scottish whisky distillery tours in the highlands
The Grampian Malt Whisky Trail
A ‘must do’ day out from Inverness. Discover the best Scotland has to offer - Highland scenery, a beautiful coastline and attractive towns and villages. Visit the eight distilleries and cooperage on the Malt Whisky Trail, the Cashmere Visitor Centre, craft centres, castles & gardens and Baxters of Speyside. Play on championship golf courses, fish, sail, go dolphin watching or follow the Speyside Way footpath from the coast to the shadow of the Grampian Highlands.
Tomatin Distillery
20 miles south of Inverness well signposted form the main A9 south.
Illicit stills are part of the history of whisky distilling in Scotland, and were widely used in the local hills around Tomatin. As a distilling site, illicit or otherwise, Tomatin goes back to the 15th Century when drovers – men who ‘drove’ their cattle to market over high mountain passes – would fill up their whisky flasks from a still alongside the Old Laird’s House.
A formal distillery for the making of fine Scotch malt was first built on the site in 1897 by the Tomatin Spey District Distillery Co Ltd, and revived in 1909 by the new Tomatin Distillers Co Ltd. A 20-year expansion programme started in the 1950s saw production rise to some 12 million litres a year by 1974, making Tomatin the largest capacity Scotch whisky distillery in the world at the time.
The distillery was acquired by Japanese shareholders in 1986, who established the current Tomatin Distillery Company Limited, and launched the modern era of whisky distilling in the Monadhliath Mountains.
Glenmorangie Distillery
The biggest selling single malt in Scotland but from a small company. Glenmorangie (the Scots pronounce it to rhyme with "orangey") made an early start: It has been available as a single since the 1920s.
The distillery is around ½ hour’s drive from Inverness, at Tain in the county of Ross-shire, on the Morangie burn and overlooking the Dornoch Firth. The site housed a meal mill from the 1550s and a brewery from the 1820s, not to mention illicit distillation which went on in the area for most of that time. Certainly an estate inventory in 1703 mentions an 'aquavitie Pott with it ffleake and stand'.
The water comes from the Tarlogie springs about a mile from the distillery, flows though lime and sandstone and is hard. Glenmorangie felt sufficiently strongly about protecting their interests in the spring that they bought up the square mile or so of land surrounding it, an area rich in heather and clover. Lightly-peated malt is used, and a house yeast. The stills are the tallest in Scotland at 5.13m/16ft 10.25in.
All of Glenmorangie's output is now bottled as a single malt and the distillery is unusual in this respect.
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