Highland Park 1978-1998 - 18 Year Old - Hart Brothers - Finest Collection

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.

One of the unsung heroes of the independent whisky bottling scene, Hart Brothers started life in the 1960s as independent blenders and whisky brokers, and began bottling single malts themselves in the late 1980s. Hart Brothers have often flown under the radar, but a glance at their bottling history reveals some truly outstanding single malt whiskies from distilleries including Bowmore, Macallan, Longmorn, Springbank and Glen Grant. 

Hart Brothers have a quiet tradition of getting their hands on unusual or difficult to source whiskies and releasing them with little fanfare which continues to this day, with recent releases including 1980s vintages of Littlemill and Macallan and a sherry cask of Talisker 1993. At auction, they are a bottler always worth looking out for, particularly for the magnificent 1950s and 1960s Bowmores and their superb 1960s Glenfiddichs.