Back from the brink for Scapa
The Scapa distillery on Orkney is to be reopened full time after years of neglect Dominic Roskrow visited it
If the owners of Scapa distillery needed a sign that its time was finally up they got it during a tempestuous evening on Orkney last August. During a storm lightning took the electricity out. Permanently.
âThe electricians who were quite young took one look at the wiring and said they didnât know what to do with it,â recalls Allied Domecqâs malt distilleries director Jim McLean. âThey said theyâd never seen anything like it outside a museum.â And so Scapa reached its inglorious end.
Nobody was too surprised. It had been on the critical list for some time, having been effectively mothballed by Allied some seven years before. To keep stocks of the single malt alive it was reopened for a couple of months each year and staffed by former Scapa employees now employed by Edrington at nearby Highland Park.
âBut the truth be told, we wouldnât have run any of our other distilleries in the sort of state Scapa was in,â says Michael Cockram, director of malts for Allied Domecq. âAnd neither would Edrington. So we looked at it and started to ask ourselves why it was acceptable to run it in the state it was in between the two of us.â
That should have been that â and if you were a betting man, youâd have bet your last dram on the fact that Scapa was set to be consigned to history.
June 2004: The Orkney Isles have a habit of rapidly reclaiming to nature anything abandoned by man. From the Neolithic village at Skara Brae, and the ancient stone circles that cha.....
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By Dominic Roskrow
Section : Whisky Trends
Page number : 44
