Published in Scotland Magazine Issue 11 on 17/11/2003.

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Give them a drop of winter warmth

Winter is the ideal time to invest in Scottish whisky or give it to a loved one as a gift. Dominic Roskrow picks out some of the best

Excuse the sweeping generalisation, but to my mind nobody does winter better than Scotland.

Oh, there are some fine places to see out the cold; The Rockies, Lapland, southern New Zealand might all make a case.

But let’s face it, Scotland has some very distinctive advantages.

Let’s start with food. Scandinavia might be very nice, but you can’t seriously match hard black bread and dried salted fish with the sort of hearty fare you get in Scotland; meat bridies, pies and haggis with tatties, neeps and lashings of gravy.

Scotland’s one of a handful of countries that actually looks better in winter, alongside Norway, Austria and Switzerland. But which of those has invented a form of dance so energetically created to keep out the cold?

Frankly, slapping men in leather trousers just doesn’t do it; recklessly throwing yourself around in a folkie form of head-banging to a pipe and violin group does.

Then there is hogmanay. Which other winter destination had the intelligence to come up with the party to end all parties right in the middle of winter and straight after Christmas, just as the depressing realisation that the festivities are over and there are at least two months of misery ahead?

The Scots have got it sorted; Hogmanay events that run well in to January and then another houlee at the end of the month to mark the work of Rabbie Burns.

Yep, the Scots do winter perfectly. That’s why it used to be called Hibernia after all.

But the coup de grace, the winning score, the.....

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By Dominic Roskrow

Section : Scottish Whisky

Page number : 23