Spirits high for whisky festival

The rise and rise in the popularity of whisky continues unabated – with the Speyside Whisky Festival the latest to benefit from a surge of worldwide interest.

Tickets for 300 events at the annual festival, which is held in the Speyside region of Scotland between 3 and 7 May, went on sale on Saturday night (21 Jan), and within the first 12 hours more than 30 of the events, including the main Gala dinner, had sold out.
More than £50,000 was taken in the first day and since then sales have continued to thrive and thousands of whisky fans worldwide have signed up to the Festival’s Facebook and Twitter accounts. The sales represent the busiest start to festival sales since it started 13 years ago.

The most popular events included exclusive tours of distilleries not normally open to the public, ‘ultimate’ tours of some of the finest whisky distilleries in the world, whisky and food pairing workshops, the intriguing Mystery Bus Tour of Speyside, a tour around the five distilleries of Elgin and the popular Seven Stills Bus Tour.

Visitors to the Festival will be coming from as far afield as Japan, Australia, Russia, South Africa, Canada and the USA with the majority making the journey from closer shores such as Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Germany and the UK.

A spokeswoman for the Festival said: “Speyside and the wider area benefit greatly from the Whisky Festival each year, both in terms of reputation and financially, so it’s important that we offer a strong line up of events to encourage visitors to return year after year to share their passion for the world’s finest whiskies, and to appeal to new visitors to come and experience Malt Whisky country and the Whisky Festival for themselves. From the response we’ve seen in these first few days we will be welcoming the usual big crowds, but hopefully this may be the best attended and finest Festival yet.”