I love Highland Park Whisky, and wrote about my tour of the distillery back in November of 2013. During my time in Scotland, I tried to make a point of sampling a lot of whiskies, particularly during several outings to The Grill. Partly because it was Orcadian, but largely because I liked the taste, I became a regular consumer of Highland Park's twelve-year-old whisky... Well, by "regular consumer," I mean that when I drink whisky, which is increasingly rare, that's the whisky that I usually drink.
Last week, I heard on Around Orkney that Highland Park is re-branding. For years, they've played up Orkney's Viking heritage. Rumor has it that the Asian market doesn't really know what to make of the Vikings, and the interview (with someone who clearly wasn't Orcadian) also mentioned efforts to market Highland Park to women. The result is some of the most uninspired packaging I've probably ever seen. You can check it out here. The claim is that the new look emphasizes "Orkney heather," but I'm hard-pressed to see how the new look relates to heather generally, or Orkney heather specifically. It looks like it could be any old alcohol bottle, and reminds me of the sort of thing you'd see in Mad Men, where the actual brand of whisky was rarely (never?) even mentioned.
This is a disappointment. In 2017, when leaving the East Coast to get married back on the West Coast, I had to bin many empty bottles of Highland Park that I'd saved up during the preceding three years. I've collected a few since moving home, and at this point, I'll have to make sure that I retain at least a couple for the duration.
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