Argyll Distillery — Campbeltown Single Malt Whisky

Argyll Distillery was a Scotch whisky distillery located on Longrow Street in Campbeltown, Scotland. It was founded in 1844 by Robert Colvill, Hugh Greenlees, and Robert Greenlees Jr., and closed in the early 1920s during the collapse of Campbeltown's once-thriving whisky trade. Little of its output survives today, and the site was eventually repurposed as a garage.

History

Argyll Distillery was established in 1844 for Robert Colvill, Hugh Greenlees, and Robert Greenlees Jr., on Longrow Street in Campbeltown. It opened during the boom years of the town's whisky trade, when Campbeltown was one of the most concentrated whisky-producing centres in the world, at its Victorian peak home to around thirty working distilleries and known as "the Whisky Capital of the World." Detailed operational records of Argyll Distillery from this period are scarce, as is the case for many of the town's smaller 19th-century producers, and no tasting notes or original bottlings from the distillery are known to have survived into the modern era.

Like the majority of Campbeltown's distilleries, Argyll did not survive into the mid-20th century. The town's whisky industry went into a rapid and severe decline in the years following the First World War, driven by a combination of falling quality standards among some producers, the loss of the lucrative American export market to Prohibition, and the broader economic pressures of the early 1920s. Argyll Distillery ceased production during this period, and by 1929 the building itself had been sold and converted for use as a garage, erasing most physical traces of the original distillery.

Quick Facts

• Region: Campbeltown, Scotland
• Founded: 1844
• Owner: Founded by Robert Colvill, Hugh Greenlees, and Robert Greenlees Jr.; no current owner (distillery closed and site repurposed)
• Status: Closed

Closure & Legacy

Argyll Distillery was one of more than twenty Campbeltown distilleries that closed within the space of a few years during the industry's collapse in the 1920s, a downturn severe enough to reduce the town from around thirty working distilleries to a mere handful. Its building was sold in 1929 and converted into a garage, and no distillery structures are known to survive on the site today. No verified original Argyll Distillery bottlings are known to be in circulation, and given the distillery's obscurity and the century-plus since its closure, any genuine surviving bottle would be an exceptionally rare curiosity for collectors of "ghost" Campbeltown whiskies rather than a realistically obtainable dram. Campbeltown's whisky-making tradition endures today through its three surviving distilleries: Springbank, Glen Scotia, and Glengyle.