Blended Scotch Grenache Ice Wine Scotland Highland

The Grenache grape holds the honor of being the most widely planted wine grape varietal on earth. It has a long and impressive history, and has been the backbone of the some of the planet’s most respected and famed wine regions, blended with Syrah in regions such as Chateauneuf du Pape, and in certain other Loire and Languedoc regions where it reigns supreme as a single varietal wine grape. In other key areas, such as Spain’s La Rioja (where it is known as Garnacha Tinta), it is blended with Tempranillo to make that country’s signature red wine, and is widely used as a blending grape in other old and new world countries, due to its unique character and jammy, fruit forward character.


For a long time, the Grenache grape was somewhat looked down upon as an ignoble varietal, incapable of producing wines of any particular interest. However, times are very much changing - in the right hands, Grenache grapes result in astonishingly intense and complex wines, full of fascinating features, and capable of achieving plenty of expression. For a while now, Grenache has been a major player in Australian wines. While not yet quite as extensively planted down under as Shiraz is, the Barossa Valley is bringing out some of the finest examples of this grape’s wines in recent years.

For fans of fine scotch whisky, there’s nowhere quite like the Highlands. This single malt whisky region is the largest in Scotland, covering a vast swathe of the country and providing a great deal of variation, and both subtle and dramatic differences in style, flavor, aroma and character from bottle to bottle. This isn’t surprising, when you consider how varied the landscape of the Highlands is. Here, you find towering mountains, misty moorlands, urban centres and rugged coastlines, each with their own distilleries creating their own interpretations of single malt scotch whisky.

Due to it being such a large region, the Highlands produces around twenty-five percent of all Scotland’s whiskies. Thirty distilleries are still operating in the Highlands, continuing a set of whisky traditions that stretches back centuries, and always innovating and experimenting in order to achieve the best expression of their unique surroundings. Great pride is taken in maintaining traditional techniques, and alongside state of the art equipment, Highland scotch is forever pushing the possibilities and reaching new heights.

Highland scotch is difficult to pigeonhole and characterize with a set of flavors or features, because there is so much variety between the distilleries in the north, and those in the southern and central parts of this region. However, the most common flavor profiles include rich, fruit-cakey flavors, smoky notes from the production techniques which include burning peat, and dried fruit, oak and fragrant heather.