Region & History

No law recognizes "Islands" as its own whisky region. The Scotch Whisky Regulations of 2009 list only five regions. Anyone distilling on Orkney, Skye, Jura, Mull, Arran, Lewis, Harris, or Raasay legally belongs to the vast Highland area. Yet the whole industry talks about the islands as if they were a world of their own. Here, the sea shapes things more than any administrative boundary.

The stories of the individual distilleries diverge widely. On Jura, whisky was already being distilled in 1810, thirteen years before any law made distilling legal at all. On Skye, brothers Hugh and Kenneth MacAskill founded the Talisker distillery in 1830. Before that, as landowners, they had evicted tenant families from their land, one of the notorious Highland Clearances.

On Orkney, Macfarlane & Townsend founded the Scapa distillery in 1885. It sits just a few hundred meters from the bay that gave it its name. Scapa Flow became the most important Royal Navy anchorage in both the First and Second World Wars. In 1919, the German fleet scuttled nearly its entire High Seas Fleet there. Whisky production and world politics often sat closer together on Orkney than the island would have liked.

Many island distilleries had to close and waited decades for a second chance. Ledaig on Mull started in 1798. From 1837 it lay silent for forty-one years, reopened in 1878, and was finally shut down by the Distillers Company in 1930. Only in 1972 did smoke rise from the chimney again, this time under the name Tobermory. Arran, too, went without a legal distillery for a long time. It wasn't until 1995 that former Chivas director Harold Currie opened a new one, Lochranza. Today the region is enjoying a second spring. Torabhaig on Skye began operating in January 2017, followed by Lagg in southern Arran in 2019. Raasay, Lewis, and Harris are also distilling legally once again.