If you’re partial to a wee dram — or indeed, if you’ve always wanted to get into whisky but never have — Scotland has a particularly special allure.
There are more whisky distilleries here than anywhere else on the planet. Most welcome visitors for tours that follow a tried and trusted formula. They’ll show you around their distillery, tell you their history, share the machinations of the whisky-making process — including the key differences between blended whiskies and single malts — then ply you with a few samples of the uisge beatha (“water of life” in Scottish Gaelic).
I’ve done more of these types of tours than I can recall and, to be honest, most tend to blend into one. However, I’ll remember my visit to the Glen Garioch distillery for some time yet.
Nestled amid the rolling arable farmland of Aberdeenshire, this is one of Scotland’s oldest distilleries, established in 1797 (and pronounced “Glen Geery” in the ancient local Doric dialect).
But their Legends of the Garioch tour is one of the most forward-thinking and immersive that you’ll find. Instead of going straight to the distillery, we’re picked up at our accommodation, just down the road at Meldrum House Country Hotel. It’s a 13th century baronial manor on a 97ha estate — with resident highland cows and a golf course — on the edge of Oldmeldrum, a village between Aberdeen and Banff.
Our designated driver and guide is Iona Barrio, an Aberdeenshire native (and whisky specialist) who proceeds to take us around a countryside that’s variously speckled with sheep and bales of straw, hamlets with granite houses, medieval castles, neolithic stone ruins and Bronze Age roundhouses.
Over the next few hours we stop at places of significance to the area and Glen Garioch, including the fields where the distillery sources its barley for malting and the spring where it first tapped its water.
Iona tells us about the characters who shaped the distillery, including the two founding brothers, John and Alexander Manson. Even more interesting are her stories about one of John’s children, Sir Patrick Manson, who was born in Oldmeldrum in 1844. An ambitious scientist, he travelled to the Far East where he theorised that malaria was spread by blood-sucking mosquitoes. He became known as the “Father of Tropical Medicine” (and “Mosquito Manson”). We’ll later see a portrait of him at the distillery.
Like most of Scotland’s whisky businesses, Glen Garioch is now under foreign ownership, in this case part of the Osaka-based Suntory Global Spirits group. But the end product has the same classical taste you’ll find at many distilleries in the east of Scotland, where whiskies are usually smooth and honeyed rather than peated and smoky like on the islands off the country’s west coast.
“Just the thing to put hairs on your chest in the morning,” says Iona, as she pours Glen Garioch’s 16-year single malt into the wee glasses that she’s supplied us with.
The fact that the glasses are attached to lanyard necklaces — and that it’s not yet 10am — almost makes me feel like I’m on a bucks’ night. But we drink (reasonably) responsibly and as we sample Garioch’s varieties, Iona ensures our stomachs are sufficiently lined. She pairs the whiskies with local delicacies, including pork pies, sausage rolls and “baby butteries”, a kind of squashed croissant fuelled with lard, butter and sugar (they’re also known in Aberdeenshire as “rowies”). We also have oatcakes with cheeses and marmalade infused with whisky.
Ironically, the word “Garioch” derives from the Gaelic “gairbheach”, which means “place of roughness”, but I’m struck by how incredibly smooth all the whiskies are.
Fair dos, we’re slightly tipsy by the time we arrive at the distillery, which King Charles visited (wearing a kilt) in 2021. Things get slightly more conventional as we’re shown around, with Iona taking us into the granite buildings stocked with grains, mash tuns and copper stills (including one named after Alexander Manson).
We follow Iona into the cask-studded warehouse where some of Glen Garioch’s most prized whiskies are kept, including a vintage from 1979 that we’re allowed a generous sample of. It has notes of creme brulee, highland heather and poached pears and will set you back about $3000 for a 70cl bottle.
After checking out the distillery shop, we’re driven back to our hotel, where we have lunch waiting for us at the 800-year-old stonewalled cave bar. Thankfully, considering we’ve been snacking and sipping all morning, it’s smallish bites rather than anything too heavy, including Aberdeenshire pulled pork and marmalade cake dessert with a whisky-drizzled milkshake sauce.
The bar has, by the way, over 120 different whiskies, from Glen Garioch and beyond, but I’ve had my fill for now. It’s time for a wee nap, in fact. Fortunately, upstairs, in one of the restored turrets, is my bedroom. Zzzzzzzzzzzzz …
+ Steve McKenna was a guest of Visit Scotland and Visit Britain. They have not influenced or read this story before publication.
fact file
+ Standard tours at the Glen Garioch distillery, including three drams to taste, are priced at £20 ($40). The Legends of the Garioch tour is £150 ($300) per person (minimum two people). glengarioch.com
+ Meldrum House Country Hotel has rooms from around £105 ($208) per night. meldrumhouse.com
+ To help plan a trip to Scotland and Britain, see visitscotland.com and visitbritain.com
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