Highland Park 40 Year Old

INFORMATION

Highland Park 40 Year Old. 70cl. 48.3%.

The Highland Park 40 year old is probably one of the best official 40 year old whiskies from any distillery of recent years and one of the crown jewels in Highland Parks range. It's a hugely complex, redolent with distillery character and is a massively satisfying whisky.

DISTILLERY:Highland Park

DISTILLERY STATUS:Working

Bottle ABV:48.3%

Bottle SIZE:70cl / 700ml

BOTTLER:Distillery Bottling

SPIRIT TYPE:Scotland

CASK TYPE:Single Malt

REGION:Island

AGE:40

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.