Lost Distillery, Ten Samples and a Coastal Birthday Dinner
Not every moment of a good trip fits neatly under a single heading. Some experiences simply stand on their own – and deserve to be told regardless.
Coleburn: When a Warehouse Is a Library
Someone who has never stood inside a Scottish cask warehouse may not fully understand why whisky enthusiasts rave about them. Anyone who has been inside needs no further explanation.
In the warehouse of the silent Coleburn Distillery sit the casks of ACEO, Arcanum Spirits‘ cask collection. Bennrinnes, Teaninich, Auchroisk, Highland Park – distillates with character, at various stages of their maturation. The air is cool and woody, the smell a blend of alcohol vapour and decades of patience.
Standing here and assessing the casks is not a romantic moment. It is work. Recognising the right moment when a cask has finished telling its story is an art. Owning a cask and knowing when it has reached its finest point are two very different things.
Dallas Dhu: A Distillery That No Longer Produces – and Yet Lives On
Forres, 1983. The last time the Dallas Dhu Distillery was active. Since then it has been a monument – maintained by Historic Environment Scotland as one of the few fully preserved whisky distilleries in the country, frozen in time.
No manufactured atmosphere. No tourist veneer. Just a distillery that stopped distilling – and lives on through its remaining casks.
Dean, Head of Whisky Creations at Murray McDavid, welcomed us there. Tasting whisky with someone whose daily work is assessing casks and creating whisky at the highest level is already something special. That he allowed us to carry out a personal bottling alongside him is a privilege that is difficult to put into context.
The whisky: Dallas Dhu, distilled April 1970. Bottled November 2007. Thirty-seven years in a refill hogshead. 109 bottles in total.
What landed in the glass was not a modern whisky. It was a distillate from another era – carrying the depth, the stillness, and the complexity that only very old whiskies possess. Dried figs, beeswax, old leather on the nose. On the palate: caramelised nuts, dark chocolate, an elegant tannic structure. The finish: long, drying, a final whisper of resinous tobacco. Unforgettable.
Tasting a whisky like that in the place where its story began is something entirely different from simply opening a rare bottle somewhere else.
Findhorn: The Evening That Didn’t Taste of Whisky
After warehouses, bottling halls and decades-old distillate, you sometimes need a different horizon.
We found it at Findhorn.
The coast of the Moray Firth in the evening light, the water shimmering in the last of the day, good food, two friends, Scotland. No programme. No shop talk. Just a birthday on the coast – with the ease that only genuine friendship carries.
Sometimes that is exactly what is called for.
Ten Samples and an Honest Conclusion
The late evening belonged to work: ten samples of potential casks for new Arcanum bottlings. Not a pleasure tasting – concentrated assessment. Name, age, supposed exclusivity – all secondary. In the end, the glass decides.
The most interesting finding of the evening was a negative one:
Old whiskies in Koval casks were not for us.
Too dominant, too foreign, too far removed from the original Scottish character. Age alone is not a quality marker. A cask that matures for decades and ends up out of harmony with the distillate remains a mismatch – however impressive the numbers sound.
These are exactly the conclusions that make such tastings worthwhile. Not to be impressed by figures. But to drink whisky.
Arcanum will draw its own conclusions from this. That is precisely what taste buddies are for.
Blair Athol: The Right Ending
The final day took us to Pitlochry and Blair Athol – one of the most beautiful distilleries in Scotland. Historic buildings, pagoda roofs, the distinctive water flowing across the site, gentle hills on all sides. A place that would be worth visiting even if no whisky were distilled here.
A fitting close to a trip that had long since become something more than a journey.
Slà inte mhath.
