For me, however, I am looking for the casks which contain only the very best whisky. One of the enchanting mysteries of Malt Scotch Whisky is that even though individual casks of whisky are distilled on the same day and at the same distillery the whiskies' flavours and tastes, after maturation in separate casks, may differ widely.

So the secret of bottling excellent quality whiskies lies in the selection process. The joy of bottling a single cask is that one can choose a whisky that has matured exceedingly well and will therefore have unique characteristics which cannot be repeated. Each cask will only have a few hundred bottles of this very unique product.

All casks to be bottled as "Mackillop's Choice" have been selected by me, Lorne Mackillop, after careful tasting. I am a Master of Wine and I use my extensive training and experience in the art of tasting to select only those casks that have matured with an excellent balance of flavours. These flavours are derived from the original spirit having been tempered by many years in an oak cask. The whisky extracts from the oak great complexities of flavours by a process that is still not fully understood. No cask is selected without a sample being taken and tasted, and I reject approximately 80% of the cask samples that I taste as not being of sufficiently high quality to bear the label of "Mackillop's Choice". I seek only excellence , not the good or average.