T
he cliché of a whisky-drinker is an old duffer sitting in his library before the fire, sipping on a fine single malt. Today, whisky drinkers are as likely to be male as female, young or old. And as for the surroundings — great whisky is now at home everywhere with taste — and if the décor is leather and mahogany, that’s as likely to be a witty comment on the past as a well-preserved slice of it. Several of the great distilleries have responded joyfully to this broadening of horizons. They don’t just invite aficionados into the place where the whiskies are born. They build an entire experience, of tastings and visits, great food and magnificent accommodation, around the miracle that is grain, water and yeast, transformed. Here are a few of the finest.
1. The Glenturret, Crieff
The Lalique Restaurant bar has a well-stocked whisky selection
Scotland has only two restaurants with two Michelin stars, and they are 20 minutes apart in Perthshire. Only one, the Lalique Restaurant at The Glenturret, is in a distillery — Scotland’s oldest working distillery, as it happens. And what a restaurant it is. Beneath a Lalique chandelier, a succession of delicious and often witty dishes appear, courtesy of the chef Mark Donald, who learned under the late Andrew Fairlie at the other two-star, Gleneagles, just down the road, including sourdough bread made from malted barley, served on a grist box (the primitive contraption used to separate the grains from the husks), a langoustine-shaped biscuit and a lobster toddy featuring two kinds of whisky. The tour of this small, historic distillery takes visitors from one 200-year-old whitewashed building to another, through a delicious fug of fermenting mash. On the Warehouse No.9 tours, there’s also a tasting of rare drops, beside their maturing casks in their most zealously guarded storehouse. Since 2024, there is even luxurious accommodation for diners, at the six-bedroom Aberturret Estate House next door. Even here there are clever nods to the main activity, such as a copper-tinted bathtub in the master bedroom that pays homage to the copper still working busily just across the small burn opposite.
