I’ll drink to that
ORKNEY distillery Highland Park has unveiled a new 50-year-old single-malt whisky that evokes the island’s aromatic peat and heather honey. In a limited edition of 274 bottles, this is only the third 50-year-old release in the distillery’s 223-year history.
Highland Park’s 50-year-old whiskies are created using the solera method—the system for maturing sherry. It started when nine casks were laid down in 1968 for 40 years, then re-racked into sherry-seasoned oak casks and left to mature for 12 years, after which only one cask was selected and married with a small quantity of the previous 50-yearold whisky—which, in turn, contains some of the first ever half-century tipple, thus maintaining ‘the core DNA’ and adding ‘depth and complexity’.
‘When I sampled the whisky from the re-racked casks, the whisky it contained—aged for a little over 50 years —had absorbed the rich sherried flavours of dried fruit and sweet toffee from its final first-fill cask maturation, but still retained all the delicate fragrance and flavours driven by the original refill casks,’ says master whisky maker Gordon Motion. Highland Park founder Magnus Eunson, a descendant of Viking settlers in Orkney, was a butcher by day and bootlegger by night, who initially distilled whisky illegally in a bothy at High Park, overlooking Kirkwall. The whisky is presented in a walnut box with a crystal decanter and a book to tell its story (£20,000, www.highlandparkwhisky.com).