Drinks Tourism - Excuses and Elevations

Todays beginning, and end.

A couple of years back, I found myself pondering some of life’s bigger questions- “What becomes of the broken hearted?”, “Why is abbreviation such a long word?”, “Why are we allowed to see inside the washing machine but not the dishwasher?”, you know the really BIG existential stuff. And right on cue I received a message from a friend inviting me to a surprise birthday weekend on Orkney. That’s when it struck me, like a lightning bolt from a clear blue sky, my inner monologue exclaimed-

It's empty now.

“Excellent! I’ve got a bottle of Highland Park 8 year old, 43%, Own Bottling, Ferraretto Italian Import from the 1970s I can take and open!” Now, I’m guessing that to some of you reading, this statement will come as no great surprise. It’s just what we do, right? Us whisky nerds. We visit the distilleries with the nice bottles we’ve acquired from them, we drink them, we nod knowingly, and there is much rejoicing. That’s just the natural order of things, and the natural order shall not be challenged. Quandaries concerning dates, transport, and accommodation are superfluous and will be dealt with as a matter of course. Hence, we’re on a mission, and woe betide those who attempt to derail us!

Hold on a Minute!

And such behavior should be encouraged, far be it for me to rock the boat. However, there are some - I think they’re generally referred to as “normal” - who may reason that our inherent desire to gather at a liquid's birth place to drink it is, frankly, a touch peculiar.

After all, despite the fact that (by volume) my drink of choice is tea, I’ve never felt the pull to enjoy a cup or two in the climes where it’s grown. For all I know, the field in which my milk is produced is very pretty. And I’ve driven past a local plant where a popular mixer brand is produced more times than I care to count, not once have I felt the need to knock on the door. So what is it about alcohol that draws us to its birth place, often crossing borders and oceans to align like pilgrims to the mount at the gates of the producers from where it first flowed?

You Wouldn’t Understand…

Dante's Inferno. Also difficult to understand.

Maybe we’re just wired differently. If you have a passion for certain category of wine or beer or spirit, and if you’re anything like me, you may well feel it necessary to repress the desire to correct the uninitiated in polite company close to crippling. It’s a very real compulsion, the urge to inform said drinks ignoramus that “It’s supposed to taste like that, you prick! They didn’t spend hundreds of years trying to perfect how the stuff is made for you to get exactly what you ordered and THEN say you don’t like it! …and another thing - terroir is just marketing BS!” (a conversation for another time, perhaps) And if you’ve never experienced such an impulse, you’re missing out.

You see, what we have is an active relationship with the liquid, its history, its cultural significance, its processes, its traditions, its rituals. And like any relationship, it’s seasoned with the wonderfully irrational. To us, drinking it is barely half of the story. It’s immersive, it’s emotional, it’s educational, it’s evocative, it, well - it matters. We have an utterly blind faith in that this ridiculous submission, of what at its very core is a matter of maintaining sustenance to the point where the skills and knowledge bred from the exercise will help us thrive, excel and even reflect a deeper knowledge of what makes us who and what we are.

Lets Go!

“Yeah - whatever!” the naysayers will claim… “You’re just looking for an excuse for a jolly with your pals!” And to be honest, they could be on to something. That being said, there’s more to it than that. Often it’s a case of narrowing down select associates not necessarily based on who’s the funniest or the most sociable (although admittedly that can help), but more accurately how much they will APPRECIATE it. We’re not just going down to the local to sip on “the usual” here, we’re going above and beyond, creating memories, the chosen are to be considered more than just “good people”. Inclusion is the result of a sacred silent triage, a group decision that results in each member deciding that you can contribute to the collective effervescence - “yeah, you’re ok, you get it.”

Nevertheless, the theory of “getting it” remains somewhat elusive, and it utterly contradicts my own desire to make our industry more inclusive. But we are by our own admittance the niche of the niche of the niche. We know that there’s nothing wrong with a couple of drams from a stoically well produced bottle from the supermarket around at a friend's house (Some of the most memorable drams I’ve ever had have been in a friend's flat in Park Royal), but we NEED more! What's Really Happening?

At face value we're just travelling somewhere scenic with some bottles and some mates, but underneath there's something far dafter and far more sincere going on. We're not content to be passive consumers; we want to close the loop, to see the stills, smell the washbacks, nod at the warehouses and mutter, “Aye, this is where you became you.” It’s the illogical belief that the liquid will somehow show us more of itself if we bring it back to where it started, as though the cask staves have kept a set of stories they’ll only whisper on home turf.

And in amongst the jokes, the hijinx, the ferry timetables, and the panicked group chats about who’s bringing what, there’s that tiny, stubborn conviction that the dram will taste different there – not chemically, but cosmically. We’re engineering context on purpose, building the setting so the scene feels worthy of the script we’ve already half written in our heads. Call it pilgrimage, call it tourism, call it a cask strength mid life crisis, but it certainly isn’t “just a long weekend away”.

Mindset With All the Baggage

Sigmund Freud. Psychiatrist and originator of the "Yo' Momma" comeback.

If you ask a psychologist, they might dress it up as “place attachment”, “peak end rule”, “collective identity reinforcement” and other phrases that sound better with a PhD attached. Translated, it means: we go because doing something slightly ridiculous, together, in a specific place, is exactly how we create the memories that keep us coming back. Opening a 1970s Highland Park 8 in your kitchen is nice; opening it on Orkney with the wind doing its best to tip your glass over is a chapter heading in your life story.

We also get to indulge in a bit of harmless self mythologising. “We’re the sort of people who do this,” we tell ourselves, as we stand in the rain clutching a special bottle like a relic rescued from an auction site. When the cork finally pops (although this bottle had a screwcap), everyone present becomes a named character in the tale – no longer “pals from the tasting group” but “folks who were there that weekend when we finally opened it back at the distillery.”

Philosophy - Less Greek and More Peat

Aristotle. Philosopher. Never seen on Orkney.

Philosophically, you could say we’re chasing authenticity, aura, essence – all those big leathery words beloved by people who own more notebooks than is strictly necessary (in this case – me). Deep down, we know the whisky in the bottle is the same whether it’s poured in Kirkwall or in a Travelodge off the A1, but our relationship with it is not. Returning it to where it was made gives the moment a pleasing circularity: what left as “stock” comes back as “story”, and we get to be the ones who closed the circle.

There’s also a whiff of rebellion against the idea that everything can be flattened into just “content”. Algorithms don’t care where you drink your dram; a coastal warehouse and a living room look much the same once the pixels are compressed. We, stubbornly, do care – about the bloody midges, the smell of mash, the way the light hits the pagoda roof at 4pm in April, all the impractical details that refuse to be tidied up into neat tasting notes.

Don't Mention This Bit!

Of course, you can dress it up as psychology, philosophy, tourism or terroir adjacent nonsense, but at the heart of it there’s something simple: we want to feel like we belong somewhere with this stuff. Not just as customers on a mailing list, but as participants in a story that started long before us and will carry on long after our last bottle is gone. Walking through the distillery gates with an old bottling under your arm is a small, symbolic way of saying, “Thank you. We noticed. We cared enough to come back.”

And if, in the process, we also get a cracking weekend, a handful of new in jokes, three hundred photos of copper and brickwork, and a lingering sense that life is marginally better when there’s a dram in your hand and warm mash vapour on the breeze – well, that’s hardly the worst side effect. Some people take their broken hearts back to the places they first fell in love; we take our bottles back instead.

Coming Home

So why do we do it? We do it because “just drinking it” isn’t enough, because we’re daft enough to believe that context counts, and because shared silliness with meaning attached is one of the few things that reliably makes being human feel worthwhile. In that sense, taking a bottle back to where it was made isn’t indulgence, or madness, or even tourism – it’s simply letting the whisky, and us, come home.

Home. Well, my street, at least.

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