The Whisky Store, co-founded by husband-and-wife duo Chua Khoon Hui and Joyce Ng, is one of Singapore’s pioneering whisky retailers of independent labels. Their company TSH Corporation also runs several bars in Singapore including Quaich Bar Collector at Grand Copthorne Waterfront Hotel Singapore; The Other Room at Singapore Marriott Tang Plaza Hotel and Signature Reserve at Fullerton Hotel.
Since 2005, they have been making trips to Scotland to deepen their ties to the distilleries and bottlers that supply their business with rare and interesting bottles. It is this carefully forged network that has made it possible for us to gain access to this exemplary example of Scottish hospitality.
I soon learned that Dylan was not just an absentee lord of the manor – in fact he used to visit the estate with his brother for a few weeks every year but had decided to sell it because he was no longer using the space. So of course, I had to spend some time in a drawing room where Dylan had left a baby grand piano behind. I sat on the piano bench, hoping his creative genius would spark long forgotten muscle memory and inspire me to tap out a tune but obviously that did not turn out well.
Never mind, whisky awaits.
In the grand dining room, our hosts, master distiller Robert Fleming from Tomintoul Distillery and master blender Iain Forteath for both of Angus Dundee Distillers brands – Tomintoul and Glencadam – were eager to share some of their most interesting bottles.
Over a multi-course dinner of delights featuring local delicacies such as roast Scottish salmon and chicken Balmoral where chicken breasts were stuffed with haggis, we savoured too many drams to count. That included Tomintoul’s Five Decades Speyside-Glenlivet Single Malt Scotch Whisky, which Fleming had blended from casks across each of the five decades of the distillery’s history.
