There’s a law in Scotland called “the right to roam,” which I learned about roughly ten years ago. While private property in terms of buildings and houses is respected and enforced, you’re allowed to access pretty much any open land for recreational purposes. Nature hikes, fishing, rock climbing—you name it. You can’t wander into random distillery buildings or bonded warehouses, but you definitely can explore the areas around just about any distillery without fear; even the legendary shuttered facilities like Convalmore, located just behind Balvenie. Closed in 1985, and purchased by the Grants back in 1992 to expand their warehousing, it casts a ghostly figure as you pass along the footpath between both sites.

Using your right to roam around the Grant family estate is a fun adventure if you’re in the area. You have to hop one fence and descend a small ravine to access an old railroad path, but it eventually takes you to the Dufftown train station. There’s a small commuter line that runs between Keith and the Dufftown and it’s as quaint as they come. Definitely worth stopping by as you make your way around what’s called the Isla Way.

Roaming through the Highlands isn’t just about perspective, it’s about the sensory experience and sense of place that links your mind to the moment and to the whisky created around you. I can’t tell you how sad and tragic the current practice of drinking and exchanging minis feels to my soul. Drinking 50ml of a particular whisky and moving on to the next sample is like taking a selfie at the airport and claiming you’ve been to Paris. Tasting a few sips of a single malt doesn’t give you any real understanding of a product other than the most basic overview. Like any relationship, you have to spend time with it. If you really want to understand a person, you go to where they’re from and meet their friends and family. The same goes for any Scotch whisky.

For the first few years of my booze career, I assumed the barley, the stills, and the wood were the most important components of a whisky’s essence. After a few trips to Scotland, I quickly learned that no element is more important than water; more specifically, where that water comes from and how much of it is available. Not only does the quality of the water greatly affect the flavor of the whisky, if there’s a particularly hot summer and the spring or “burn” that supplies the distillery starts to dry up, then the distillery shuts down until the water starts to flow again. As we walked with Kirsten up to Robbie Dhu—the water source for Glenfiddich and Balvenie—she explained how her family purchased all of the land around their water source to protect that supply. Nothing is more important to their whisky than the Robbie Dhu spring.

The Robbie Dhu is like something out of a Bronte sisters novel with the shaded grove around it, the heather peeping out from the hillsides, and the serenity of the flowing water easing your troubles. This is the source of the Grant family’s whiskies. It all starts here. From melting snow high in the Cairngorn mountains, these underground springs make their way down to the Highlands, permeating the landscape into the various rivers and tributaries that weave through Scotland and the whiskies created here. Every time it started to rain, Kirsten would say: “Today’s rain is tomorrow’s whisky.” It’s an adage that’s easy to gloss over and forget, yet it’s the quintessence of what makes a whisky.

-David Driscoll