Highland Park 1973-1996 - 23 Year Old - Adelphi - Single Cask 3967

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.

The Adelphi name was revived in 1993 by Jamie Walker, the great-grandson of Archibald Walker, founder of the original 19th century Adelphi whisky distillery in Glasgow which had closed in the 1930s. 

The new Adelphi whisky company, with Charles Maclean serving as Chief Nose on the tasting panel, quickly established themselves at the forefront of the new generation of independent whisky bottlers, releasing a string of top class casks of single malt and grain whiskies, with early highlights including outstanding bottlings of long-aged Ardbeg and Springbank.

Jamie Walker sold Adelphi in 2004 to investors Keith Falconer and Donal Houston, the latter of whom is laird of Ardnamurchan Estate in the Highlands. Adelphi began construction of their Ardnamurchan distillery in 2013 and released the first Ardnamurchan single malt whisky in 2020.