This Scottish Region Is Famous for Whisky That Tastes Like the Sea — How to Plan the Perfect Trip

It was raining in the ancient Norse settlement of Wick, on the ragged shores of northern Scotland. Whitecaps seethed and simmered on the ocean; gulls somersaulted in the squally air. Inside the vast warehouses of Old Pulteney, a 198-year-old distillery famous for its maritime malt, I could feel the brackish air working its magic on the wooden casks of whisky, the sweet, briny flavor deepening day by day.

During a tour of one of the four warehouses, my guide, Daniel Ross, and I gazed in reverence at the tidy ranks of bourbon barrels, each stamped with the year they were filled. Some date from 2002, making them only slightly younger than Ross. At 25, he is already well versed in the destructive power of the winds that lash these shores. “Up here, the salt will strip the paint off everything,” he said. 

Ross gestured to the open windows high up in the warehouse wall and explained that the wind sprays in seawater, which settles like fairy dust on the casks. “In the maturation process, the whisky penetrates into the wood, where it reaches the salt,” he said. “It doesn’t sound like a lot, but the casks are here for 12 years.” 

I’d heard a version of the same story the evening before, in the seaside town of Dornoch, where I began my journey through Scotland’s so-called Flow Country in search of maritime whisky. There, I had sat with Michael Hanratty, manager of the Carnegie Whisky Cellars, a tasting room and shop that stocks a huge variety of scotches. I was curious to find out how one of my favorite single malts could taste like the ocean it overlooks.

“Something has to fill the void,” Hanratty explained. The void is the “angel’s share”: the amount of whisky lost to evaporation — about two percent a year. And that something is the sea air. “When the whisky starts to breathe, it’s going to draw some of that salty character in.” 

A briny quality also permeated the Links House, a 15-room sandstone hotel in Dornoch on the edge of the tumbling sea. It is the kind of place Agatha Christie might have set one of her country-house murders, but with better food, and a relaxed sense of being among friends who have a thing for plaid. An open fire and broad windows and skylights made it feel bright and spacious, even on a dreich day. Rooms come with a dedicated butler’s pantry, well stocked with soft drinks and Tunnock’s caramel wafers, an iconic Scottish treat.

Most guests were there to sink a putt on Royal Dornoch, one of Scotland’s finest golf courses. The fairways separate the hotel from a shimmering strand of beach where sand plovers congregated on the rocks and seals bobbed in the waves. In the pale morning sun, with the early breath of sea wind on my face, it was as happy a spot as I could wish for. A lunchtime stroll to Surf & Turf, a Dornoch hole-in-the-wall, was rewarded with a lobster roll, tangy with lemon and mayonnaise. 

Fishing is the reason these coastal towns thrived in the 19th century, and it led to the construction of the distilleries. In Wick, the herring industry (the fish were known as “silver darlings”) gave rise to Old Pulteney (“liquid gold”) as a means of keeping the fishermen refreshed. The fisheries eventually collapsed, but the whisky thrived, lifted on a wave of global demand that has seen prices for rare bottlings surge. (A commemorative edition of 45-year-old Old Pulteney sold at auction for $88,000 last October, way above the estimate.) 

Such demand has led to the resurrection of so-called ghost distilleries like Brora, which closed in 1983 after more than 160 years. Located 25 minutes north of Dornoch, Brora reopened in 2021 with its antique copper pots refurbished and installed beneath a dramatic peaked roof. Like Old Pulteney, its whisky doesn’t possess the signature smoke of other Scotch single malts, but instead exudes notes of ocean spray. I found, to my dismay, that the tasting room does not keep regular hours, so I wasn’t able to sample what one whisky connoisseur has described as having “briny umami hints, redolent of sushi rolls.” 

Brora was en route to the Flow Country, a vast expanse of wet peatland in the far northern reaches of Scotland that is a haven for birds like greenshanks and golden plovers, which feed and nest on its insect-rich bogs. The region is a 2024 candidate for UNESCO World Heritage status, in part for its role in climate-change mitigation. The amount of carbon locked in the peat, which reaches down 32 feet in places, is about 400 million tons — more than double the amount stored in Britain’s woodlands. Peat is also a critical component in many Scottish distilleries, where it is used as fuel to dry the barley that is then distilled into whisky, bestowing on the liquor its signature smokiness.

To learn more about this extraordinary ecosystem, I took a snaking one-lane road to Forsinard Flows, a nature reserve in the heart of the Flow Country, nudging sheep off the road and making quick stops to Instagram the heath and bog, all russet and green and speckled with yellow, like a giant swatch of Scottish tweed. The 52,000-acre preserve is managed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, with well-maintained boardwalks and a larch-clad observation tower that resembles the prow of a Viking ship washed up and stranded on the bog. 

As I stood atop the tower, surveying an intricate lattice of ponds, my guide, Milly Revill Hayward, explained how the peat had been degraded by generations of misuse until conservation efforts prevailed in recent years. In this part of the world, a healthy pond is a stagnant pond. The peat is fed by a decaying layer of sphagnum moss, sundew, and butterwort, which deepens a millimeter a year. The process is like a slowly maturing whisky, and standing in the thick of Flow Country puts the brevity of life into perspective. 

From Forsinard Flows it was a 40-minute zigzagging drive through vast wind farms to the Forss House Hotel, near the town of Thurso. Built in 1810, it is a paean to whimsical décor, with a wall covered in antique pendulum clocks and barstools with antlers for legs. Conveniently situated at the northernmost end of the NC 500 — a Caledonian version of Route 66 that has supercharged tourism in this region — Forss House lures guests with elaborate dinners, wine pairings, and a generous afternoon tea. The main draws for me, however, were the well-stocked bar, soft leather chairs, sepia photographs, and worn wooden floors. A crackling fire was a seductive invitation to spend an evening nursing a whisky. Then again, Scotland is a land of crackling fires and well-stocked bars, as befits a rain-sodden country with more distilleries than Kentucky and Tennessee combined. 

Back at Old Pulteney, Ross introduced me to two veteran distillers who have worked there for decades and embody the time-honored rituals of malting, mashing, and distilling. They chatted amiably about temperatures and measurements and volumes of alcohol as I frowned in concentration. A yeasty fragrance, like that of a bowl of cornflakes doused in hot milk, bloomed through the old stone building. We paused before two fat-bellied stills, which looked like giant copper snowmen with stovepipe hats. It is inside those gleaming orbs, I learned, that the metamorphosis of barley, yeast, and alcohol takes place, without which all whisky would just be beer.

Finally we stepped into the tasting room, which felt modern and a little sterile after the old-world charm of the distillery. Ross poured samples of Old Pulteney’s single malts, plus a new coastal series that had a second maturation in Pineau des Charentes casks from the southeastern coast of France. As I worked my way along the line, letting the whisky settle on my tongue — now sweet, now salty, now with hints of caramel — I gave silent thanks to the wind and water that produced it. 

“Today’s rain is tomorrow’s whisky,” Hanratty had told me in Dornoch. Soon after I departed Old Pulteney, it started coming down thick and fast again. There would be plenty of whisky tomorrow. 

A version of this story first appeared in the February 2024 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline "Amber Waves."