Glenmorangie is located close to the small town of Tain, Ross-shire in the Northern Highlands. Tain, one of the oldest “Royal” burghs in Scotland, dating back to 1066, in the region of Easter Ross.  William Matheson who had previous experience as a distiller bought the Morangie farm and the brewery on it which had been producing since the 1730s. He then converted the brewery with two second hand gin stills to a whisky distillery in 1843. Production started in 1849.

In 1887 the Glenmorangie Distillery Company Ltd. co-owned by the Maitland brothers and Duncan Cameron was founded and purchased the distillery from William Matheson. In 1918, 40% of the company was sold to their rivals Macdonald and Muir, and 60% to Durham. The following year they acquired the Ardbeg Distillery on the island of Islay, and in 2009 upgraded to a new ‘state of the art’ production facility with offices in Livingston, West Lothian as well as a new head office in central Edinburgh.

Around 1995 Glenmorangie released three different ' wood finishes' - a Port Finish, a Madeira Finish and a Sherry Finish. Later on, some more finished 'limited releases' were bottled. For a few years Glenmorangie was virtually the only malt whisky distillery to use eccentric casks for the maturation of stocks, but around the year 2000 more and more distilleries in Scotland started to experiment with unusual casks that had no place in the whisky tradition. In 1996 Glenmorangie moved from its original location in Leith (port of Edinburgh) to a larger facility in Broxburn, West Lothian.

In 2004, the Macdonald family decided to sell Glenmorangie, as well as the other distilleries that they owned, including Ardbeg which comprised 'Glenmorangie plc'. The bidding war over the company was absolutely frantic, with Moet Hennessey emerging triumphantly. Moet Hennessy launched a complete re-vamp of the Glenmorangie brand, discontinuing the 15 and 30-year-old bottlings, and re-naming the other bottlings entirely. Glenmorangie has continued to go from strength to strength under Moet Hennessey which are owned jointly by Diageo (34%) and LVMH (Louis Vuitton), Having managed to scale up production to a truly competitive level without undermining the quality of the single malt.