Bar/fly: Moniack Castle, Inverness

The world's most northerly winery, Moniack Castle, is 10km from Inverness. Illustration / NZ Herald

In a castle in Scotland, Kevin Pilley quaffs mead in the search of a new coiffure.

"If you suddenly start growing a thatch of thick hair you know who to thank," said Johnny, pouring me a glass of 2011 Moniack Castle medium-dry white silver birch wine. "It's meant to be a cure for baldness. Although Prince Albert might disagree."

I sipped rather than shampooed. I drank rather than lathered. "It tastes a little like Tio Pepe sherry," I said, affecting the connoisseur. My host smiled. "Silver birch wine has always tasted a bit woody to me."

I was sampling the wares of the world's most northerly winery, in Moniack Castle, 10km from Inverness. It was my first degustation of unique Scottish country wines.

"Moniack means bog," continued Johnny. "So we are in the bog castle and you are drinking bog-standard wine. The castle was built in 1580 and is of no strategic importance whatsoever. One of its previous occupants, the 11th Lord Lovat was the last peer to be executed for treason."

I tried to listen but I was distracted, trying to listen and sense if there was any activity on the top of my head yet. I had a further glass.

We had visited the winery's filtering and fermenting rooms and been to the bottling area, which is the castle's old laundry room. I had been introduced to the jelly-labelling lady. Moniack Castle also produces a range of jams and jellies including hawthorn and sloeberry as well as juniper chutney, wild garlic sauce and a whisky and red currant haggis sauce. Everything is hand-picked, hand-bottled and hand-labelled. The winery was started by the clan Fraser.

"Silver birch wine is our flagship brand and best-seller," my tippling instructor told me, letting me sample the castle's excellent plum wine. "We produce 50,000 bottles a year. It won second prize in a competition in France when someone took off the label and entered it into a homemade wine section. 'Betula pendula' wine has been made in Scotland for centuries and is still made in Russia. But not commercially. That's why we are so unique. It's mentioned in Queen Victoria's diaries. She had it made for her at Balmoral. Wine made from the sap of silver birch was Prince Albert's favourite tipple."

Another cork popped. "Our raspberry wine mixed with soda makes a great Scottish summertime sangria." I was beginning to glow and felt my face taking on the hue of the "Hunting Chisholm" tartan.

"We've had some glorious failures, like gorse wine and meadowsweet. Our laird's mead is popular. An ancient drink made from fermented honey." It gave me an immediate buzz.

But I had developed a taste for the birch.

Every March, in the woods near Cannick, the silver birch sap is tapped from the trees. A small harmless hole is drilled into the bark and a plastic tube drains off the clear liquid into five gallon drums. One tree fills the drum in two or three days. Fifteen months or so later the wine is available in Moniack Castle's tasting room. Trees are tapped every two years and must have a diameter of more than 30cm.

Johnny enthused about Inverness-shire. You can visit the battlefield at Culloden, play golf at Royal Dornoch or Nairn, visit lots of weaving exhibitions and factories as well as Britain's most active earthquake zone at the Great Glen. Glenmorangie offers tastings at its distillery in Tain as does "the perilously drinkable" Glen Ord whisky. But you go to Moniack castle to taste real history.

"Beautiful," I slurred to myself, conscious now that my complexion had passed from the colour of "Graham of Menteith" tartan to that of the deep red of my hosts. As I nursed my mead, I heard how newly-weds were given hydromel "to calm anxieties and appease the gods and to give them courage to penetrate the mysteries of the flesh and exorcise the demons of love".

My genial host gave me a bottle of Scottish sloe liqueur to have as a digestif with dinner.

We shook hands and I promised to return to celebrate the castle's second growth. And, hopefully, my own.