MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

You don’t go to Ullapool for the shopping, but the Highland Liquor Company Bottle Shop is one of the prettiest stores in the country. Not for the interior per se, but for what it sells: rows and rows of Seven Crofts gin in sleek, fluted, ribbed bottles that fade from emerald green at the neck to clear at the base. You have to buy one. Even if you never drink it.

Scottish gin makers are as passionate about how they present their spirits as they are about the botanicals in them. The Highland Liquor Company – which next month will open a restaurant with rooms named The Dipping Lugger – commissioned the D8 design agency in Glasgow to create something that looked fresh and luxe for its Seven Crofts product, and the bottle is a deco stunner.

When the Harris Distillery wanted a vessel for its gin, created using hand-dived sugar kelp, it brought in design agency Stranger & Stranger, which created a mood board of the island’s visual vocabulary

– Harris Tweed, the lines of the landscape, the colour of the water around the coast – and channelled it into a fabulously detailed piece of glass in a fresh blue colour.

Similarly, the label for the recently launched Isle of Raasay gin was created after an artist spent a week exploring the island around the distillery across the water from Skye.

Go into any supermarket or off-licence in the Highlands and you’ll encounter gins you’ve never seen before. Each distiller has upped its game to be distinctive, and carve out a space in your cocktail cabinet: Fairytale Highland Gin has an ornate green illustration of the skewed building it originates from, like something from the Brothers Grimm, while Oro – from the distillery at Dalton – looks like a crystal fragrance bottle, with a simple graphic on the front that represents the atomic structure of gold.

Whatever your taste in gin or design, they all beat the hell out of a fridge magnet souvenir.