To date, I’ve found Cardhu to be a very consistent whisky. I visited the distillery last year and tasted a raft of different expressions – they all by and large tasted exactly the same. Cardhu started its life as many whiskies have done so – as a blending component – it’s been a key Highland component of Johnnie Walker for many decades. DCL (forerunners of Diageo) chose the distillery to be one of their earliest forays into single malt production – a 12 year old released in 1981 with the name ‘Cardhu’ rather than the previously used ‘Carlow’. It’s success quickly overtook the capacity of the distillery resulting in DCL producing a ‘vatted malt’ from a range of its distilleries. Confusion with both customers and within the industry ensued and the bottling was dropped and vatted malt abandoned as a official labelling term.