The forecast for Thurso this week is roughly what you would expect. By midwinter we will be down to about six hours of daylight and we all agree not to mention it. Madeira, meanwhile, gets called the island of eternal spring, largely because it is one. That is where these casks spent their working life, holding fortified wine under a sun we see perhaps four times a year. They came north last autumn. We filled them with whisky that had already spent eleven years in first-fill bourbon casks on the Caithness coast, and gave it a final twelve months in the Madeira wood. You can taste where that wood has been. Dried fruit, sultana, orange marmalade and soft toffee over the orchard fruit of the house style, with a long warming finish and dark caramel at the end of it. We are not going to pretend it makes October any brighter. It is simply what we want in the glass once the nights draw in.