Fettercairn is a village in Aberdeenshire, at the foothills of the Cairngorm Mountains. There’s a pub, a hotel and restaurant, a post office, a small shop for food and provisions, and a vintage store featuring a random assortment of clothing, shoes, and accessories from past decades. An ancient graveyard fills the yard next to the early-19th-century steepled church. The primary school can accommodate about 70 children. Balbegno Castle, built in 1569, and the castle-like Fasque, sit within a two-mile radius.
Much of the activity of the population of about 250 people swirls around the village square, which is marked with a granite cross perched on a stepped sandstone pedestal. It bears the date 1670, but whether that date refers to the year it was erected or something else is unclear. Historical documents have shown that the village had some sort of market cross since it was granted status as a free burgh of barony, in 1504. What is far clearer is the story behind the Fettercairn Royal Arch, less than half a metre away. Cars, Royal Mail vehicles, and sanitation trucks pass under the arch that has stood since 1864, when it was built for £250 to commemorate the overnight stay of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1861, while they were on an excursion from Balmoral.
If you’re a regular reader of these pages, you know there’s one critical thing I haven’t mentioned in this inventory of landmarks and businesses in this picturesque though nevertheless quotidian Scottish village. Not to worry, we’re getting to that part. During their excursion, Victoria and Albert may have caught a whiff of barley cooking. Less than half a mile down the road from the village centre is the Fettercairn Distillery, which started producing malt whisky 37 years before the royal couple made their memorialised cameo.
I visited the distillery in July, while spending a few weeks with a good friend who lives in Aberdeen, trading the stifling swelter of New York City’s concrete jungle for a summer sojourn in the cooler climes of Granite City. (This is a good moment to mention that there are almost as many people in all of Fettercairn as there are in my apartment building in Queens, New York.) This wasn’t to be a work trip; no barnstorming tour of distilleries across the Highlands. If that had have been my intention, I’d definitely still have made Aberdeen my home base, what with it being known as the gateway to the Highlands. The mix of distilleries you can drive to in under two hours reads like the Scotch list at a high street chophouse: Macallan, Glenfiddich, Glenlivet, Glendronach, Benriach, Glenglassaugh. Yet, to be so close to so much star power, so to speak, and leave the country without a lungful of fresh angel’s share seemed a shame indeed.
We decided to visit Fettercairn. It’s a bit of deep cut. Indeed, like a band’s incredible song that fails to get mainstream radio play while its chart-topper becomes an anthem for reasons no diehard fan can quite pinpoint, Fettercairn dazzles in the shadows. It’s a true malt-lover’s malt. We sampled a 12-year-old, a 16-year-old, a new cask 18-year-old, and a special release aged in part in sherry casks. Each hummed with the distillery’s signature nutty and pear notes, a result, in part, of the 50-plus hour fermentation, and harmonised with the characteristics of the barrel types.
I was left astonished that the powerhouse brands become the powerhouses they are while this distillery, using water from rain and snowmelt that flows from the mountain springs, cranks out stunning malts. Fettercairn is the quirky deep cut of owner Whyte & Mackay.
Production buildings were shut for seasonal maintenance, but our guide explained the distillery’s crowning idiosyncrasy: a cooling ring attached to the top of the still’s swan neck. The contraption sprays cold water down the sides of the still, facilitating reflux and bringing about a lighter character.
As we walked past barley fields on the way to the car park, we learned there would be a small company-wide celebration of Fettercairn’s 200th anniversary that weekend, outside with a sightline to the plot where the company planted 13,000 oak saplings. It was to be a quiet triumph for an understated marvel.