Wild, Wild Country: Whisky, Speyside, and the changing climate

The winters of my childhood were brutal, bitter things, drifted high with snow, nestled as we were at the foot of the Cairngorms. This place that I call home is Morayshire, known to tourists as Whisky Country. All of my childhood memories are tinged in the golden light of the drink.

I’m thinking now of Hogmanay. My brother and I curled up in our pyjamas in front of the stove, watching the Edinburgh street party on the telly. It was close to midnight when we heard a heavy thud outside. When we pulled open the back door, we found our neighbour straddling a horse, a bottle of whisky held triumphantly aloft. “My car was snowed in,” he told us after we’d wrapped him in a blanket and poured him a dram, “but it takes more than a little snow to stop me first-footing”.

A Way of Life

In this way, whisky shaped my childhood long before I ever drank it. In Speyside, whisky is less a drink than a way of life. Over half of Scotland’s whisky is produced within a 25-mile radius of Dufftown, and this is reflected in the landscape – endless barley fields, pagoda roofs, and warehouses scattered across valleys.

A key part of this landscape is the River Spey. When I was young, my father took me fishing along its banks. He and his friends would cast their lines and wait. 'For salmon', they told our Mums, but really they were waiting on the Clearic Man – a warehouse worker who would siphon off a little unaged spirit and sell it in plastic bottles along the river, the whisky travelling the same paths as the fish.

Barley, too, shaped the land. Single malts have to be made from malted barley, so in Speyside, barley is the dominant crop. Summer for the farming children stretched on just a little longer than it did for the rest of us, as they were needed to help with the harvest. We loved that time of year, full of endless days and harvest dances. Tucked away in a bird-hide after one of those ceilidhs, I had my first taste of alcohol, a stolen sip of whisky from an unlabelled bottle. It burned, bright and violent, while around us the barley fields danced in the wind.

But soil is not meant for the same crop, year after year. Now the barley is stringy and sparse, the nutrients sucked from the soil as result of the same strains of barley being planted in the same fields year after year, needed for the whisky. This monoculture has left our fields unable to support the crop, and industry expert Simon Difford has reported that we now have to ship the barley in from England and Canada in order to keep up with the increasing demand.

Image: Phoebe Willison.

The rivers too are drying up. According to SEPA reports from 2025, last spring was the second driest the East of Scotland has experienced in the last century, with many distilleries closing due to water shortages. Whisky requires vast quantities of water – for mashing, for cooling, for cleaning. In a recent study, it was estimated that for a single litre of whisky, 46.9 litres of water are used, meaning that roughly 61 billion litres of water are used in whisky production each year. With increasingly hotter summers, it is not unusual to arrive at a familiar stretch of a river and find only a trickle.

We ship the water too. Glenfiddich distillery, for example, admitted in a recent article with Esquire that they load water in tankers down to Glasgow for bottling. The lorries thunder down the narrow roads, which are always littered with the victims of these black exhaust smoking beasts: badgers, foxes, pheasants. I used to go out with a stick and poke at the roadkill, wondering how many more corpses littered the whisky trail.

Changing Climate

We rarely connected these things. The distilleries provided work. They funded improvements, sponsored events, and supported the local economy; to question whisky was to question our community. So we ignored the cost – the thinning water, the poor harvests, the corpses in the ditches.

The warehouses that once relied on the steady rhythm of the Scottish climate have had to adapt. Warmer summers mean more whisky is lost to the so-called 'Angel’s Share', the spirit that evaporates through the wood of the cask. With changes to Scotland’s climate come changes to the processes that rely on it. Climate-controlled warehouses can be used to mitigate the amount of spirit lost to the angels, and so the valleys hum with cutting-edge HVAC systems.

“The whisky’s evaporating too quickly,” one warehouse worker told me. “It’s too hot for too long.”

So the solution is an artificial winter. 

Those cooling systems require energy. Energy produces emissions. Emissions warm the air. The loop closes in on itself; the more we do to preserve the spirit, the further we alter the climate that made it possible. In a press release from 2021, the Scottish government stated that the whisky industry produced around 530,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year.

We no longer get winters like the ones I remember. Snow rarely drifts high enough to block the roads. My neighbour no longer arrives on horseback at midnight, whisky raised against the storm. He comes by car, stepping from one heated box into another. There is no stamping of snow from boots, no red noses, no shock of cold air following him through the door.

And the whisky. The whisky is still there, of course. But it doesn’t seem to taste as sweet when the daffodils are blooming in December.

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Anna Comrie is an Edinburgh-based writer from Speyside. Although her first job was in a distillery, she now spends her time writing local histories and documenting her travels