Next time you are in a wine shop, take a stroll around the fine wine section.

If you look closely at a bottle of Chateau Lafite, or any other of the great Bordeaux wines. You will see on the label, or the case, the words "Grand Vin". Not ‘great’ as a superlative, a boast,  but as in Great Britain, big.

For the ‘big’ wine is a careful assembly of thirty or forty ‘small’ wines, each one vinified separately from one of five grape varieties, grown on various terroirs or microclimates around the estate. The grapes are not simply harvested and jumbled all together, willy-nilly. No, each terroir is harvested and vinified individually - made into a wine in its own right - the little wines.

Then, the skill of the maitre de chai selects and marries the various little wines, each with its own respective characteristics, to create the ultimate expression of the chateau, its cellar master and owner - the Grand Vin. That’s what we now do at Bruichladdich.

The more component parts to a bottling the more complex the resulting Bruichladdich will be, the more layers of flavour - of cerebral interest. That's why in the 2011 harvest we have  26 farms (almost 100 terroirs) and 12  barley varieties.  While for practical reasons we cannot keep each one separate, the majority are kept apart from barley to barrel. Distilled in this way, the greater the permutations possible when it comes to bottling. And ours are unparalleled.

This great work has been quietly going on for the last decade. Our stocks of maturing Bruichladdich are not just Bruichladdich, but a myriad of 'little' Bruichladdichs waiting to be assembled in to a Grand Vin de Bruichladdich. The first of these is The Organic whisky, made from three separately distilled and matured organic barley terroirs, from two varieties and two harvests. From 2012 more will follow.

The complexity, definition and cerebral interest of our bottlings is going to become ever greater.