Cotswolds Distillery

The Cotswolds kept pubs and breweries for centuries before it kept a distillery. That changed in 2014, when Daniel Szor, a London currency-fund manager who had taken a weekend house near Shipston-on-Stour, looked at the barley growing on the hills around him and decided to make whisky from it. The distillery he built at Stourton, on the quiet edge of the range where Warwickshire begins, was the first to lay down single malt in these hills at any real scale.

The gin came first, while the spirit aged. Cotswolds Dry Gin was named the world's best London dry at the 2016 World Gin Awards, and the whisky followed it into the cabinet of medals: the signature single malt judged the best English whisky of 2018, the Founders' Choice taking double gold in San Francisco. A hundred thousand people a year now find their way down the lane to watch it being made.

What ends up in the bottle is an English single malt that no longer apologises for not being Scottish. It is poured now at tables that know what they are pouring, and set down without a word, which is close to the highest thing that can be said of a drink in this country.

A fine whisky and a quiet county suit each other. One is made slowly, in the dark, and is the better for the years no one watched it. The other has always worked the same way.