Highland Park 1973 - Robertsons of Kirkwall - The Dragon - Single Cask - 58.9%

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 are rare.

A private bottling is a cask of single malt or single grain whisky that has been bottled privately by its owner or owners, and usually bottles are not released for public sale. Private bottlings may sometimes be bottled for their owners by the distillery of origin, but are not official bottlings by that distillery. 

Alternatively, if the cask is not housed at the distillery where it was made, it may be bottled either by another distillery or private cask storage facility, or transported to a third party commercial bottler.

Private bottlings used to be relatively common, a legacy of the whisky lake of the 1980s, when distilleries had excess stock and were desperate to offload their inventory. These kinds of casks rarely make it to private bottlings nowadays - casks that were very inexpensive twenty or thirty years ago have shot up in value, and distilleries have scrambled to buy back privately-owned casks of their own spirit, while cask owners are rarely short of offers from brokers or independent bottlers.