Distillery Visits: Glenfiddich

Another distillery that offers free tours, as well as special tours that offer more for a admission price. The tour described here is the free tour (you can only taste so many whiskies during the day!) which starts with the familiar video. As always it has some nice scenery so it really gets you into that tartan-feeling for the rest of the tour.

A welcome change in larger tours is that you are allowed to photograph during the tour and also inside the production area's. One of those area's include a bottling hall, something you do not get to see in a lot of distilleries. As far as I know the bottling hall in Bruichladdich is the only other one you can see during a tour.

Glenfiddich is the pioneer on the distillery tours, and that still shows with a lot of visitors joining a tour each day. We were well outside the high season but still groups left each 30 minutes or so. The site also has the largest shop on a distillery site I have seen, although for my taste it was a bit too much tartan-deer'ish.

Just across the street you can find Balvenie castle, easy to combine with a visit to this distillery. Also close by is the Parkmore distillery of which a photo is featured a lot in PeatFreak presentations (I get asked a lot which distillery this is), there are a lot of other distilleries around Dufftown which are worth to have a walk around. In the weekends there is a rail line operating which has a few rides between Dufftown and Keith. The line is a leftover from the time when the railway was used to stock the distilleries and take away the spirit and matured whisky.