Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The three of us plus my notebook take the tour at Glenfarclas. The tour costs £3.50
each, which seems fairly close to standard for distilleries with decent Visitor Centres
(though there are exceptions); as a rule you get vouchers with the tickets which entitle
you to get almost all the money back if you buy a bottle in the shop afterwards, which is
not such a bad deal. It would be nicer - and feel more like proper Highland hospitality -
if all distillery tours were free and ended with a complimentary dram, but visitor facilities
cost money and the charges don't seem to have put many people off.
Besides, at the end of the Glenfarclas tour you get to see the beautiful wood-panelled
room in the Visitor Centre which is constructed from pieces salvaged from the old
Em-
press of Australia
. The liner was built in 1913 and broken up in 1960, in Ward's ship-
breaking yard, by Inverkeithing, a mile or so away from where we live, in sunny North
Queensferry. I have to declare a personal connection here; quite a few of my family on
my dad's side worked in Ward's over the years.
Whatever, the tour at Glenfarclas is worth doing. It's not a huge distillery but it does
have what looks to me like a pretty enormous malt mill, equipped with dirty great mag-
nets to weed any metallic stuff out of the barley, and the big, bulb-shaped stills are the
biggest on Speyside. More interesting than all the technical stuff though is how truly
autonomous, cohesive and family-run the distillery is.
The Grant family have owned and run Glenfarclas for five generations, with the sixth
generation learning the ropes right now. It's a reflection of the fact they have to do all their
promotional and other bureaucratic work in-house - rather than leaving such overhead-
heavy stuff to be done by a central HQ somewhere else - that while the distillery itself
employs only eight people, the office side needs fifteen. Mash tuns, washbacks and stills
just fill the warehouses up; it takes dedicated desk-work to keep the whisky moving out
of them, onto the market.
A true independent in an industry that has grown increasingly corporate over the cen-
turies, and especially over the last few decades, it would arguably be something to be
treasured even if the whisky they made was only good, but it's much better than that. The
Glenfarclas 105 (the 105 proof translating to 60 per cent alcohol by volume) has long
been one of the best strong whiskies widely available, and it's hard not to make compar-
isons between its robust, self-confident style and the independence of the firm that makes
it. Given that the effectively cask-strength 105 is only about eight to ten years old, this
is a sweet, full and amazingly rounded whisky. The bottle I bought was the 21-year-old,
which is even more developed, smoother - only to be expected given that it's 43 per cent
rather than 60 per cent - and quite spectacular in its complexity, packed with spicy, fruity
flavours all wrapped in a subtle smokiness.
In a sense, it ought to make no difference who makes a whisky, or where it's made;
all that should matter is the taste, and that's it. Yet, part of the reason for visiting a distil-
