We took a distillery tour and Richard our guide was very knowledgeable and friendly. He took photos…read morefor us, answered any questions we had, and was all around very helpful. Our tasting was the first we have ever done and he walked us through how to properly taste each whisky and described in detail what each whisky had for flavor profiles. We learned a lot, thank you!

First stop on my whiskey tour…read more  It was interesting to learn how the attached hamlet housed the distillery employees. These days many distilleries no longer do this.  It was the closes one of the four to Inverness but seemed to be in the middle of no where. We took a tour of the facility walking through the whiskey process.  Pictures are  allowed except in two areas the guide will let you know.  Guide is very knowledgeable. The tour included a sample of a legacy 5 year, 12 year, and a mildly peated 9 year old.  The peated whiskey is a recent addition to their product line.  All the whiskies were good. Overall, it was an awesome tour The gift shop has free wifi .  They offer bottles and some branded souvenir items for sale.

This is just another general Victoria Wine store. The shop is very well laid out in sections of…read morewine, spirits etc. The prices are what is to be expected though I usually find Tesco cheaper for spirits but they can be well priced if there is an offer on and of course they have a better selection of wine than some Tesco stores. There are only a few members of staff but they are helpful when you ask them.

I loved my whirlwind trip to the U.K. but I was in search of something I was struggling to find -…read morewhisky I could not buy in the U.S. I wanted to bring back a few bottles for my whisky loving friends and I didn't simply want something that was cheaper than I could get at home. If that was the objective I simply could go south to Oregon to buy cheaper alcohol. No, I wanted to find something unique. And I had a hard time finding it. While my friend bought expensive bottles easily enough I wanted something I could give easily without spending an arm and a leg. Yet everywhere we went I didn't find anything until I went here. The Whisky Shop lived up to its name and provided tons of whisky. On top of that they had small barrels that offered small bottles of whisky you could only buy there. I ended up buying quite a few bottles as I determined I also wanted some for myself! Everyone there was so helpful. After seeing how much I purchased they offered to store the bag while I continued my tour of the city. They offered me samples of everything I wanted to try and they provided great suggestions. I was immensely pleased. I would highly recommend the Whisky Shop!

Friendly and knowledgeable staff with a good selection of modern and traditional Scottish Whisky. I…read moreleft with two bottles and $200 poorer with a smile on my face.

i shouldn't really start with my (mis)adventures in this haddows. it sells the usual fags, beer and…read morecheap cider so was handy when plenty of those things were my forte. i regulalry used to fall out the phoenix or blackfriars into first the chippy and then haddows after an afternoon on the sauce, erm i mean shopping. memories

I stopped in here to kill some time while walking around the beautiful town of Ft. William…read more The selection wasn't too interesting vs. what you might find in Edinburgh. Still, I did see a few special single cask bottles from Highland Park that were hard to find. But the prices were predictably very high (£300 for Highland Park 19 YO single cask from one producer and £500 for Highland Park 19 YO from another producer). Otherwise, you could get just about any easy to find Scotch at the normal retail price.

Rather a smallish shop, but they got my business because they were one of only two shops (of any…read morekind) on High Street open before 9:30. Besides the usual suspects, I found some great small-scale specialty bottlings here. I purchased two 200ml bottles, one Arran and one Lochingar, but the prize was a 350ml Rosebank 1991 from the Signatory Vintage collection. Apparently some guy founded this company to buy up the existing stocks of distilleries which had gone out of business (whiskies which had been laid down but were not yet ready for bottling at the time of the business's dissolution). They then bottled the product in their own Signatory Vintage packaging and put them on the market. So when you buy one, you are getting a piece of the past, because once these whiskies are all consumed, there will be none left of them in the world. To me, that's really cool (and rather wistfully sad too). So of all the scotches (at least a dozen of various sizes) that I brought back to the U.S., this Rosebank is my most treasured. In fact, after a year and a half, I still haven't opened it. It deserves a truly special occasion. Oh, and I couldn't pass up a 3ml bottle of Dalmore which they had labelled "World's Smallest Bottle of Whisky." I wanted to make a Christmas tree ornament out of it, but I never got around to it.

My distillery tour and accompanying whisky tasting were enjoyable because of the…read moreup-close-and-personal tour of the inner-workings of the distillery and our superbly engaging and humorous guide Alex. We arrived after the last stated tour time, but since there was another couple with the same fate as us, they offered to do one more basic tour for the 4 of us. Alex immediately plunged us into his whisky world, with a thick but understandable Scottish accent. I haven't been to a large distillery, but from what I've heard Benromach's tours are intimate in the sense that we can walk right up to the mash containers and take whiffs of the premature spirits (it's NOT called whisky until it's finished :)), as well as smelling and even rubbing our hands with the different by-products of the whisky making process (the "head" and "tail"). One of those products had the effect of a nice hand lotion which smelled like whisky. At the end of the tour, Alex was nice enough to let us try small samples of some whisky's which weren't part of the normal tasting. I think it's because we were good tour takers :) If you aren't so lucky at tour's end, I recommend tasting the organic Benromach.

While in the Speyside region of northern Scotland, we toured a few whisky distilleries. Of all of…read morethem, my favorite was Benromach. This small distillery is a short (~30min) train ride from Inverness to the town of Forres. It is then a short walk down the road to the distillery. What I liked about this distillery was that it was a small operation. Because of this we were given a really up close tour of the facility. Our tour guide was an older Scotsman who was pretty funny and also fluent in Spanish. In addition to an overall cool feel to the distillery, the actual tour was really cool, too. Well, if you've done a tour or so, they're pretty much all the same (harvest grain, distill with famous Speyside water, and age it in a wodden barrel, etc.), but I liked this one because we got to see how the whole process works and we were able to ask lots of questions. There's a little museum area where one can see some displays related to the whisky-making process. This is the only place one is allowed to take a picture while going on the tour. Oh, and FYI--Benromach has a barrel which Prince Charles sealed a while back, and is due for a tasting. The tour was then topped off by a tasting of a couple of different Benromach whiskys. I was not a whisky drinker before going to Scotland, but I let half of my heritage kick in, grew an appreciation.