Walking With Whisky

One of the hottest travel trends? Scotch tours in, well, Scotland.

- Paula Froelich

FORGET VINEYARDS AND WINE TASTINGS— whisky walks in the country where Scotch originated are now a thing.

A big thing. Scotland, the land of tartan kilts, has always been a top destination for Americans. But now tourists are pouring in with a specific purpose—to try every ancient Scotch on the planet, it seems.

As long as there have been people in Scotland, there has been Scotch whisky, but it wasn’t big business until the 19th century when it became legal—and profitable. Today, there are over 120 distilleries across five regions (Campbeltown, Highland, Islay, the Lowlands and Speyside). And business is booming as a whisky renaissance continues to take hold in America.

In recent years, whisky-specific bars have opened their doors in cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles to millennials who pour in for a taste of the good stuff. The revival has led to travel demand to see how it’s made. According to the Scotch Whisky Association (SWA), a record 1.9 million tourists visited Scottish whisky distilleries in 2018 (up from 1.6 million in 2017)—the majority of which came from Germany and the United States—and numbers for 2019 are expected to be even higher.

It’s such a big business that the liquor and spirits giant Diageo, which owns Lagavulin, said in 2018 that it would invest $190 million over the next three years to “transform” what it offers to Scotch-drinking tourists.

Of course I had to check out this phenomenon for myself. Last May, I headed straight to Islay—the small, windswept island in the southern Hebrides, just off the west coast of Scotland and 25 miles north of Ireland.

Here’s what I, a whisky Luddite, found.

IN SEARCH OF SINGLE-MALT