Dalmore sits on the banks of the Cromarty Firth in Alness, twenty miles north of Inverness, looking across the water to the Black Isle. The name comes from the same place the distillery does: dail mhor, the big meadow, the flat fertile ground beside the firth. The distillery was established in 1839 by the entrepreneur Alexander Matheson, then sold in 1867 to brothers Andrew and Charles Mackenzie, who gave it the symbol it still wears - the twelve-pointed Royal Stag emblem on every bottle. The Mackenzies kept the distillery in family hands for nearly a century. The water for distillation is drawn from the River Averon, which flows past Alness from Loch Morie deep in the Northern Highlands, lending the spirit the smooth, floral character that qualifies it as a Highland malt rather than a Speyside or an Islay.

Smooth operations were broken in 1917 when the Royal Navy chose the firth next to the distillery as a site for manufacturing deep-sea mines. The arrangement was a wartime expedient that nobody at Dalmore had asked for, and on a day in 1920 it ended badly. A mine detonated, an explosion and fire wrecked much of the distillery, and Andrew Mackenzie began legal proceedings against the Navy. The case dragged on for over half a decade and worked its way up through the courts until it reached the House of Lords - a remarkable journey for what began as a wartime industrial accident on a remote Scottish firth. The distillery was rebuilt. The Mackenzies kept running it. They held on until 1960, when one of Dalmore's largest customers, the blender Whyte and Mackay, took over the business outright. Today Whyte and Mackay belongs to Emperador Inc, a drinks conglomerate based in the Philippines.

Dalmore does some things differently from most Highland distilleries. The spirit stills carry horizontal external shell-and-tube condensers, an arrangement that mirrors the old worm pipes that once lay in the burn outside the stillhouse - long copper coils submerged in cool water to condense the vapour back to liquid. Modern condensers usually run vertically; Dalmore's lie flat, paying quiet homage to the older method. The water from the Averon, the horizontal condensers, the long maturation in a mix of bourbon and sherry casks, and the cool firth air all contribute to a spirit Dalmore's master distiller Richard Paterson has spent decades shaping into the brand's distinctive heavy, sweet, marmalade-and-Christmas-cake style.

On 15 April 2005, a bartender named Denis Barthe at the Ascot Bar in Surrey sold a single bottle of 62-year-old Dalmore for £32,000. It was a blend of five casks from 1868, 1878, 1922, 1926, and 1939, and only twelve bottles had ever been produced. That was the moment Dalmore became a name in the world of luxury collecting as much as in the world of whisky. In 2010 the distillery produced Dalmore Trinitas, three bottles in total, the first two of which sold for £100,000 each; the third went at Harrods in 2011 for £120,000. In 2013 came the Paterson Collection, twelve bottles assembled in homage to the master distiller, offered at Harrods for £987,500 - a single set of whisky retailing for the price of a London flat. The casks beside the firth keep aging. The next set of headlines is presumably already in oak.