Highland Park 18 — Honey and Heather, Fire and Stone
By Rafi Mercer
There are whiskies that lean entirely on smoke, and there are whiskies that lean on sweetness. Highland Park 18 does neither. Instead, it balances them with rare precision, carrying honey, dried fruit, and a heathery peat that belongs to Orkney alone. This is not a dram of extremes; it is a dram of equilibrium, where sweetness and smoke live together in harmony.
Highland Park was founded in 1798 on Orkney, the northernmost distilling outpost of Scotland. The islands are windswept, remote, shaped by the North Sea and the North Atlantic. Peat here is not like Islay’s iodine-rich bogs. It is cut from heath, rich with heather, giving a gentler smoke — aromatic, floral, almost incense-like. The 18-year expression has long been regarded as the distillery’s masterpiece, the point where sherry cask richness and heather peat smoke meet in perfect proportion.
In the glass, Highland Park 18 glows deep copper. On the nose, it greets with honey, dried apricot, orange peel, and gentle smoke. The first sip broadens into toffee, dark chocolate, raisins, and spiced oak, all threaded with that heathery peat. The smoke is never overwhelming; it drifts, almost perfumed, carrying sweetness along. The finish is long and warming, leaving a memory of fruit and smoke braided together. It is whisky that feels whole, rounded, architectural.
What makes Highland Park 18 remarkable is its balance. It does not demand loyalty to peat or to sherry; it shows how the two can be fused. It is a whisky of diplomacy, but also of depth — the kind of dram that feels equally at home in solitude or in company. That is why it belongs in the Tracks & Tales Guide to the Top 50 Whiskies: it demonstrates that equilibrium can be as powerful as intensity.
Its musical counterpart is Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda. Released in 1971, the album is built on harp, bass, and drone, with a meditative quality that draws from Eastern spirituality as much as jazz. Like Highland Park 18, it is about fusion — elements brought together to form something greater than their parts. Listen to the title track and you hear serenity anchored in depth, repetition shaped into transcendence. Sip Highland Park 18 alongside it and the whisky’s sweetness and smoke echo the music’s dual nature: calm, but powerful; gentle, but lasting.
In a listening bar, the pairing resonates deeply. Pour a dram of GlenDronach 15 as the clavinet riff of “Higher Ground” begins, the whisky’s dark sweetness echoing the funk’s pulse. By the time “Visions” plays, gentle and introspective, the whisky has settled into its long finish, fruit and oak merging like chords fading into silence. Both whisky and album are immersive — they fill the room, they ask you to sit, they leave you changed.
GlenDronach 15 is not about subtlety. It is about fullness. It shows what happens when spirit and wood are given time and patience, when richness is pursued unapologetically. For those building their own listening rituals, it offers a reminder: sometimes the moment calls for grandeur, for whisky that wraps you in velvet and records that speak with authority.
And perhaps the next step is to seek it out in the right place — a bar with deep leather seats, shelves lined with sherried malts, speakers carrying the groove of Stevie Wonder into the night. Because whisky like this isn’t just for tasting; it is for inhabiting, for letting richness fill the air as much as the glass.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or click here to read more.
