Give New York-based Laila Gohar a dram of whisky and she is more likely to picture fully formed scenes than start ticking off citrus, vanilla, and smoke. It’s the kind of instinct that led Scotch whisky distiller Highland Park to Gohar for its latest expression of Between You and I, a 17-year-old single malt developed in conversation with the Egyptian-born artist.
Highland Park Master Whisky Maker Marc Watson sampled more than 80 casks before settling on a profile with notes of orange blossom, leather, vanilla, and spice, alongside the distillery’s characteristic gentle smoke. For Gohar, those flavors brought a series of places and memories to mind. “I don’t really separate the senses,” she tells Surface. “A flavor or a smell can immediately transport you somewhere.” Leather brought her to a museum in Cairo, orange blossom to an Andalusian courtyard, and vanilla to the slopes of a tropical volcano.
Courtesy of Highland Park…
For the Highland Park collaboration, these impulses meant giving illustrator Silja Goetz the moods and imagined settings that came to her while tasting the whisky, rather than a literal visual brief. Goetz then reinterpreted them in her own language. The harder part was figuring out how those images would live across the three-dimensional bottle and packaging, where they come together almost like a collage.
“I didn’t want to be overly prescriptive,” Gohar says. “It was much more interesting to see where she would take the ideas.” The same approach carries through to the inside of the box, where Gohar’s vignettes take the place of conventional tasting notes. Rather than telling the drinker exactly what to look for, they offer another way into the whisky. She sees it as a medium for memory and imagination, something that can send you somewhere that is entirely your own.
Courtesy of Highland Park…
That idea also connects to Gohar’s longstanding interest in the table. She thinks of it almost like a set, where food, objects, interiors, and people all contribute to the atmosphere. Her ideal setting for the whisky is similarly unfussy: poured neat, outdoors, in a garden or courtyard with close friends and family in the late afternoon. “I’m interested in the social side of things,” she says. “It’s about what happens when people gather around something.”
A flavor might call up a memory, a place, or an entirely imagined world. For Gohar, that is part of the point: the whisky gives you somewhere to start, and leaves the rest to your imagination.
