Islay, Scotland — Everything you need to know about Scotland’s ghost whisky and its umbilical bond to Scottish identity can be found in Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “Drams.”“Barley, water, peat,weather, landscape, history;Malted. Swallowed neat.”The words of the UK’s former poet laureate come to mind in the Scandi-vibed lounge of the reborn Port Ellen distillery on the Isle of Islay, where the first drink some visitors are offered is a cup of pine-smoked Lapsang tea from China’s Wuyi Mountains.It is not what you’d expect to be drinking on a Hebridean island, especially not in a black metal and glass temple to the art of distilling. But it soon makes sense: it’s all about tuning the tastebuds in preparation for sampling some seriously expensive, smooth and aromatically complex single malt.The luxury visitor experience here is billed as a deep dive into the smokier end of the whisky spectrum, a sensory revelation of the kind evoked in Duffy’s “Drams.”“The gifts to noses –bog myrtle, aniseed, hay,attar of roses.”
Source: Why Scotland’s ‘ghost’ whisky distilleries are coming back to life | CNN
