Brodgar (Highland Park) 1976 - 17 Year Old - The Whisky Connoisseur - Single Cask 1986

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 entrepreneur and social activist Arthur J A Bell founded his Scotland Direct business with his wife Susan in 1973, and was an early pioneer of direct sales mail order, sending high quality Scottish goods around the world. The Whisky Connoisseur was his whisky bottling subsidiary, and came to national prominence when Bell was sued in 1986 by Guinness, who had recently bought the more famous Bell’s whisky company.

The courts ruled in Arthur J A Bell’s favour, however, allowing him to continue to use his own name and signature on his bottles. Throughout the early 1990s Bell’s Whisky Connoisseur range of single malts released some extraordinary whiskies, with the most famous being some sensational Bowmores bottled as Largiemeanoch and a superb Balmenach 1966 bottled as Miltonhaugh.