The title of Spirit of Place: Scotland’s Great Whiskey Distilleries evokes the contents. The author, James Beard Award-winner Charles MacLean, explores the idea that the Scottish landscape infused the country’s whiskey with its “vivid scents of hot gorse, fresh flowers, heather and bracken.” Chapters are devoted to 50 distilleries, including recently opened craft operations such as Kilchoman, which grows its own barley, as well as venerable concerns such as Balblair, founded in 1790. “The wood makes the whiskey,” an old saying goes, and MacLean writes learnedly about the casks where whiskey is aged, even the microclimate of the warehouses where they are stored, which “may influence the flavor of the mature whiskey.” Spirit of Place is also a beautiful coffee table book with expansive photographs of distilleries, the whiskey-making process and—yes—the Scottish landscape under moody, filtered sunlight.
