Location: Advie, Grantown-on-Spey, Morayshire PH26 3LR Roads: On A95 between Grantown and Bridge of Avon Hours: Visits by appointment only No reception centre or shop Phone: 01807-510244

As you turn a bend on the A95 on Speyside Tormore suddenly looms large before you. It is solidly built in light-coloured granite but the details – great arched windows, stone balustrading, fine strip-fenestration on the roof-ridge – lend the distillery considerable style and originality. When it was completed in 1960, the first new distillery in Scotland this century, it created a whole new community with its clutch of pretty tied cottages laid out behind.

Even in a modern distillery, timehonoured methods of testing the water have to be followed

The architect was Sir Albert Richardson, a past president of the Royal Academy, who succeeded in creating a main building that was different from the classic Highland distillery but which equally avoided the visual curse of the concrete and glass boxes to which remodelled distilleries were starting to be reduced. Sir Albert included a small curling pond in the layout and he tried to mask the mandatory tall chimney by rendering it as a giant whisky bottle, but there were problems in constructing it and the idea was abandoned.

There are four pairs of stills, each with a purifier to lighten the spirit. The malt used to make Tormore is lightly peated and the whisky is matured principally in ex-Bourbon casks.

A time-capsule in the shape of a pot-still was buried in the forecourt of the distillery, the intention being to open it in the year 2060. It contains assorted data about whisky and Scotland for future industrial archaeologists including a history of the clans, the names of the Tormore staff in 1960 and samples of barley, local water, peat and cask staves. The excavators should have some glasses handy too since there is a tregnum of Long John, the owners’ blended whisky brand, for them to sample.

Tormore has finesse and a certain, straight nobility to its personality. It is subtle, nutty and has a light, but velvety, texture. It understates all the way yet stays on well at the end. Long John bottle it at 10 years and 40/43% vol. and independent versions are scarce. Not surprisingly Tormore is used in the Long John Blends.