John McKenzie is a farmer, a green energy advocate, and a commercial helicopter pilot - the combination of biographies that explains why GlenWyvis exists at all. In 2015 he decided that Dingwall, which once had two distilleries and had not had one for decades, should have one again. The catch was that he did not want it to belong to a multinational, and he did not want it to run on diesel. So in 2016 he launched a crowdfunding campaign, and in 77 days more than 2,000 people - more than half of them from the same corner of the Highlands - pledged around 2.6 million pounds to build a distillery they would own together. On 30 November 2017, St Andrew's Day, the doors opened on the world's first community-owned distillery, on a windswept slope above the burgh of Dingwall, running on hydro, wind, solar and woodchip biomass.
The name reaches back. There were two earlier distilleries in this corner of Easter Ross, both gone for decades by the time McKenzie started planning his new one. The Ben Wyvis distillery operated in Dingwall itself in the nineteenth century. The Glenskiach distillery sat over in Evanton, on the other side of the firth. Both went silent. GlenWyvis took its name from the great mountain that towers over Dingwall - Ben Wyvis, a thousand-metre Munro that catches the first snow of every Highland winter and holds it well into spring. The name is a deliberate claim to inheritance: the new distillery wanted to be understood as a revival of something old, not the importation of something new. The fact that its energy mix would have astonished any Victorian distiller did not get in the way of the storytelling.
The mechanical novelty of GlenWyvis is that it runs on its own renewable kit. Hydro power from local watercourses. Wind from the turbines that dot the surrounding hills. Solar for what little southern Scotland sun the Black Isle and the Cromarty Firth can offer. A woodchip biomass boiler handles the heat. There is no fossil fuel in the mash. For a craft that has burned coal and then heavy fuel oil for two centuries, this is a quiet kind of revolution - the distillery's most distinctive feature is something the visitor cannot taste. The site sits on uphill ground a few miles outside Dingwall. There is no visitor centre. The buildings are working buildings. The whisky and gin go out to shareholders and to the trade, not to bus tours.
After a second share offer the company moved from roughly 2,000 to more than 3,000 shareholders. They are individuals - locals, expatriate Scots, whisky enthusiasts from around the world - rather than institutional investors. The model is co-operative in spirit and limited-company in structure. In 2018 production began under master distiller Duncan Tait. Within a year more than 500 casks were resting on the site. By 2018-19 GlenWyvis was making 39,248 litres of whisky and 3,576 litres of its Premium GoodWill gin. The arithmetic of community ownership is awkward - distilleries take years before they can sell aged whisky, and the gin is what pays the bills in the meantime - but the model has held together. In October 2019 a fire broke out in the woodchip store. Damage was limited. The boiler survived. Production continued.
The awards arrived quickly. In 2019 GlenWyvis took Best Newcomer at the Scottish Gin Awards. The World Gin Awards gave the GoodWill Gin a Bronze that year and a Gold in 2020. The International Wine and Spirit Competition awarded the Christmas GoodWill Spiced Gin a Gold in 2019, and Silvers in 2020 for the Cask Matured Goodwill Quercus Alba Gin and the GlenWyvis New Make Spirit. During the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020 the distillery pivoted online: master chef Gary Maclean ran a live cookery demo built around the gin. By 2023 the range had grown to four gins, a new-make spirit, and two four-year-old single malt whiskies - the first proper releases of the whisky that will eventually be what GlenWyvis is judged on. The community-owned experiment had survived its early years. Whether the world's first community-owned distillery becomes the world's first of many is a question still being answered, one cask at a time.
GlenWyvis distillery sits at 57.6148°N, 4.4566°W, on rising ground a few miles north of central Dingwall in the shadow of Ben Wyvis. Inverness Airport (EGPE) lies about 19 miles south-southeast at Dalcross. From the air the distillery is a small cluster of working buildings on a hillside with wind turbines often visible in the surrounding country. Recommended viewing altitude 3,000-5,000 ft AGL. Ben Wyvis (1,046 m) dominates the western horizon and offers an immediate visual anchor; the Cromarty Firth opens out to the east. Watch for low cloud spilling off Ben Wyvis - the mountain catches and holds weather long after the firth has cleared.