Originally a producer and merchant of Burgundy wine from 1951 to 1978, Michel Couvreur acquired the Molet cellars in Bouze-lès-Beaune in 1956, then settled in Scotland in 1964, a few years after having transferred the headquarters of his company in England. He studied the processes of making whiskey and in 1971 closed the London offices and now concentrated on selling wines in the Canadian market. In 1978, he registered his company as a whiskey distillery in Scotland and began distilling in 1986 in Edradour. Michel Couvreur was incorporated in 1990 in Old Meldrum, Aberdeenshire.
He specializes in unusual whiskeys produced using traditional methods, such as Bere Barley, a whiskey named after a variety of low-yielding barley grown in Orkney. Unlike many independent bottlers, Michel Couvreur never specifies on the labels of his bottles the distillery where each whiskey is produced. Those that are reduced are with spring or lake water from Scotland imported in tanks.
This bottler considers that “90% of the quality of a whiskey comes from the cask, and only 10% from the distillation process”, and sees the use of bourbon casks, popularized since the 70s instead of sherry casks , rarer and more expensive, like a “great tragedy”.
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