A WHISKY WISH LIST

November arrives and our thoughts turn to festive celebrations with family, friends and loved ones. Sharing time, sharing food and sharing gifts are the great joys of this time of year so we’ve selected three Highland Park whiskies that we think are ideal for sharing and giving.

Each whisky has its own distinct character but each also carries that unmistakeable flavour DNA of Highland Park – heather honey, spicy fruitcake and peat smoke. These three are at the top of our whisky wish list… will they be at the top of yours too?

15 YEAR OLD

When scorched pineapple meets cinnamon shards meets vanilla sponge cake… This wonderfully complex single malt opens with rich and spicy aromas of crème brûlée, heather honey and crumbled cinnamon followed by intensely fruity notes of fresh pineapple with a scattering of lemon zest. You’ll find warm hints of freshly-baked sponge cake and toasted shard of cinnamon packed in there too – delicious!

Presented in a ceramic decanter, inspired by the earthenware vessels our whisky would have been stored in a century or two ago, this one has been made for us by Wade Ceramics in England. Not only does it make an extremely attractive gift, it’s ‘two gifts in one’ as our team demonstrated last month with some creative upcycling! The inspiration for, and the ideal accompaniment to, one of our favourite ever pudding recipes too, need we say more about this entry on our wish list?

15 Year Old will be available globally from September, find out about local stockists here.

18 YEAR OLD

Bursting with the flavours of ripe cherries, bitter dark cocoa, fresh honeycomb and salted peat smoke, this iconic single malt is full-bodied yet refined… and it’s loved right across the globe. With a unique flavour profile driven by the high ratio of first-fill sherry seasoned European and American oak casks that we use, it’s the most consistently and highly awarded of our whiskies too. In 2021, it received a Gold in the International Spirits Challenge as well as an ‘Extraordinary’ Ultimate Recommendation (with a score of 96) in the Ultimate Spirits Challenge, accompanied by the comment, ‘Simply put, this is as good as it gets.’

If you’d like to let someone special know that they’re ‘as good as it gets’ this festive season, then maybe you’ve found the perfect gift? And you could always add a little extra magic by making our extraordinarily good Cherry and Chocolate Old Fashioned together.  

21 YEAR OLD

The intense balance found in every Highland Park whisky comes from the careful selection of casks we know will marry well. The older the whisky, the fewer casks our Masker Whisky Maker, Gordon Motion, has to choose from so he creates our 21 Year Old in small batches each year. Gordon uses a combination of different cask types, and bottles at the whisky’s marrying strength of 46% for a consistently rich and full-bodied finish. You’ll find small variations in character from batch to batch, but the wild harmony of smoky-sweet flavours that is, uniquely, Highland Park, runs like DNA through every single release.

A marvellous gift for a whisky aficionado, or to mark a special birthday or anniversary, our 21 Year Old is also perfect for sharing at the end of a celebratory meal, taking centre stage in the cheese course.