Dingwall once had three distilleries. The last of them, Ben Wyvis, closed in 1926, and for almost a century the Highland town went without. GlenWyvis — opened in 2017 by a crowdfunded community of nearly three thousand shareholders — is the answer. It is Scotland's first 100 percent community-owned distillery, and the first new distillery in Dingwall in ninety years.
The project was the brainchild of local helicopter pilot John McKenzie, who put the land forward and rallied the town. The distillery sits on a hill above Dingwall, powered by wind, sun and biomass — a genuinely carbon-conscious operation that takes its environmental responsibilities as seriously as its liquid. The name honours Ben Wyvis, the mountain that dominates the horizon.
The early single malt releases are unassuming in the best way: clean, orchard-fruited, honeyed, with the soft cereal sweetness of a well-made Highland spirit that hasn't been overworked. This is not a whisky trying to be complicated. It's a whisky trying to be Dingwall, and in that it succeeds handsomely.
The nose opens with bourbon-cask vanilla and green apple, the palate brings pear and malt biscuit, and the finish closes clean and gentle. At 46.5% it has enough grip to feel grown-up without overreaching. For a community distillery only a handful of years into its maturation, this is encouraging work — and the back-story, for once, is genuinely worth caring about. A town reclaiming its distilling heritage, one shareholder at a time.
