The earliest record of alcohol production at Morangie Farm dates to 1703 - a brewery using the Tarlogie Spring, which still feeds the distillery today. In the 1730s, a more permanent brewing operation was built. Then in 1843, William Matheson - a former distillery manager at nearby Balblair - bought the farm and converted the brewery to a whisky distillery. He fitted it with two secondhand gin stills, taller than ordinary whisky stills because gin makers wanted heavy reflux, and the unusual height stayed when Matheson switched to single malt. The Macdonald family took over and held the company for nearly ninety years. The name comes from the Gaelic *Gleann Mòr na Sìth*, vale of tranquillity, or possibly *Gleann Mór-innse*, vale of big meadows - the etymology is contested. The pronunciation, however, is not. Glen-MOR-angie, stress on the second syllable, rhyming with *orangey*.

For most of the twentieth century, the entire distilling operation - mash tun, wash backs, those vast stills, the cask filling room - was run by just sixteen workers. They worked year round, with breaks only for Christmas and scheduled maintenance shutdowns. The team became famous enough that the jazz fusion guitarist Allan Holdsworth named a 2000 album after them: *The Sixteen Men of Tain*. The water comes from the Tarlogie Springs in the hills above the distillery, hard from the limestone it passes through - one of the few sources in Scotland that is. The hard water carries minerals that subtly shape the final spirit, the way different terroirs shape wine.

Once the spirit comes off the still it goes into casks - and here Glenmorangie has built its modern reputation. Wood finishes were the company's signature innovation: aging in former bourbon casks first, then transferring to barrels that had held Port, sherry, Sauternes, or other wines for a final period. The bottlings carry names like Quinta Ruban (Port), Lasanta (sherry), and Nectar (Sauternes). One special edition, Cellar 13, comes only from the warehouse closest to the sea, where the maritime air is believed to affect the maturing whisky in distinctive ways. Glenmorangie has been the best-selling single malt in Scotland almost continuously since 1983 - around ten million bottles per year, six percent of the global single malt market. In 2004 the company was sold to Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy.

In the 1986 film *Highlander*, Connor MacLeod walks into a bar and orders a double Glenmorangie on the rocks. It is a small cameo, but it captured the distillery's positioning - Highland heritage, sword and dragon, a single malt to be sipped by an immortal Scot. The reality is somewhat less mythological. The bottling now happens at a purpose-built plant outside Edinburgh; the Glen Moray brand was sold off in 2008; the Sixteen Men of Tain have been joined by automation and new colleagues. But the stills remain in place, still the tallest in Scotland, still pushing the heavy compounds back down toward the wash. The shape of the apparatus settles the shape of the spirit, and that shape has not changed since Matheson installed his secondhand gin stills in 1843.