Scotland, Isle of Orkney. Distillery operational. Owner: The Edrington Group Ltd

Owned by the Edrington Group, Highland Park remained for a long time somewhat of a niche malt reserved for connoisseurs and well-informed enthusiasts, notably due to its kinship with Macallan. The distillery drew its quintessence from this relationship and the access it afforded to perfect mastery of sherry cask ageing and beautifully sculpted casks. The rest comes from the island's natural, cultural and geographic heritage. Established in 1798 on Orkney, a wind- and wave-swept island where Viking blood continues to run through the veins of its inhabitants, Highland Park produces a traditional malt, characterized by its lightly peated barley which is malted on site. Although the bottle shape evolved at the turn of the 1980s, the style remained the same until the late 1990s. Playing on a profound sherry register in which subtle notes of iodine and peat smoke highlight its almost mystical Celtic temperament, Highland Park has today come completely out of the shadows. It is one of the most legitimate distilleries in the collectibles world due to its history, the consistent quality of its malt and the breadth of the range.

A Highland Park distilled in 2001 and bottled at cask strength in 2019 by Gordon & MacPhail for the famous Connoisseurs Choice range after 17 years’’ maturation in a second-fill sherry cask. This comes as no surprise, as the independent bottler’’s relationship with the distillery goes back a long way and it was responsible for the distillery’’s first licensed bottlings in the 1960s. Connoisseurs Choice was one of Gordon & MacPhail’’s spearhead ranges. Created for the Italian collector and importer Edoardo Giaccone in the early 1970s, it entered the standard collection in 1979 and has been part of it ever since, although it has undergone many changes, from the map labels to its gradient labels and finally the design found today. Older editions were reduced to 40% and coloured artificially. Today, the whiskies in the range feature their natural colour and are sometimes cask strength. A limited edition of 592 bottles.