The Dalmore Distillery Select 2026

The Dalmore Distillery Select 2026 is a 14 year old single malt finished in Semisecco Marsala casks, bottled at 53.7% ABV. There are 1,100 of them and each one is £350.

Work out the per-year price and you get £25 a year in cask, against roughly £6.50 for the GlenDronach 14 we wrote about yesterday. The whisky in these two bottles spent the same amount of time in wood. What separates them is cask strength, a Marsala finish, a run of 1,100, and Dalmore's position in the market, which it has spent two decades building at the very top and now prices accordingly.

The Marsala finish is the genuinely interesting part and the reason to consider it seriously. Semisecco is the off-dry style, sweeter than a sherry butt and considerably less common in finishing, and on a distillate as rich as Dalmore's it should push towards dried fruit and something closer to marmalade than the chocolate note the house is known for. Cask strength means you can take it apart with water and find out where it goes.

Whether that is worth £260 more than the GlenDronach is a question about you rather than the whisky. Eleven hundred bottles will sell either way.