Why I rate Dalmore Distillery for having expensive tours

There’s no whisky in the reception room at the Dalmore distillery. When I visit in August 2026, it’s housing an art installation and a selection of books on loan from the V&A Dundee, with which it has an ongoing creative partnership. 

Dalmore certainly isn’t trying to trick you into thinking you’re somewhere you’re not. In the wall opposite the front door is a two-foot-wide imprint of the distillery’s 12-point stag emblem — it’s embedded in the wall, plaster built up around the outline.

Instead, what the lack of bottles in the entranceway says is: you can enjoy this space whether you care for whisky or not.

Reopening the doors (sort of)

Dalmore has recently undergone a substantial renovation, with parent company Whyte & Mackay closing the gates for more than two years and funnelling in a multi-million-pound investment. Its purpose was two-fold: to increase production capacity with the construction of a second stillhouse, and implement a radical redesign of its visitor experience.

Those who are lucky enough to have the time and means to travel around whisky distilleries will be familiar with how their tours typically work: an hour-long overview of what whisky is and how the distillery makes its whisky, rounded out with a tasting and a turn around the gift shop.

By this, I absolutely do not intend a blanket disparagement of the UK’s whisky tourism industry. The experience described above is a valuable one; the narrow scope casts a much wider net of appeal and helps frame whisky distilleries as a must-see attraction for visitors to an area. It democratises whisky, rendering barriers of age, gender, class and knowledge less relevant. The industry needs these tours. 

However, that doesn’t mean every distillery should offer one — and nor should people expect every distillery to provide one. If we are happy for the whiskies to be different, we should extend the same courtesy to how a distillery decides to present itself to us. (Industry professionals can be hard to please on this front; it feels some are on the hunt for a ‘Goldilocks’ tour, neither too populist nor too elitist, but without being sure where they’d draw either boundary.)

Guests, not visitors

Dalmore is clear on where the lines of its reimagined experience lie. Its tours are by appointment only and cost £250 per person. When measured against nearby distillery experiences, this looks steep. Classic tours at the Glenmorangie or Singleton of Glen Ord distilleries cost a tenth of that and can be booked online as simply as buying a cinema ticket.

But what does your £250 at Dalmore get you? Within reason, anything you want. A member of the brand home team, acting as concierge, will call in the run-up to your visit and ask what you’d like it to include. No set menus here — it’s all à la carte.

A distillery tour with the production staff? Cask samples in the warehouse? Lounging with bespoke Dalmore cocktails in the renovated maltings, now a prime entertaining space? Time to explore the remarkably rich Archive Room over pastries and coffee? A meal with a private chef in the lushly fitted new dining room, chased down with cigars on the terrace? All within the realms of possibility. (For comparison: Glen Ord’s premium Malt to Cask tour also costs £250 per person, but it’s a strictly on-the-rails experience, comprising a tour of the distillery and warehouse and a six-dram tasting.)

In a conversation about “luxury” a while back, someone explained to me how expectations around this term have shifted. It no longer signifies the most expensive thing you can buy, but the things you can’t. Premiumisation has been supplanted by personalisation. 

While you obviously can buy an experience at Dalmore, no two people will have the same one. And, returning to that neutral reception room, there’s also no expectation that drinking whisky will be the focal point.

I’m chatting about this concept with Steph Forsyth, Dalmore’s global communications manager, over lunch in that new dining room when she refutes my use of the term “visitors”. “We don’t have visitors, we have guests,” she corrects with an excited smile. Rather than a semantic idiosyncracy, this is a new prism through which to view the people who patronise the distillery. The passive “What will they purchase from us?” becomes an active, agency-fuelled “What do they want from us?”. The guest is at the centre of this experiential universe, not the brand.

Preserving difference

Have you noticed how a lot of cars have started to look the same? Similar monotone shells and sleek dashboards, a familiar slant to the headlights. In the pursuit of sales security, once-distinctive edges have been blurred. 

To me, Dalmore’s experience is a polite decline of that conformity. We shouldn’t overlook the advantages that enable this attitude (it’s an established name in Scotch whisky with global reach for its single malts and a comfortably premium price point), but Dalmore has chosen to build a guest experience which reflects that elevated status, rather than slouching to hide it. It hasn’t softened its edges.