In a wood in Bridgend, tucked away off the road, there is a damp, stone monument encrusted in a vibrant orange lichen there is a grave. Scrape away the slab’s grass covering, and there is the engraved name: George Montgomery, Distiller at Octomore.

Octomore farm sits on a commanding position on a hill over looking the village of Port Charlotte near Bruichladdich. There are dramatic views over the whole island, away to the Northern Irish coast twenty-five miles away, around to the Paps of Jura. A peaceful place with a tragic story.

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Some great photographs of Port Charlotte village and distillery have come to light.

John Rucklidge posted on the internet some photos of Port Charlotte from around 1890 that were discovered in a house in Hexham, Northumberland.

The album belonged to Helen Orchard and the images were taken by William Miles (her father) who was the Customs & Excise officer at the Lochindaaal distillery.

Tantalizingly, some of the images show his children, including Helen, playing around Port Charlotte.

Helen still lives at Hexham in the North of England.

These are the DIY bottlings available exclusively to visitors to the distillery.

A valinch, possibly from a Spanish term, is the name applied to a large, copper pipette used to take cask samples from whisky barrels.

Our view is if you have made the effort to get here to Islay then you deserve something just a little extra special.

Valinchs are by definition only ever at cask strength, from a single barrel, and selected by Jim for individuality. Each Valinch released has it’s own label and title, usually to commemorate a specific event.

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Most Hebridean place names are derived from either the Gaelic or Norse language, and denote a precise geographical location or landmark.

Bruichladdich is usually translated rather poetically as ‘brae by the shore’, but this is a rather vague concept in the context of Loch Indaal and its environs.

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The original whisky regions are Highland, Lowland, Cambeltown and Islay. To this has been added, for convenience, Islands and Speyside.

They are merely C19 bureaucratic administrative areas for distilling licenses. They represent no more, no less, the concentration of distilling licences at that time.

They were invented when there were 22 distilleries on Islay, 32 in Campbeltown, and 30 in the Lowlands. Now there are 8, 3 and 2 respectively.

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Some people will always find the wide array of Bruichladdich bottlings confusing.

What is great choice to some, is a “clusterf%!k” to others, as one commentator suggested, a bewildering proliferation of one-off bottlings.

This is fair criticism.

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Bruichladdich distilled the world’s first ever whisky from biodynamic barley last year. Such is the extraordinary quality of the spirit that we are doing a second distillation - and it is double the size of the first one.

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Bruichladdich have been distilling a whisky that from an ancient cereal called Bere, to be bottled later this year, that may indicate a Viking origin for Scotch whisky.

The first recorded description of whisky production was in 1494 by Friar John Cor.

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Winston Churchill's detractors accuse him of having been an alcoholic. The evidence, however, contradicts that.

His daughter, Lady Soames, recalls that the "Papa Cocktail" was a smidgen of whisky covering the bottom of a tumbler, which was then filled with water and sipped throughout the morning. In his autobiography 'My Early Life', Churchill claimed he earned this habit as a young man in India and South Africa.  "The water being unfit to drink, one had to add whisky and, by dint of careful application I learned to like it."  Churchill remarked to those who took whisky neat, "you are not likely to live a long life if you drink it like that."

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Two rums on offer are from distilleries that were originally developed by Scots.  In 1790, it was believed that a third of all Europeans in the Caribbean - 6,000 people -  were Scots.

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