Scotland’s “ghost” whiskey distilleries are coming back to life

Everything you need to know about whiskey and its link to Scottish identity can be found in the poem “Drams” by Carol Ann Duffy.

“Barley, water, peat,
climate, landscape, history;
Malted. Swallowed straight.”

The words of the important former UK poet come to mind in the reborn lounge Port Ellen distillery on the Isle of Islay, where the first drink offered to some visitors is a lapsang tea cup Pine-smoked from the Wuyi Mountains in China.

It's not what you'd expect to drink on a Hebridean island, especially in a temple of black metal and glass dedicated to the art of distillation. But it soon makes sense: this is tune the taste buds in preparation to taste a very expensive, smooth and aromatically complex single malt.

The luxurious visitor experience here is billed as a deep dive into the smokier end of the whiskey spectrum, a sensory revelation of the kind evoked in Duffy’s “Drams.”

“Gifts for noses –
marsh myrtle, anise, hay,
rose attar.”

AND:

“The perfume of the place,
smell of seaweed in the peaty air,
heather wet with rain.”

“Whiskey Lake”

Port Ellen, owned by international drinks giant Diageo, closed in 1983 when a global recession and overproduction combined to produce a surplus of unwanted Scotch whisky, dubbed the “whiskey loch”.

Now it is the newest member of a club of once-shuttered “ghost” distilleries that have been lavishly remodeled following a decades-long boom in demand for single malt.

In the four decades between closure and reopening, Port Ellen It has attracted a cult following among self-proclaimed whiskey geeks, who have detected all sorts of interesting and varied things happening to the drink as a result of it being aged in mostly older, well-used bottles.

“It was thanks to independent bottlers and a few influential enthusiasts that gradually built up a following for these whiskeys that, for the most part, were simply sublime,” says Roy Duff, editor of Dramface.

“It was pure coincidence. The magic happened because the whiskey was forgotten and left alone. Being in the (less active) refill casks meant the drink could shine, and the longer it aged in the Scottish climate, the better it got.”

With its long pedigree – the distillery was founded in 1825 – and its seaside location on Islay, a pilgrimage site for maltsters from around the world, Port Ellen is a celebrated member of the ghost whiskey club.

Others to have recently come back from the dead include Brora's Highland distillery, also part of the Diageo stable, and Rosebank, near Falkirk in Scotland's central belt.

Another Islay whiskey legend, Ardbeg was mothballed for most of the 1980s but has been spectacularly revived since being purchased by the mainland Glenmorangie distillery in 1997. In 2022, a single barrel of Ardbeg 1975 was sold to a Hong Kong buyer for a reported £16 million ($20 million), more than double what Glenmorangie paid for the distillery and its shares.

These are the rewards offered for waking a ghost. But harvesting them requires a lot of money. First announced in 2017, Port Ellen's revival has been delayed for more than three years by a combination of Covid-19, post-Brexit issues with the cost and supply of building materials and a shortage of ferry capacity.

Those headaches seem forgotten for now.

Buildings old and new, the latter adorned with contemporary whiskey-themed art, are back in action as Islay's tenth operating distillery. By 2030, there could be 14 – a remarkable concentration for an island just 40km long and 13km wide, with just over 3,000 residents.

The aroma of seaweed and Duffy's peaty air they are plentiful on the balcony of the first-floor visitor lounge, which floats above Distillery Road, between the seaweed-strewn shore of Kilnaughton Bay and the whitewashed pagodas and warehouses that survive from the previous incarnation.

Alchemical environment

Across the courtyard, the new still room resembles a vast industrial greenhouse with four shiny new copper stills like exotic plants. Two giant “Phoenix” stills are replicas of those that made Port Ellen's reputation. A second, smaller pair is in use for more experimental whiskey production.

In the background, Maltings, a factory owned by Diageo that supplies custom malted barley to Port Ellen and other distilleries on the island, it emits a cloud of rarely interrupted gray smoke, filling the air with the aroma of a peat-powered brewery.

Looking out, if there are no dolphins or Caledonian MacBrayne ferries gliding across the bay, the eye will be drawn to the hills of Antrim in Northern Ireland and the Mull of Kintyre on the Scottish mainland. On clear days, they loom so large on the horizon that it's easy to imagine Viking longboats coming and going, as they once did.

Inside, the tea service offers even more inspiration. Having been served Hijiri Hojicha, a roasted green tea from a supplier to Japan's imperial court, to tune your palate to notes of hay, visitors can detect similar aromas in one of the experimental drink samples straight from the still created under the watch of Master Distiller Alexander McDonald.

The notable differences between batches of freshly distilled spirits, just half an hour apart, offer a glimpse into the future of the distillery as a hub of innovation, with a particular focus on how peat smoke is managed throughout the distillation process.

McDonald already has a to-do list of more than 1,000 experiments that will involve playing with variables like contact with peat and copper, and even the shape of the stills. An on-site laboratory and what can only be described as a games room for making your own whiskey add to the alchemical ambience.

Innovation was part of the old distillery's history – it was notably one of the first Scottish distilleries to export to North America – and it aims to continue breaking new ground.

“It’s important that we recreate that classic Port Ellen character that people love, but we also want to do things we’ve never done before,” says McDonald. “For me, leaning on the past is not enough.”

Peat and fruit

A glimpse of that past emerges in the musky ambience of warehouse number two with a drink drawn straight from a barrel filled in 1979. His voice echoing in a cavern empty except for the first 20 or so new barrels filled so far, McDonald says the distilled spirit 45 years old is a good example of the classic Port Ellen flavor – peat and fruits balancing on a salty background . He's right. Subsequent sips give notes of clove.

Port Ellen hopes to attract sophisticated whiskey fans to the experience Atlas of Smoke Experience – by appointment only.

Designed for groups of up to eight people, it comes with a hefty price tag – undisclosed but estimated at around £900 ($1,120) – which includes a locally sourced lunch and a tasting of Port Ellen Gemini a pair of 44-year-old Port Ellens that ended up in two different barrels, each with their own special stories to share with visitors.

Bottled to mark the reopening of the distillery, they were created just 274 Gemini pairs . The sets cost £45,000 (about $57,000) each – the equivalent of just over £800 for each standard 25-milliliter pub portion in the UK.

These ambitious prices can be taken as a reference to the single malt's surprising success. But there are some in the whiskey fraternity who fear this should be seen as an amber warning of a bubble about to burst.

Diageo has already felt the chill of the headwinds hitting the luxury sector in general. The multinational's share price has fallen by a quarter since the start of 2022. Following a profit warning in November, triggered by slowing sales in Latin America, its latest results revealed that sales of single malts to the United States fell 27% in the second half of 2023.

There is also concern that enthusiasts are being priced out of their favorite drink.

“Whisky is a popular drink. Now it’s slowly being stolen by the rich,” says Duff of Dramface. “It’s enthusiasts who have elevated these distilleries to the point where Diageo can practically charge whatever they want – which is good, they are a business after all.

“But we can also decide not to buy, and in the end it will be enthusiasts, not marketing agencies, who decide which whiskeys are truly premium.”

Emily Burnham, hostess at the distillery in Port Ellen, said the company had thought carefully about its offer to visitors, which includes a shorter £200 (about US$250) experience for groups of up to 12 people (bookable from June ), as well as a free one-time trial. open days per month.

“We need to be careful not to price out the average whiskey lover,” she says. “At the same time, there is a demand for these more luxurious experiences.”

“At the moment, Port Ellen is expensive because it is very old and rare. That won’t be the case when we start launching (the newly-made spirit several years from now) – it won’t always be in the tens of thousands of pounds per bottle.”