DORNOCH CELEBRATES PRESTIGIOUS DRINKS AWARDS!

The Carnegie Whisky Cellars celebrates its 1st Birthday with a National Award! As we approach our first full year of trading, we were extremely pleased to be nominated by the public for the Scottish Independent Retail Awards. As the only finalists North of Inverness in our category, we were even more pleased to be named as winners in our regional category of North of Scotland! We were, however, thoroughly surprised and delighted, not only to win that but to take the top award for best independent off license in Scotland.

This adds to a stellar year for Dornoch, as the world famous Dornoch Castle Whisky Bar next door to the Carnegie Courthouse took top awards for Whisky Bar of the year at the SLTN awards and pub of the year in Caithness and Sutherland in the CAMRA awards, they are also the number one ranked Whisky Hotel in the World on whiskybase.com. The town itself was the only Scottish finalist in the Great British High Street awards in the Rising Star category. Adding to this, the Thompson Brothers whose family owns the Dornoch Castle Hotel started production at the new Dornoch Distillery – housed in the towns old 1881 Fire House – on the 30th November and they recently launched their first ten experimental batches.

As a very small but dedicated and enthusiastic team we are grateful for the amazing support our customers have shown over the past year. It was this support from our local and international customers, including our local MP, Dr Paul Monaghan that took us to the top. You can see what some of our customers are saying on TripAdvisor or Facebook.

This last year, in our bid to become a centre of excellence for Scotch whisky we have seen our disused Courthouse building in the heart of historic Dornoch, transformed into the stylish and vibrant community asset it is today, housing several local independent businesses including our Whisky Cellars, you can see our shop for yourself with our new Google virtual tour.

Whisky tastings in our elegant tasting vault have proved extremely popular and we have, over the year, developed a great customer base among locals and visitors alike. We have whisky and gin club monthly meetings, and once again the local support has been amazing.

Ultra-special bottlings have appeared, (and disappeared again very quickly!) in the form of the 400 years of Golf at Royal Dornoch bottling created by Glenmorangie, our own Wolfburn Dornoch Whisky Festival bottling (which proved a winning collectable) and a single cask Caol ila bottling exclusive to us, a stunningly good expression which met with great approval by all those lucky enough to taste it! Our second exclusive single cask bottling will be with us in July – watch this space…

Last year was the second year for the Dornoch Whisky Festival which included tastings by Charlie Maclean and the Thompson Brothers. We also had tours at all of our local distilleries including Brora and Teaninich. This year’s festival will take place during the last weekend of October. Keep an eye out on their Facebook page for more event details.

So, this year we’ll celebrate our 1st birthday with our Courthouse colleagues, and give our hearty thanks to all our customers, whose fantastic support has made us award winners! For those yet to sample the delights of our extensive selection of malt whiskies, Scottish gins, collectable whiskies and more, we extend a warm welcome and look forward to seeing all our customers old and new in the coming months – Sláinte

You can contact our team directly on 01862 811791 or email us at whisky@thecarnegiecourthouse.co.uk