, Pakistani and Bollywood movies. Queensferry Museum holds whisky bottles from the local Vat 69 bottling and blending plant.
The deluxe limited edition Vat 69 Reserve shown below was launched in 1980.
The idea of a different bottle for their Deluxe Whisky was evidently not new, as shown in the advertisement below, dating to the early 1900s.
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