whisky tours

Whisky's Next Stop: Tasmania

Filed under: Luxury Travel & Hotels, Spirits

Lark Distillery, Whisky Makers in Tasmania, Australia

On the day I arrived in Hobart, Tasmania's harbor-side capital, I was not expecting to hear much about Scotland and whisky.

After all, I'd just traveled about 10,000 miles from New York to Australia, and Scotland is just about the same distance in the other direction; if anything, I was prepared to hear about France because Tasmania has vineyards, and as every luxury traveler knows, wherever grapes grow, conversations about France flourish. But that evening, I gamely battled jet-lag to visit Lark Distillery's cozy downtown bar, and had a chat with owner Bill Lark, it was Scotland that we discussed the most.

Lark, a former land surveyor who bears an eerie resemblance to Kris Kringle, is Australia's patron saint of whisky. A decade or so ago, he realized that Tasmania had what it needed for whisky -- pure water, barley, even its own peat bogs. (If you're Australian, you'd giggle at this, since "bog" is slang for a toilet.) Anyway, the only trouble Lark faced was the law: a 1901 distillery law mandated very large stills, and he didn't want to run a giant whisky operation. So he successfully lobbied the Australian legislature to change its 1901 distillery law, and when he opened in 1996, became the first to open a licensed whisky distillery in 153 years. After that, Lark traveled to Scotland to learn the craft, returned to Tasmania, found a still-maker who could make one small enough for his purposes, and got cranking.

It all worked: the whisky's award-winning (more on that in a moment), Lark now runs a distillery school and is a distillery consultant. There are now five other whisky makers who have opened in Lark's wake, and another two getting started in Tasmania, which would very much like to be known as "Australia's Whisky Isle".

In an example of things going full circle, Lark's now a consultant to and an investor in a Kingsbarns Farm Distillery in Scotland, in the beginning phases of start up, just a few miles from St. Andrew's . "I can't teach the Scots how to make whisky, they taught me," Lark says. But Scotch tends to be brewed on a large scale, and Lark's developed expertise in distilling on a smaller scale. In fact, Kingsbarns is buying its stills from Lark's Tasmanian supplier. More on Lark and Scotland here.

Want to taste Lark's whisky for yourself?

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Tags: australia, scotch, scotch whisky, ScotchWhisky, scotland, tasmania, whisky, whisky tasting, Whisky Tours, WhiskyPeats

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The $85,000 Scotch Whisky Gift Experience

by Annie Scott (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Luxury Travel & Hotels, Spirits

If Jared Paul Stern's $2 Million Scotch Whisky Gift Experience (with Glenfiddich) was a little too rich for your blood, an $85,000 experience with The Dalmore might be just right for you.

We've covered various Dalmore bottles with prices as high as $58,000 over the years, as well as a tasting led by the colorful third generation Master Distiller Richard Paterson (above). With the once-in-a-lifetime Dalmore Experience package, you can combine all that -- taste the best bottles, spend a day with Richard and even get your hands on a custom-blended bottle of The Whisky Dalmore.

The $85,000 price tag gets you first class transportation (including airfare) to the Scottish Highlands, a city and country tour, four nights in a five-star hotel, a private barrel tasting of resting casks, a day of falconry with Richard Paterson, and a bespoke bottle of scotch whisky hand-created for you by Richard himself -- after he gets to know you, you personality and your preferences. The bottle will arrive in a handmade case a few weeks after you return to real life.

This extravagant package is so exclusive, it's only available for those in-the-know. Comment below and indicate your interest if would like to be contacted by a representative (or contact Annie.Scott-at-weblogsinc.com), and the Luxist team will pass along your information. You're welcome.

Tags: dalmore, richard paterson, RichardPaterson, scotch, the dalmore, TheDalmore, whisky, Whisky Tours, WhiskyTours

Whisky Tourism On The Rise In Scotland

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed) —

Wine tourism is big business around the world but for Scotland it's all about the whisky. The Scotsman has figures from Scotlandwhisky, the national Whisky tourism organization which show that over one million tourists visited distilleries last year and brought in more than £25 million in revenue. The number of tourists went up 12 percent last year. Scotlandwhisky offers a newsletter and a downloadable PDF with a map of Scotland's distilleries as well as information on hotels and guided tours.

In recent years distilleries have taken a cue from the wine tourism industry offering conference facilities, restaurants and bars to make their visitor centers more appealing. Today people are interested not just in tasting whisky but in learning how it is produced. Of course it also doesn't hurt that some distilleries are in beautifully scenic countryside. Also just as in a wine tour of the Napa Valley, the types of experiences differ with both larger more commercial venues and smaller family-owned enterprises showing their wares.

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Tags: scotland, whisky, whisky tourism, whisky tours, WhiskyTourism, WhiskyTours