Ireland
Ireland's whiskey renaissance is rewriting the spirit's history. A country that barely had a handful of working distilleries a decade ago now has over forty, from Dublin's cobblestoned liberties to remote Atlantic coastline operations reviving traditions that predate Scotch by centuries. Midleton in County Cork produces the country's most celebrated expressions under one roof — Jameson, Redbreast, Green Spot, Midleton Very Rare — while Bushmills in the north has been distilling since 1608 and craft producers experiment with Irish peat, native barley, and bog oak cask finishes that taste like nowhere else. Ireland is also the Ryder Cup at Adare Manor, championship golf at Ballybunion and Lahinch, the Cliffs of Moher, literary Dublin, and traditional music sessions in pubs where the musicians outnumber the tourists. Whiskey provides the access; Ireland's coastline, culture, cuisine, and warmth define the journey.
CULINARY ARTS
Ireland's food revolution has transformed a country once overlooked into one of Europe's most exciting culinary destinations. Atlantic oysters from Galway Bay, wild salmon from the River Moy, butter so rich it's become a global export, and farmhouse cheeses from small producers across Cork and Kerry that rival anything from France. Dublin's Michelin scene continues to grow while the real discoveries happen in smaller coastal towns — seafood restaurants in Kinsale where the catch arrives before the lunch service, smokehouse visits along the Wild Atlantic Way, and farmhouse kitchens where soda bread is still baked daily in cast iron. Traditional Irish stew and boxty take on new meaning when you're eating them in the places they originated, paired with a pot still whiskey from the distillery down the road.
CULTURE & LEISURE
hampionship golf at Ballybunion, Lahinch, Portmarnock, and The K Club — links courses carved along Atlantic cliffs where the wind is as much a part of the game as the greens, private literary Dublin tours walking the streets where Joyce set Ulysses, where Yeats drank, and where Wilde held court before the world turned on him, Cliffs of Moher rising seven hundred feet above the Atlantic and the Ring of Kerry's coastal drives through landscapes that have barely changed in centuries, traditional music sessions in pubs where the musicians show up because they always have and the best nights are never advertised, Trinity College and private Book of Kells viewings, horseback riding through Connemara countryside, and falconry on castle estates where the sport has been practiced since the Norman invasion.
ARTISAN TRADITIONS
Waterford Crystal factory tours where master cutters shape molten glass into some of the world's most recognized crystal using techniques brought to Ireland in the 18th century, Aran sweater knitting demonstrations on the islands where each family's stitch pattern was unique enough to identify a fisherman lost at sea, traditional Irish music instrument making — bodhrán drums stretched over ashwood frames, uilleann pipes requiring years of handcrafting from a single maker, copper pot still craftsmanship at distilleries where the shape and size of each still is considered as sacred as any recipe, Belleek Pottery workshops in County Fermanagh producing paper-thin porcelain since 1857, and bookbinding and manuscript illumination in the tradition of the Book of Kells — where monks created what some consider the most beautiful book ever made.