Last winter, I walked out from Drogheda’s train station to see an Irish distillery I’d heard a lot about - Boann. Many had recommended it, and I tried some early products of theirs in Paris, but now I was going to see it for myself. An unusual entry for EuroWhisky - no chance I would become a supplier for such a large Irish distillery. That said, they were very welcoming nonetheless, and I’d like to share how it was to explore this new generation Irish distillery.

As part of my efforts to outline what proper terroir in whisky could mean, I've come across much discussion of organic and biodynamic whisky. After all, Waterford and Bruichladdich are two of the biggest names to come up when you research terroir in whisky, and they're also two of the leaders in marketing organic/biodynamic drams. Not the only ones of course - look at Domaine des Hautes Glaces, for example, who don't do anything with biodynamics but take organic farming very seriously. But as for the traditional whisk(e)y homelands of Ireland and Scotland, those two distilleries hold the torch. Both owe their modern legacies to Mark Reynier, and despite Waterford's present issues, they still form the core of these discussions at present.

Last year, I had an article published in Whisky Magazine laying out the shape of the Czech whisky world: who's making it, the history, what you can expect in terms of flavour, etc.

Starting out a day in Llandudno for the Wales Whisky Festival last November, I was immediately hit by a little foreshadowing. The event was being held at the decidedly un-Welsh sounding St George's Hotel. The goal for the day: see, try, and discuss every Welsh whiskey possible, before walking to Lloyd Street for a tour of Penderyn's second distillery. I saw the original (in the Bannau Brycheiniog) back in December 2017, when I was still working for SWE.

With my fortunate lift over from In the Welsh Wind, I arrived at another nearby distillery: Dà Mhìle. For a long time, this was the only whiskey maker in Wales besides Penderyn, so I've always wanted to know more about it, especially as the name means '2000' in Gàidhlig , not Cymraeg …

Why not spend Halloween traveling deep into West Wales? Winding west form Shrewsbury on the train, I retraced steps I last took in 2019, heading to Aberystwyth. From there, a TrawsCymru bus took me along the wet coast of Ceredigion to In the Welsh Wind. You may remember that I posted a blog about them back in 2024 , when they kindly sent me a sample of their first whisky. 

At the end of September last year, I went to the Basque Country for the first time. Besides giving a tasting at Edari in Bilbao, I used the opportunity to see a distillery. What else do you think I would get up to?!

Everything I say here is intended for the world of European whisky (Scotch and Irish included), but the same principles could be applied to whiskies made anywhere in the world with some adaptation of the details to local conditions, e.g., which types of grain can be grown locally

From some of Czechia’s most historic distilling sites to one of its newest. Radlík is only 40 minutes outside Prague, and it's a lovely journey on a late August day. Before hosting a tasting at the Whiskeria in the evening, I got to sample some of Czechia’s great public transport. A fast metro to Budějovická, where city buses fire you right out into the countryside. 

As soon as I finished visiting R. Jelinek in the morning, it was off to Olomouc on the train. Leaving the edge of the Carpathians, I headed for this historic Moravian city to see a much smaller Czech distillery: TOSH. A few trains, trams, and buses later, I was standing in Těšetice, the true genesis / ground zero of Czech whisky. 

As soon as I finished my last distillery visit in Austria, I headed straight off to Czechia on the train. By 10pm, I managed to make it to the small town of Vizovice in eastern Moravia. A town of only 5,000 inhabitants, it’s also home to one whisky distillery, and it might be the single most important one in Czechia: Rudolf Jelínek.  

I’d had a very disrupted start to my Czechia trip… which started with a brief interlude in Austria. Missing my planned night train, I had to take a series of buses and trains overnight, which did have the silver lining of letting me watch the sunrise between Munich and the Danube. All that left me standing at Linz Hauptbahnhof, where I was met by Jasmin Haider pulling up in her Tesla.