Highland Park released The Light in the spring of 2018 as one half of a paired set — its counterpart, The Dark, followed later the same year. The conceit was straightforward: two 17 year old expressions drawn from opposite ends of the distillery's cask spectrum, bottled to illustrate the difference that wood alone can make.
The Light was matured exclusively in refill American oak sherry seasoned casks — the comparatively restrained wood that allows the underlying Orcadian spirit to show its cereal, citrus and faint heather-peat character without being shrouded in dried fruit.
The presentation leaned on Orkney's midsummer. The decanter-style bottle was pale, modelled after the Neolithic Pictish stone carvings the distillery has long borrowed for its packaging, and the stated inspiration was the long northern daylight of the simmer dim — the weeks around the solstice when Kirkwall scarcely sees a proper night.
Bottled at 52.9% ABV without chill filtration, it was a limited release of around 28,000 bottles worldwide. The intent was not to replace the core sherried 18 — it was to stand beside it and argue a case for restraint. On those terms it succeeds: the spirit is audibly Highland Park, the smoke is measured, and the fruit is orchard rather than Christmas cake.
It is an unusually un-sherried Highland Park, and reviewers at the time noted precisely that. Whether that pleases depends entirely on what one expects the distillery to taste like.
