Highland Park 12yo 1 litre

"Long before Highland Park’s marketing team decided to play the viking angle, Highland Park was once one very highly respected whisky.  “The greatest all-rounder in the world of malt whisky” wrote Michael Jackson in his Malt Whisky Companion, and when you tasted the 12yo in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, it was hard to argue with him.  A little bit of peat and smoke; a decent dollop of oloroso sherry; the perfect balance of malt and oak; and that alluring heather honey note made the Highland Park releases from that era nothing short of spectacular – the 18yo and 25yo expressions were also class leaders.

In 1996, Highland Park and Macallan came under the common ownership of Highland Distillers, which would later be absorbed into the Edrington Group.  It’s been speculated that one of the reasons for Highland Park’s change (some would say decline) in flavour profile is that Edrington began directing its better-quality sherry casks to Macallan at Highland Park’s expense, but that’s drawing a long bow.  A more rational observation is that Highland Park simply became yet another distillery to suffer from the shortage of good quality sherry casks, at a time when its own popularity was on the rise.  Once it came under the ownership of Edrington, there’s little doubt that Highland Park’s production regimen and supply chain of materials would also have been tweaked to take advantage of broader company policies, efficiencies, and economies of scale.

Regardless of the reasons, the irrefutable fact is that tasting a bottle of Highland Park 12yo from the 1990’s – even into the early 2000’s – is a very different experience to tasting a Highland Park 12yo bottled today.  And I’m bold enough and brave enough to assert that the bottlings from 20 years ago were, quite simply, better.  Significantly better."