REPORT
ON THE SCOTTISH WHISKY TRAIL
WITH WHISKY WIDENING ITS APPEAL IN RECENT DECADES, THE SCOTTISH
DISTILLERIES PRODUCING IT NOW OFFER A LOT MORE THAN WHISTLE-STOP TOURS AND TARTAN SOUVENIRS. WORDS: SIMON USBORNE
When John Laurie used to hear the words ‘whisky’ and ‘tourism’ uttered in the same breath, it conjured images of perfunctory distillery tours with a swift exit through a gift shop laden with predictable trinkets. “It was all shortbread tins, bagpipers and tartan,” he says. Laurie, a whisky fan with a
professional background in the leisure industry, is managing director of The Glenturret distillery. Founded on the banks of the River Turret in Perthshire in 1763, it claims to be Scotland’s oldest working distillery. By the time Laurie arrived at
The Glenturret in 2017, its visitor attraction was successful enough — attracting up to 250,000 a year, generally via coach from nearby Edinburgh for what became known as The Famous Grouse Experience. At the time, the company that owned The Glenturret also owned the Famous Grouse whisky brand. But when The Glenturret was
put up for sale in 2018, Laurie spied an opportunity. Aware of a bubbling demand for a more evolved, higher-end experience, he took advantage of a buyout in 2019 by Swiss luxury goods company the Lalique Group. Over £5m of investment later,
The Glenturret is a distillery transformed. As well as revamping the tours to dive more deeply into the distillery’s heritage, Laurie introduced a fine dining restaurant in 2019. Within months, it won a Michelin star. The new
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Lalique Boutique, meanwhile, has no shortbread — but you can pick up a 50-year-old single malt bottled in a black-crystal Lalique decanter for £50,000. The dramatic shift of a
distillery with over 250 years of history to what Laurie describes, in impeccable corporatese, as a “super-premium positioning” reveals a lot about a buoyant industry. Across Scotland, and at the popular as much as the premium ends of the market, a sleepy, tartan-clad bear has been given a shot in the arm, waking up to the potential of its brands and destinations. “There’s been this big shift
from a time where distilleries were operational plants that maybe had a visitor centre plonked on top, if there even was one, to now, where they’re being designed around the visitor experience,” says Blair Bowman, a prominent, Edinburgh-based whisky writer, consultant and broker. Bowman, who’s also a
tourism ambassador for Scotland Food & Drink, a Scottish government-backed industry body, is thinking, in particular, of Macallan, whose new £140m distillery and visitor experience opened in 2018 on the banks of the Spey, 35 miles east of Inverness. It has a strikingly modern, undulating timber roof and acres of glass overlooking the river. The range of tours runs from an afternoon tasting at the bar all the way up to the four-hour, £250 ‘mastery
NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC.COM/TRAVEL
experience’, which includes a meal with paired wines and a tutored tasting at the distillery’s Cave Priveé. It’s a long way from the standard
tour and tasting that Glenfiddich pioneered with the first Scottish distillery visitor attraction in the late 1960s — The Glenturret was the second distillery to let visitors peek inside, in the 1980s, according to Laurie. “There’s a lot more interaction
than there used to be,” Bowman tells me, from his home in Edinburgh. “It used to be a bit boring — you’d watch a little video, go on your tour and get your whisky at the end, and that was about it.”
Pilgrims’ progress Bowman likens the trade today to a distilled version of a pilgrimage, where devotees from all over the world pay homage to whisky in what’s also, quite conveniently, one of the most beautiful regions of Europe. “There’s something quite special about making that journey to Scotland, getting a car or a ferry and going to a remote location to taste whisky where it’s from,” he says. It was ever thus, but now
the industry is taking a cue from other industries, including the wine trade, where vineyard tourism has thrived for decades with elaborate visitor centres and fancy restaurants. “We’re still generations behind wine but we’re catching up quickly,” Laurie says.
Visitor stats appear to bear that out: Scotch whisky tourism had reached a peak just before the pandemic, with 2.16 million visits to more than 70 distillery visitor centres in 2019, according to the Scotch Whisky Association — an increase of two-thirds since 2010, which followed a £200m investment over the previous five years. In 2019, £85m was spent by visitors — 66% of whom were from overseas; almost 20% from the US, with Germany and France the next biggest dram-seeking nations. Anecdotal evidence since
the great reopening suggests the investment is paying off, as visitors flock once more to Scotland. A lot of the money is being focused on broadening the market to appeal to younger would-be whisky drinkers, and create a generational, as well as geographical, gateway to the distilleries. In September 2021, Diageo, one
of the biggest players in British booze — it owns Guinness and Smirnoff, as well as eight Scotch whisky brands, including Johnnie Walker and Talisker — opened Johnnie Walker Princes Street, an eight-floor, art deco temple to malted barley housed in a former House of Fraser department store in the centre of Edinburgh. The interactive museum-with-
drinks, which welcomed more than 300,000 visitors in its first year, offers immersive tours and is more neon-and-cocktails than casks-and-tartan. At the 1820 rooftop bar, cocktail ingredients
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