A special corner (South and East Highlands)
The region known as The Highlands covers a huge and disparate area. So in this area we focus just on the South and East part of the region
Is it time to reassess our definitions of the whisky regions of Scotland? Are our broad regional descriptors becoming increasingly redundant and as whisky enthusiasts grow in number and the knowledge levels rise, are they over-simplistic and meaningless?
Certainly a growing number of distilleries are questioning whether such caricature descriptors are doing more harm than good. With an increasing number producing whisky that doesnât totally sit at ease with the region they operate from (Bruichladdich and Bunnahabhain on Islay, Jura, Scapa, Tobermory and Arran in the islands, Tomintoul and Benriach in Speyside) the question needs to be asked.
Such musings arenât new; geographically island malts are placed in the Highlands anyway. Speyside has never been a naturally defined region and many of its distilleries arenât at the side of the Spey. It has three or four places which each claim to be the true centre of the region, a point addressed comprehensively by Robin Laing in his new book The Whisky River.
More pertinently to this article, can we really describe a region as âThe Highlandsâ, include in it Glengoyne in the South, Oban in the West, Glen Garioch in the East and Pulteney in the North East and do it justice, particularly when the central band of distilleries in this vast region are removed (because they form Speyside)? Of course not.
So we have split The Highlands in to two separate regions stretching from the South and across to the East of Speyside, inclu.....
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By Dominic Roskrow
Section : Regional Focus
Page number : 36
