Scotland Day Four: Pipercount- Two!

I started the morning at 5AM catching up on live blogging Scotland. Then I had a walk past Huntly castle and the adorable town of Huntly. It reminded me of towns in Napa and Sonoma in a way, in that it's all cute all-too clean small-town goodness, except in this case it's 400 or so years old and not created by some entrepreneurial developer.

We drove to the Ardmore distillery, which has a relatively new single malt on the market despite folks distilling whisky there for many years. It's one of the primary single-malts in Teacher's Highland Cream, which is a blended whisky once popular in the US and still popular in the UK and other markets. The distillery isn't open to the public for tours, yet is all shiny and new-looking despite its age. They do a good job keeping things clean.

We then headed off to a local estate now owned by the Scottish trust, had a tour, then a great tasting session of Ardmore and Laphroaig (also owned by Jim Beam). We were lucky enough to sample a Laphroaig 27-year-old whisky that was just terrific. I highly recommend buying a bottle if you've got a thousand bucks laying around.

We hopped back onto the bus, our second home, and drive for a few hours to the Glenmorangie House, an incredible hotel on the sea owned by the distillery. For dinner that night we were greeted by a bagpiper (Hooray! Finally!) who announced the meal, then later recited the traditional Robert Burns haggis poem. The cook even made veggie haggis for little old me so I could finally try some.

While I passed out early, the rest of the crew stayed up to three in the morning. I'm uncomfortable in my new role of party pooper.

Labels: scotch, travel