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End Date : Jun 24 2026 08:00 PM
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Highland Park 12 Year Old. Bottled 1980s. 75cl. 40%. In presentation box.
A classic 1980s release of Highland Park 12 Year Old, presented in the distillery’s iconic dumpy bottle and featuring the sought-after screen-printed label design that has become a favourite among collectors. Widely regarded as one of the finest standard official bottlings of its era, these early Highland Park releases capture a style of whisky that helped establish the distillery’s legendary reputation.
Matured for a minimum of 12 years, the whisky in this bottle would have been distilled no later than the early 1970s, a period celebrated by many as one of Highland Park’s golden ages. The result is a remarkably characterful single malt, displaying the rich honeyed sweetness, gentle heathery peat, dried fruit and subtle maritime influence that define the distillery’s traditional Orcadian style.
Today, these old dumpy bottle Highland Parks are increasingly difficult to find and remain highly prized both as collectible pieces of whisky history and as examples of a much-admired era of Scotch whisky production.
One of Scotland’s greatest distilleries, Highland Park on the Orkney archipelago has a long and storied history. The distillery in Kirkwall was founded in the 18th century by either David Robertson or Magnus Eunson, the latter of whom was a famous smuggler churchman who hid casks of his whisky from customs men by stashing them under his pulpit. Highland Park distillery has been owned by the Edrington Group since 1999 and is famed for its lightly smoky character from its own peated floor-maltings, which make up around 20% of the barley used for distillation.
Official bottlings of Highland Park began around the end of the 1970s, marking the beginning of a remarkable run of core bottlings, with the famous slope-shouldered 12-year-old and 18-year-old OBs from the 1980s now highly sought after at auction, as are the 1990s editions of the official 25-year-old. Independent bottlings of Highland Park were once very rare but now appear relatively regularly, usually as Orkney or Whitlaw.
Distillery bottlings are, as the name suggests, bottled by or for the distillery from which the whisky has originated and are thus often referred to as Official Bottlings or OBs. Distillery bottlings are generally more desirable for collectors and usually fetch higher prices at auction than independent bottlings. They are officially-endorsed versions of the whisky from a particular distillery and are therefore considered the truest expression of the distillery’s character.
This ideal of the distillery character is regarded so seriously by the distilleries and brand owners that casks of whisky that are considered to vary too far from the archetype are frequently sold on to whisky brokers and independent bottlers. When this happens, it is often with the proviso that the distillery’s name is not allowed to be used when the cask is bottled for fear of diminishing or damaging the distillery’s character and status.
| BID | DATE | TIME | |
|---|---|---|---|
| £10.00 | 18th June 2026 | 10:24 AM | |
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