Islay Whisky Academy

This article was originally published on the old Islay Whisky Academy website in April 2024. It was written by IWA Kinship Host, Neill Murphy, in an attempt to summarise the whirlwind of emotions stirred up by another magical week in Islay…

The Islay Whisky Academy Residential Diploma for Spring 2024 has wrapped. I can’t quite believe it. Those six days spent on the famous whisky isle felt like a whirlwind. A hurricane of information and experience, of new friendships and new perspectives and of whiskies so good, you could spend a lifetime trying to describe them.

This wasn’t my first time attending the Academy. In fact, this was the sixth time I’ve gone along to help out behind the scenes, but somehow I still find it difficult to make sense of it all. Things seem to happen in Islay that don’t happen anywhere else. It feels like this Diploma takes place in another dimension, where the normal laws of the universe don’t apply.

I feel almost shell-shocked, and there’s a whole tumble of emotions going on. There’s sadness at leaving Islay, but happiness at coming home to Glasgow. There’s joy from reuniting with my family, but sorrow that I’ve bid farewell to the group that were my constant companions over six intense days.

I feel an inability to fully process the events of the week. There was so much to take in, and each segment felt crucially important to understand, for a dozen different reasons. I don’t think the experience can be properly described or defined using any terminology I possess.

Preparations for the trip always seem to take an age. For weeks, even months, I exchanged messages with the guests who planned to join us. I gathered bottles, wrote notes and made plans. Sometimes it felt like the week would never come. Then, one Sunday, I stepped from the MV Finlaggan and was swept off my feet by some unseen force that didn’t put me down again until I reached the mainland the following Saturday.

The return trip was a smooth sailing, but I stepped from the ferry with legs like jelly and nerves jangling, as though I’d just come off the world’s most intense roller coaster. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but each Diploma experience leaves me reeling.

Maybe I don’t want to get used to it. Maybe it would be a terrible mistake to ever take such a beautiful thing for granted. Besides, no Academy experience is ever the same. The lectures, the distilleries, the tastings… everything evolves from course to course, and the island’s famously temperamental climate creates a new and unique atmosphere every day, complete with its own bespoke mood lighting.

Then there’s the students. People from all over the world attend the diploma, and their characters and their personalities shape each event. The Islay Whisky Academy prides itself on providing guests with new perspectives that deepen their understanding and enjoyment of Scotch whisky, but we, in turn, gain from them. Through their questions and their insights, we enhance our own thinking and the week shifts and evolves around them.

The Islay Whisky Academy concept starts (and ends) with Rachel MacNeill, a Colonsay-born resident of Islay. Rachel was writing about whisky for women and women in whisky before it was on most people’s radar. She sees and understands the world uniquely, and it is that maverick spirit that produced the Academy. Rachel’s understanding and appreciation for the old ways, her love for the technical detail that makes Scotch, and her ability to relay information in new and colourful ways are key elements in the diploma.

You may think then that there’s no mystery. You might think that Rachel’s unique world-view and formidable skill set, placed in a land of rich history and staggering natural beauty, with distilleries in abundance and eager whisky lovers from all over the world, would guarantee a good time, and maybe you’d be right, but there’s something else.

Even for me, a man who considers himself very sceptically minded, there’s an indefinable magic here that I can’t quite fathom. It feels like we are being generously rewarded for learning and appreciating whisky in a way that’s respectful of the land and the culture that birthed it.

In this most recent trip, we were, as always, blessed with a brilliant bunch of students. They came from Poland, from England, from Guernsey, from the US, the Netherlands and Germany. They came from different cultures, different backgrounds, different careers, different belief systems, but they came with an open mind and a desire to learn and have fun. I hope they feel they achieved that. I know I did.

I also know that I feel wiser and richer for having met them and hope I continue to know them for many years to come. The same goes for all the students from previous courses. I remember each one and am thankful for the time I’ve been able to spend with them, even if I often greedily wish for more.

None of this helps to process the events of the Spring 2024 Residential Diploma. I haven’t even mentioned our trip to the museum in Port Charlotte, or the visits to Kilchoman, Port Ellen, Ardnahoe, Laphroaig and Bunnahabhain, or the whisky tastings, or the traditional storytelling, or the Highland Dancers, or the lectures and presentations, or the peat cutting, or the opera singing (!) but maybe expressing my feelings of gratitude for the experience is the first step to understanding the whirlwind.

Or maybe, no matter how hard I try, I’ll never quite grasp it fully, and maybe that’s OK. Maybe I don’t need to understand the magic, maybe I just need to feel it and acknowledge it. Our Celtic ancestors believed in the Otherworld, a sort of afterlife that presented as a realm of everlasting youth, beauty, health, abundance and joy. It was said to lie somewhere in the western sea. I think I’ve just been.

Islay Whisky Academy Residential Diploma is now booking for October 2026 and March 2027.