Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
Introduction – Out of our Heads
1: These Drugs of Subtle Virtue
The Land Rover: a paean
Great Wee Roads: a digression
2: Does not Rhyme with ‘Outlay’
Pronunciation: a word
Once upon a time: distilling as cottage industry
Distillery aesthetics: a highly partial overview
Childhood: a sentimental detour
3: Exploding Custard Factories
Whisky: the how-to bit
Notes: a note
4: To Jura
Willy’s Definitive Dram Definition
The Toby’s Party/The Balcony Scene story
5: The Heart of the Water
The midge: microscopic megascourge
Les and Iain’s Guide to Sensible Sailing
Loch Shiel: an appreciation, with reservations
Cask Strength
Drinking: you’d think it would be obvious
And that’s one of the good ones
6: WhiskyLandWorldVille!
Altitude problem
7: Break for Curry
Scotland: land of contrasts (not)
The Highlands: their identification and use
Highway the hard way: a road bore writes
8: Fear and Loathing in Glenlivet
The Jag: all the fruity flavour of yesteryear
Substances: the usual disclaimer
9: The Awemsys of Azshashoshz
Azshashoshz: that etymology in full
Head crash: talking on empty
McCartney: the case for madness
Ditto Brown: telling who your real friends are
10: Welcome to the Land of Heederum-Hawderum
Happy cars: in defence of anthropomorphism
What Happened to My Car
11: The Smell of a Full Scottish Breakfast in the Morning
How much? Nested digressions around Aussie wine
Writers: What Not to Say
Stop Press Handy Anti-Midge Tip
12: Porridge and Scottishness, Football and Fireworks
Fitba and the Greater Morality
13: Just the Whole Gantry, Then
Why Roger and I have mixed feelings about Brad
14: The Ends of the Country
Welcome to the Free World
Illegality: a thought experiment
Orkney: a Handy Hint on blending in
15: Tunnel Biking
Last rant before the end
Redman’s Blues
16: A Secret Still
Further Reading
Pronunciation Guide
Copyright
About the Author
Iain Banks was born in Scotland in 1954. He came to widespread public notice in 1984 with the publication of his first novel, The Wasp Factory. Since then he has gained enormous popular and critical acclaim with further works of fiction and science fiction. In 1993 he was acknowledged as one of the Best of Young British Writers. He lives in Fife, Scotland.
About the Book
Iain Banks is widely acknowledged as one of Britain’s greatest living writers, and as a Scotsman he knows something about whisky too. In Raw Spirit, Iain combines these two passions with a third, travel. Result: a unique journey around his native land: his goal, to find the perfect dram. And the perfect dram, surely, must be a single malt.
Along with a curious bunch of fellow travellers in a selection of cars, planes, ferries, trains, bikes and shoes, he journeys to remote shores and hidden glens, discovering the breathtaking and often inaccesible distilleries where tiny quantities of malt whisky are produced. He finds people engaged in centuries old tradition where eccentricity is the norm: it’s a journey of a thousand ‘cheers’ and subsequent wobbly walks, of unpronounceable place names and daft customs and superstitions. Will Banks prevail? It’s a tough job but as he puts it: ‘Someone’s got to do it, and I’m damn sure it’s going to be me.’
For Gary and Christiane
And to the memory of James Hale
Acknowledgements
This book really couldn’t have been written without the help of a lot of other people. I would like to thank my wife Ann, Oliver Johnson, John Jarrold, Toby and Harriet Roxburgh and everybody else at Ballivicar, Martin Gray, Les, Aileen and Eilidh McFarlane, Jim Brown, Dave McCartney, Ken MacLeod, Tom and Michelle Obasi, Roger Gray and Izabella, Mic Cheetham, Gary and Christiane Lloyd, Ray, Carole and Andrew Redman, Bruce, Yvonne, Ross and Amy Frater, Jenny and James Dewar, Andrew Greig and Lesley Glaister, my uncle Bob, everybody I met and talked to in the distilleries I visited – with particular appreciation going to all the managers and the long-suffering though invariably helpful tour guides who were prepared to answer my idiot questions – all at the Scotch Malt Whisky Society and, lastly and firstly, my parents.
Everything in here is true. Especially the bits I made up.
Introduction – Out of our Heads
‘BANKSIE, HI. WHAT you up to?’
‘Well, I’m going to be writing a book about whisky.’
‘You’re what?’
‘I’m going to be writing a book about whisky. I’ve been, umm, you know, commissioned. To write a book about it. About whisky. Malt whisky, actually.’
‘You’re writing a book about whisky?’
‘Yeah. It means I have to go all over Scotland, driving mostly, but taking other types of transport – ferries, planes, trains, that sort of thing – visiting distilleries and tasting malt whisky. With expenses, obviously.’
‘You serious?’
‘Course I’m serious!’
‘Really?’
‘Oh yeah.’
‘… Do you need any help with this?’
Beginning with something ending; in these perverse times this seems somehow appropriate. But first, a sort of mission statement:
This is a book more than nominally about single-malt whisky, about the art of making it and the pleasure to be had in consuming it. It is also, partly, about the business of selling and promoting the stuff, about the whisky industry in general, about drink in general, even about mood- or perception-altering substances in general. It’s not just about whisky, because drinking whisky is never about just drinking whisky; we’re social creatures and we tend to drink in a social context, with family, friends or just accomplices. Even if we resort to drinking alone, we drink with memories and ghosts.
It’s a book about the land and country I love, about Scotland and its people, its cities, towns and villages and the landscape around them. It isn’t going to be a book of detailed tasting notes – frankly I don’t have the nose, appearances being deceptive – though there will usually be a brief description of a whisky’s generally accepted character, and occasional attempts to describe a particularly favoured dram in a more personal manner where I think I can get away with it. It’s not a guide book to Scotland, either, though a few restaurants, hotels, cultural sites, scenic areas and tourist traps are bound to be mentioned.
I’m going to travel to the far north, to Caithness and Orkney; to Dumfries and Galloway, to Skye and Mull and Islay, to Speyside, Moray, Aberdeenshire, Perthshire, Argyll, Clydeside, Lothian and wherever else I can find distilleries. I’m not going to every single one (though I do intend to sample the wares of each, including some that are closed or no longer exist) because frankly they’re not all worth seeing once you’ve a general idea how distilleries work, and also because they’re not all set up to receive visitors and – after a few feet-finding, hand-holding pro-style tours at the start – I’m not looking for any special favours just because I’m writing a book.
It will – appropriately, given the subject matter – be a staggered tour; I’ll be taking in distilleries in clusters and individually over single weeks and day trips, returning to my home in North Queensferry in between (at least partly because I’m intending to buy a full bottle of as many single malts as I can, and, with about a hundred distilleries in Scotland, plus the closed ones, I’ll need to get back fairly frequently to off-load and free up some boot-space). North Queensferry – The Ferry, as we locals tend to call it – is where I lived until I was nine, and it’s been my home for the last thirteen or so years. I have family here, and it’s home, too, to a lot of memories. It’s my hub, my docking station, and I make no excuses for returning here to recharge.
Roads, cars (quite a lot of roads, and quite a lot of cars, come to think of it … and one motorbike) are going to feature heavily in the book, as well as ferries, trains and aircraft and any other forms of transport I can find which can be shackled into the narrative if there’s the even the least semblance of an excuse for it.
This is a search for the perfect dram, undertaken in the full knowledge that such a thing probably doesn’t exist. That doesn’t matter; it’s a quest, and any quest is at least partly its own point. And besides, you never know.
This book will, inevitably, be about me, my family and my friends too, especially those friends who have been persuaded – with, you may not be surprised to learn, no great deal of body-part manipulation involved – to take part in this project. As a natural result, old adventures – several of them involving no illegal activity whatsoever – and ancient anecdotes of dubious and disputed authenticity will be ruthlessly exhumed, exposed, exaggerated and exploited. This, let’s face it, is a book about one of the hardest of hard liquors and for all this Let’s be mature, I just drink it for the taste not the effect, honest, Two units a day only stuff … it is, basically, a legal, exclusive, relatively expensive but very pleasant way of getting out of your head.
And, talking about being out of our heads, this book can’t help being about the war. You know the one; the Iraq war, Gulf War II, This Time It’s Personal. My travels are starting just as the war begins, which makes it kind of hard to ignore, and, anyway, what’s happening around me as I make my way across Scotland, visiting distilleries, has to have some bearing on matters; I don’t intend to ignore the people or the places or the scenery or the weather around me as I make these journeys and I can’t ignore the political environment either, both at home and abroad. This is not as peripheral as it might sound in a book about whisky; the stuff, certainly as we know it, has always been up to its pretty little bottleneck in politics.
So. That ending at the beginning. Yesterday morning, on what was officially the first day of spring, my wife and I cut our passports in half and sent the remains to Mr Blair’s office in Downing Street.
1: These Drugs of Subtle Virtue
‘HIYA, BANKSIE! WRITTEN any good books lately?’
‘Not if you believe certain critics, but I’m going to be writing one about whisky.’
‘A book about whisky?’
‘Yeah. Malt whisky.’
‘You’re kiddin!’
‘Not as such.’
‘This mean you’re going to have to do the “R” word?’
‘The “R” word? Oh! Research? Yeah, basically. Goin to have to drive round Scotland, or, well, be driven round Scotland, take trains, ferries, planes and such, go to distilleries, taste whiskies, that sort of—’
‘And they’re going to pay you for this?’
‘They’ve already started.’
‘Right. I see. D’you need a hand?’
Friday the 21st of March 2003 is a good three-ferry day. It starts kind of weirdly; I get up very early and print up a load of A4 posters with your standard anti-war slogans: NO BLOOD FOR OIL, NOT IN MY NAME, and TONY BLIAR (my personal favourite, though probably not really all that effective). While those are printing I watch the breakfast news coverage of our bouncing, day-old war. I plaster the posters across the Land Rover: one in a transparent sleeve taped across the spare wheel on the rear door, six on the side windows. There’s even one on the sunroof, though I think I must have been getting a bit carried away by this stage; the only people ever likely to see that one are passing helicopter pilots and people who happen to be walking over motorway bridges as I drive below.
After I’ve taken the scissors to our passports, I compose a brief covering letter, send an email explaining why we’re doing what we’re doing to the Guardian’s letters page and head into Inverkeithing to send the passports’ remains via registered mail to 10 Downing Street.
I come home and say goodbye to Ann; I’ll be away almost a week on Islay. After that, though I’m supposed to be making for the west coast, I head into central Edinburgh and drive around for a bit, trying to show off my posters along Queensferry Road, Charlotte Square and George Street before crossing Princes Street and going up the Mound past the temporary Scottish Parliament building to the castle and down the Royal Mile, then back to Princes Street.
In the city centre, on this bright, fresh, sunny day – singularly inappropriate for my mood, but there you go, that’s the pathetic fallacy for you – a few people notice the posters and some of them nod or give a thumbs up; the people who disapprove just tend to look away. But most people don’t look in the first place. Maybe I should have used coloured sheets of A4, or even just printed the words in something other than black, however big the font and however starkly pointed the gesture seemed at the time. Maybe I should have honked my damn horn.
I head west, out past the airport for the M8 through Glasgow, to cross the Clyde from Gourock to Dunoon.
Looking down at the trucks and cars sitting on the open vehicle deck on the ferry, I can’t even see the poster on the Land Rover’s sunroof; it’s one of those stippled black glass sunroofs that just hinges up a little rather than slides right back, and because of the fine black mesh effect on the glass the writing on the poster is only visible from directly above.
I stand in the sunlight, listening to the cries of the wheeling gulls as I drink a Styrofoam cup of tea and munch on a soggy, microwaved shell pie. I watch the depressingly decrepit remains of what used to be the modestly majestic Gourock Pier fall astern to be replaced by the arse-out aspect of the old tenements whose more respectable fronts face out into the main street on the far side. A glitter of windscreens in the seafront car park where a few guys stand with fishing rods, then the outdoor swimming pool and the rising slope of pleasant Victorian sandstone villas and early and late twentieth-century bungalows. I look around, at the canted streets, budding trees and whin-covered slopes, crowned by the folly on top of Tower Hill to the east, at the hills and mountains to the north and west, at the broad river, disappearing to a bright horizon in the south.
I used to live here, in Gourock. I used to work there, on the pier.
When I was young, from the age of about ten into my mid-teens, I’d lie awake at night in the summer in my bedroom high above the bay and the great curve of Gourock pier. Each fair night, in those warm months, I’d hear, through a cracked open window, the sound of a distant engine, puttering quietly away from the quayside a half-mile or so away. It came from one of the dozen or so ferries and steamers which always tied up there during the summer season.
It was the end of the Clyde’s golden age, when not that many people had cars and a lot of Glaswegians still took day trips and whole two-week holidays doon the watter, to resorts like Largs, Dunoon and Rothesay. I worked on the pier – catching mooring ropes and hoisting gangways, mostly – for a couple of summers while I was at University in the early seventies, along with a couple of full-time pier porters and one or two old school pals from Gourock High. In retrospect, I feel privileged to have been there, witnessing the end of an era. We caught the ropes off the Waverley – the world’s last seagoing paddle steamer, and still to be found thudding and splashing its way round the seaside resorts of Britain during the summer – and we watched the newfangled hovercraft come roaring up the beach near the Pilots’ Station at the downstream end of the pier, spitting stones from under its skirts like bullets and generally making a nuisance of itself. As I say, the Waverley’s still hanging on in there, but the hovercraft never really caught on; some eras come and go almost before you realise they’ve started.
Now all the great steamers are gone and just the car ferries survive; there are a few small boats running across the Clyde to Helensburgh and Kilcreggan, and the odd booze cruise – sometimes on the Waverley if it’s on the Clyde – to somewhere further afield, but that’s your lot, and many of the old piers are crumbling away. Even Gourock pier, home to the Dunoon ferries, is mostly a ruin. The trains stop outside, further down the platforms instead of running on into the long galleried curve of the serried glass roof, most of which has been demolished, and even the pier’s surface has disappeared once you go beyond the car ferry’s ro-ro ramp; all that’s left are the concrete foundations which used to support the wood and tarmac above.
It all looks a bit like somebody’s mouth just after they’ve had most of their teeth removed. I think if you’d never seen the place before you’d find it ugly just on first principles, but for somebody like me, remembering how handsome it used to look, it’s saddening too.
I hear there are plans to redevelop the whole seafront in Gourock and – always providing it’s not just the usual excuse for developers to cram the maximum number of tiny flats into the one space with minimal facilities – it can’t happen soon enough.
Public space/private space. I cheer myself up, partially, by gazing at the Defender.
The Land Rover: a paean.
Ah, the Land Rover. It is, to give its full title, a Land Rover Defender 110 County Station Wagon Td5. It’s the particularly agricultural-looking model of the Land Rover stable, the ugly one in a family not noted for being overburdened with outrageously good looks in the first place. It has straight up-and-down sides and flat-plane glass all round (except for the wee curved windows set into the edge of the roof which are for looking up at mountains, allegedly). Engine sounds like a bucket of bolts in a tumble drier.
And, for some strange reason, I love this vehicle.
I never thought this would happen. I am a petrol-head, I confess. I like cars, I like motorbikes, I’m pretty fond of most modes of transport but I especially love stuff I can drive myself, because I just plain enjoy driving. My favourite fairground ride was always, and is still, the dodgems, for that very reason; you are – at least marginally – in control. Once I accepted that going the wrong way round and trying to hit as many people as possible – while exciting – was against the rules and promptly got you thrown out, I played it the other way round, trying to have as few collisions as possible; this was slightly less exciting, but much more satisfying. (The attraction of the modern extreme theme-park ride, where the competition amongst the designers seems to be to discover who can terrify the captive customer the most in the shortest time, almost entirely escapes me).
I strongly suspect that if I still lived in the south-east of England I wouldn’t enjoy driving so much – or I’d do a lot of track-day stuff – but because I’m lucky enough to live where I want, in Scotland, and Scotland, away from the central belt (indeed still in places within it) is full of great driving roads, I have a deeply full and fulfilled driving life and a rather splendid ongoing relationship with my vehicles of choice and the roads I use them on.
So what am I doing driving a three-tonne diesel device with the aerodynamics of a scaled-up half-brick and apparently officially classed as a bus? And not just driving it, but really getting a kick out of driving it? I mean, this thing is trapped in the sixties: no air conditioning, no central locking, not even electric windows, and as for air bags: Ha! Air bags? Air bags? Defenders aren’t especially soothing and pleasant places to be when they’re the right way up and the road ahead is smooth and straight; you weren’t seriously expecting to have a crash in comfort, were you?
What on earth do I see in this motorised Portakabin, this crude, noisy, rattly, stilt-tyred throwback with a comedy heating system that takes twenty minutes from cold to produce the first slight, damp hint of just-about-above-ambient-temperature air from its wheezing vents, whose turning circle is rivalled for tightness by your average canal narrow boat, whose front seat belts are cunningly sited so that they naturally fall into a position where they jam the door when you close it and whose aerodynamics are bettered by most motor homes and several bungalows? What can be the attraction?
Well, for one thing, the Land Rover has been chipped; something called a Stage Two Conversion has upped its horse power by 50 per cent, replacing – or at least reprogramming – the original engine management chip and fitting a beefier turbo (the ‘T’ in Td5 stands for ‘Turbo’, and it’s a five-cylinder diesel engine).
This does not exactly transform the Land Rover into a Ferrari, but it does mean you can keep up with normal traffic and can tackle long motorway inclines without the ignominy of having to slow and change down from top gear (it has five forward gears, but could use a sixth). Keeping the original gears means that you do tend to have to whisk through them pretty quickly on the way up – there aren’t many cars where you can comfortably change up to top gear at 40, even while going uphill – and the thing does feel a bit overrevved at motorway speeds. Still, there are useful peaks of acceleration to be found. You can sweep past startled slower drivers and caravans in the Land Rover, too, in other words; you just have to remember to slow down for the bends.
And you can do things to them; customise them, fit what is, in effect, chunky Landy jewellery to them, like ladders up the back, wading snorkels up the front, vehicle-long roof-racks, foot-plates on the wings so you can stand on them without scratching them, dinner-plate-sized driving lights, rear spotlights, front towing hitches (they pretty much all have rear towing hitches). There’s even stuff you can do yourself if you’re not utterly mechanically incompetent; I took off its four wee spring-loaded side-steps all by myself and replaced them with beefy-looking running boards over a year ago and they still haven’t fallen off yet. On the inside, the long-wheelbase ones in particular let you stow vast quantities of junk in them. This is a vehicle with almost no conventional cubby holes or storage bins to speak of; what it has instead is a ludicrous number of nooks and crannies, once you start looking for them, mostly behind and under its many, many seats.
And you can fit a winch, the better to extricate yourself from awkward ditch-involving situations where even your low-ratio, differential-locked four-wheel drive and mud-plugging tyres won’t get you out of your sticky predicament. Or so I’m told. Personally, I’ve never used the winch for that, but it has come in handy for boat-pulling-out duties and once got our old Drascombe Lugger (that’s a boat, honest, not rhyming slang) onto the trailer and then the trailer out of the sea in circumstances probably no other vehicle but a tractor would have prevailed in.
The only trouble with all the ironmongery up front is that you’re making an already deeply pedestrian-unfriendly vehicle even more lethal. Of all the things on the road you don’t want to walk out in front of, a tooled-up Defender must figure pretty near the top of the list. The first thing you’ll hit – no, let me correct that; the first thing that will hit you – is an industrial-looking winch capable of hauling five tonnes or so attached with extreme rigidity to a beefed-up bumper you could hang a lifeboat off which is in turn bolted to an exceptionally sturdy steel ladder chassis which is attached to everything else. There is no give there, anywhere.
(‘Does this thing have crumple zones?’
‘Yes. They’re called other cars.’)
In the Defender’s defence, all I can say is that, realising all this, you do tend to drive even more carefully, especially in towns, given the sort of mess you could make of other people or lesser vehicles if you hit one.
The impressive view is useful here. Being so high up gives you a much better idea of what’s going on between and beyond parked cars and, on the open road, helps with planning overtaking manoeuvres. The Defender’s windscreen starts about where most cars’ roofs top out and from a Defender – especially one like ours, fitted with tall 750 series tyres which would hardly look out of place on a tractor – you even get to look down on Range Rover drivers. And walls. You and your passengers get to look over walls and hedges and fences; even a totally familiar route opens up the first time you drive it in one of these beasts.
Other Defender advantages: they’re hard to lose. Take your average car into a crowded supermarket car park, forget exactly where you left it and you can spend ages searching for the thing. A Defender is different; as you push your trolley out of the supermarket’s front doors you can easily spot a Defender because it’s the object blocking out the sun in the near, middle or far distance, depending. And, talking about supermarket trolleys, Defenders laugh in the face of those savage despoilers of metallic-finish car bodywork. Honestly; you can still feel deeply proud of and even attached to the thing, but you just stop caring about dings, dents and scratches.
In fact, a Defender doesn’t really look quite right until it’s got a few dents in its aluminium panels (Defenders look somehow distinctly embarrassed when they’re all clean and gleaming, too, and as for the alloy wheels you sometimes see them fitted with … dearie me). Plus the high floor – at hip-height on me, and I’m just over six feet – is perfect for loading heavy stuff, much more spine- and disc-friendly than a low car boot, however commodious.
And, with a little experience, you can throw Defenders about to a surprising degree; they lean a lot and you’re kept very aware indeed that you’re driving something over two metres tall and only five feet wide, but, to some degree, they can be hustled. You can even get the tyres to squeal, though such larks do tend to alarm one’s passengers and as a result are very much not recommended. They are also very much not recommended because that squealing noise from the rubber bits generally means you are a frighteningly small speed increment away from executing a series of spectator-spectacular but incumbent-injurious rolls-cum-somersaults immediately prior to becoming an embedded part, or parts, of the nearby scenery.
Last advantage. This really only affects people in London for now, but if I read the rules correctly, you can drive a Land Rover like mine into the central charging zone of London without having to pay the congestion charge. I’m not saying you should, of course, but I think in theory you could.
This is because a 110 County Station Wagon of this vintage has at least ten passenger seats. In theory it has eleven, believe it or not, but that includes the central seat in the front right beside the driver, where your passenger basically gets sexually assaulted every time an even-numbered gear is selected. Most people replace this effectively useless so-called seat with a cubby box for storing handy Landy stuff. As a result of this bizarre proliferation of seats and seat belts, the vehicle is effectively classed as a bus, and while it does mean that you face the added expense of an MOT from year one of ownership, not year three, this would easily be outweighed for Londoners by the benefits of even just a couple of weeks’ free driving into the city centre.
Still a fine, bright, sunny day. Not warm, but mild, even on the water. The ferry shoulders its way through the knee-high waves; Gourock’s drawn-out southern limits draw away and I walk to the other side of the boat to watch Dunoon and Argyll come closer.
What the hell am I doing here?
It all started a few months ago, with my agent. The way things are supposed to when you’re a professional, after all. I was sitting at home in North Queensferry reading the paper and minding my own business on a cool October day when the phone rang.
‘Hello?’
‘Banksie. It’s Mic. I may have something for you.’
My agent is called Mic Cheetham; she’s one of the best, kindest, nicest people I’ve ever met, but that’s in civilian mode; as an agent she has the great and invaluable merit of treating the authors she represents like her cubs. She’s the tigress, and you don’t get between her and them, or even think about doing anything unpleasant to them, unless you want to be professionally mauled. Mic is a very good friend but when she’s in full-on agent mode I’m just mainly glad that she’s on my side. What was Wellington’s remark about his troops? ‘I don’t know what effect they’ll have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.’ Something like that.
Anyway, Mic knows through years of experience and a deep tolerance of my congenital laziness that at least 95 per cent of the proposals that people contact her with concerning spiffing projects they want me to be part of she can either say No to without even asking me – though she’ll always mention it later – or promise to pass on but with the warning that there’s relatively little hope that I’m actually going to say Yes.
And if Mic says she might have something for me, it must be a proposal worth thinking about. The last time she sounded like this I ended up driving a Formula One car round the Magny-Cours circuit in deepest France for Car magazine and having a great time (with reservations; I discovered I’m really a pretty rubbish track driver).
‘Uh-huh?’ I said, successfully containing my excitement.
‘How do you fancy being driven round every distillery in Scotland in a taxi and drinking lots of whisky? And then writing a book about it? For a not insubstantial sum. What d’you think? Eh? Hmm? Interested?’
I was so excited I think I took my feet off the desk.
I thought quickly (no, really). ‘Can I drive the taxi?’
‘Then you can’t drink.’
‘I’ll do the drinking later.’
‘Then I don’t see why not.’
‘Why a taxi anyway?’
‘I think they’re going for the incongruity factor; a black cab round the Highlands, puttering through the misty glens beneath the fearsome peaks, that sort of thing.’
‘These people are from London, aren’t they?’
‘Where else? Plus they thought you might share some witty repartee with a garrulous Glasgow cabbie.’
‘So they don’t know me; good, good …’
‘Anyway, Banksie, what do you think?’
‘Can we ditch the taxi? I mean, they’re fine in cities, but some of these distilleries are hundreds of miles away in the middle of nowhere.’
‘What do you propose to do? Walk?’
‘No, I’ll just use my own wheels. I’ll drive myself. To drink. Ha!’
‘So you’d be alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then where’s the witty repartee?’
‘Maybe I can get some of my pals to come along and help with the driving and the tasting and the repartee side of things. Some of my friends are quite witty. Well, they’re always insulting me. That’s the same thing, isn’t it?’
‘Of course it is, my dear.’
‘… Hmm. And we are talking expenses included here, right? Petrol, hotels? Umm … More petrol?’
‘Of course.’
‘And you really think they’ll fall – they’ll agree to this?’
You can hear somebody smile over the phone sometimes, just by the quality of their voice. ‘Leave it with me.’
‘Brilliant! I’ll do it!’
Which is why I find myself standing on the deck of this ferry, heading for sunny Dunoon, about to start the research phase of – gee! – my first non-fiction book. This next week on Islay should be fun if I don’t let the war get me down. And then there’s Jura, of course; I want to get across to Jura this time, to visit the distillery there and maybe get to see Orwell’s old house near the northern tip, and even – just possibly – finally see the Corryvrecken, the great tidal whirlpool between the north of Jura and the south of Scarba which I’ve heard about and seen some footage of (and mentioned in an earlier book or two) but always wanted to experience for myself. I mean; a whirlpool! One so ferocious you can hear it from miles away! How cool is that?
From Dunoon along the coast road – past the peaceful-again Holy Loch where the old US Polaris subs had their floating dock and support ships – to the first of the Great Wee Roads we’re going to encounter in this book. Officially it’s called the B836 but I’m really bad at recalling road numbers so to me it’s filed in my head as the Great Wee Road To The Left Just Outside Dunoon Before You Get To The Younger’s Botanical Gardens That Takes You Towards The Kyles Of Bute, The Colintraive Ferry For Bute, Tighnabruich And The Ferry For Tarbert. Or something like that.
At the head of Loch Striven I pass a field filled with huge dark brown wooden poles lying on the grass in the hazy sunlight. They look like oversize telephone poles, but must be due to carry power lines. The smell of creosote fills the Land Rover’s cabin. Sometime round about here I realise I’m going to miss the next ferry to Tarbert, where I’ve been hoping to drop in on some old friends – and thus complete a clean sweep of ex-editors this weekend – so I take a detour to Otter Ferry via a precipitous wee road curling over the hills towards Loch Fyne.
Great Wee Roads: a digression.
A Great Wee Road in my terminology just means a small road that isn’t a main route and which is fun to drive. Often it will be a short cut or at least an alternative route to the main road. It will virtually never be quicker than the main-road route but it will be a pleasure to drive, perhaps partly because it has less traffic, partly because it goes through lots of beautiful scenery and perhaps because it has lots of flowing curves, sudden dips, challenging hills and/or fast straights (though GWRs rarely have many of those). A GWR can be extremely slow – often way below the legal limit – and still be enormous fun, it can even be a single-track road, quite busy with traffic and so somewhat frustrating, and yet still be a hoot, and some roads only really become GWRs when it’s raining and you have to slow down.
Anyway, that single-lane-with-passing-places route over to Otter Ferry – snaking up some deciduously wooded slopes towards the broad flat tops of the low hills and their close-ranked bristles of pines – is definitely a GWR.
By the side of Loch Fyne I head north again and back down Glendaurel, finally having to press on once more as I’ve ever so slightly underestimated the time required – again – and so end up gunning the Defender up the long curving slopes towards the viewpoint looking out over the Kyles of Bute (this is one of the best views in Argyll, maybe one of the great views of Scotland; a vast, opening delta of ragged, joining lochs, flung arcs of islets and low-hilled island disappearing into the distance).
This must be the first time – certainly the first time in decent weather – I haven’t stopped to take in that great sweep of view. The Land Rover tackles the hill fast in top gear, leaning mightily on the bends but still seat-of-the-pants secure; it feels good, but I’m annoyed at myself for not being able to spare the view more than a glance as I whiz by the car park at the summit.
Getting on to the ferry from Portavadie to Tarbert is a bit easier than it used to be; last time I was here you had to reverse onto the boat, which must have been fun if you were towing a caravan. Back then, a few years ago now, my car was the only vehicle on the ferry, which felt kind of romantic somehow. I was on the way to meet an ex-girlfriend for lunch; a strictly platonic visit, but, still, there was a certain poignancy there.
A year or so later the same ferry figured at the start of the first episode of the TV adaptation of The Crow Road, with young Joe McFadden playing the central character, Prentice McHoan, standing all alone on the deck, coming back to his family home for a funeral. I remember watching that first episode on a pre-transmission video and being very nervous – The Crow Road was the first book I’d ever had successfully adapted for the screen – and when I saw that first image, and made the connection with the ferry journey I’d taken a year or so earlier, I had one of those It’s-going-to-be-all-right Good Omen feelings that I’m not sure atheists like me are really allowed to have (but appreciate now and again all the same), and relaxed, deciding that probably this was going to be a good adaptation. Which, I’m happy to report, it was.
For the whole journey I’ve been listening to a mixture of the radio and some ancient select tapes; the radio for the latest news on the war and the old compilation tapes because I’m still feeling a bit emotional about the war, I suppose, and want something nostalgic and comforting to listen to. I’ve brought my Apple iPod too, along with the adaptor that lets it communicate with the Land Rover’s tape player (CDs are far too hi-tech for Defenders of this vintage; I counted myself lucky it hadn’t arrived with a seventies-stylee eight-track) but I haven’t bothered connecting it.
So my listening consists of a mixture of breathless embedded journalists telling me how much progress the US and British troops are making, dashing across the sands towards Baghdad and Basra, and old songs from the decade before the first Gulf War.
Tarbert to Kennacraig, where the ferry for Islay leaves, takes ten minutes. The voyage to Port Ellen lasts a couple of hours, the late afternoon becoming night. On the boat I sit in the bar reading the paper, soaking up the war, then read some of the whisky books I’ve brought along as research. I drink a couple of pints. Usually if I’m going to be driving later I don’t drink alcohol but if I’m on a long ferry journey with a very short drive at the far end I’ll allow myself up to the legal limit. Two pints of Export is safe enough, though it’s also heading up towards my other limit, when I start thinking, Hmm, quite fancy a fag.
Blame the dope. When I first started smoking the occasional joint it was always resin crumbled into tobacco – I don’t think I saw grass for about ten years after my first J – and later, especially during what you might call binge smoking sessions, when my pals and I were arguably too wrecked to roll another number or load just one more bong, it was just sociable as well as a hell of a lot easier to have a straight, smoke an ordinary cigarette. So as a result I have a sort of sporadic, part-time addiction, and have decided that yes, that old piece of poisonous propaganda my generation were peddled is actually true, cannabis does lead you on to stronger and much, much more lethal drugs. Well, one, anyway; specifically, to tobacco, if that’s what you mix it with. Ah, the joys of cretinous prohibition (… we’ll be returning to this theme later. Just in case you’re under any illusions).
But it’s odd; when I’m sober I hate the smell of cigarette smoke. I’m the kind of person who tells people smoking on non-smoking trains to put their fag out. (Thinks: Hmm, I believe the technical term for this is ‘hypocrite’? No?) I even do this on the last train, when people are often drunk and seem to think that makes it okay to smoke, and I’ve been known to do this even when they’re bigger than I am or there’s more of them.
However. Just let me sink a few pints or a few whiskies or a few whatever and – especially if I’m with people who smoke – I start thinking that a cigarette would just round the buzz off nicely. Usually I manage to resist. Sometimes, very drunk, feeling extremely socially relaxed, I succumb, and start cadging fags off my pals.
And, while I may not pay for my habit in financial terms – apart from the occasions when I feel I’ve smoked too many of somebody else’s fags, when I’ll go and buy them a packet … though they’re never my fags, you understand; they’re my friends’, because I don’t really smoke, see? – I do pay. Extensive research has revealed that my hangovers are consistently between 50 and 100 per cent worse the next morning if I’ve been smoking, compared to the control group of Standard Bad Hangovers And Their Usual Indicators (number and type of painkillers required, extent of sighing and quiet moaning, ability to string more than three words together, depth of desire to consume large greasy breakfasts, etc.).
On the ferry I also have a Cal Mac chicken curry and chips with lots of tomato sauce. This is, I realise, your basic poor/horribilist cuisine, and almost as awful a confession as owning up to smoking, but it’s become something of a tradition for me on Caledonian MacBrayne ships, especially on the five-hour journey from Oban to Barra, where Ann and I spend a week or so most years.
We’re talking the sort of curry you used to get in school, like chip shop curry or a Chinese restaurant curry; curry like they almost don’t do it anywhere else any more (and for good reasons); frequently all glutinous with too much cornflour and with the chicken meat often boiled and simmered down to fibres, the whole thing coloured a suspicious-looking dark, mustardy yellow, doubtless loaded with sodium and E-numbers. Plus the chips are rarely better than okay. However, as a strange sort of slumming-it treat, it works for me. I actually look forward to one of these when we’re planning trips to Barra, and I was genuinely pleased to find that they had the same dish on the Islay service.
On the Barra trip I always know to take a dumpy little bottle of tomato sauce with me so I have a decent helping with which to slather the chips, but even without that and being forced to use a handful of those annoying little sachets instead, it is a joy. Albeit a guilty one.
Of course, when I get to where I’m going I find that my hosts have cooked some fresh-off-the-farm’s-own-fields lamb with gleaming new potatoes and a selection of succulent vegetables, and I feel really guilty about the mass-production time warp pseudo curry I’ve just eaten on the boat, but that’s just the way it goes. Anyway, I have a couple of glasses of wine, and then another couple of glasses of wine … and then a second dinner partly out of politeness but partly also because it all just looks and smells so good.
And that, I strongly suspect, is the start of a process which sees me put on nearly a stone in weight during the laughingly entitled ‘research’ phase of this book.
2: Does not Rhyme with ‘Outlay’
‘BANKSIE, WHAT’S THIS about you writing a book about whisky?’
‘It’s true. They’re going to pay me to drive round Scotland, or be driven round Scotland … whatever, visiting distilleries and drinking whisky.’
‘So it wasn’t a joke?’
‘No, not a joke.’
‘And you’re sure it’s not a dream you’ve, like, mistaken for reality?’
‘Definitely. I have a signed contract. Want to hear it rustle?’
‘Just wanted to be sure. So, you’ll be wanting help with this …’
The first signpost you see coming off the ferry at Port Ellen on Islay has only two words on it; it points right to ARDBEG and left to BOWMORE. Brilliant, I thought; a road sign that is made up 100 per cent of distillery names; a proclamation that you are on an island where the making of whisky is absolutely integral to the place itself, where directions are defined by drink!
This was, patently, a great place to start the distillery tour. I love Islay whiskies. There are seven working distilleries on the island – pretty good given that there are less than three thousand people on the place – each producing their own distinctive whiskies, and I have a deep affection for all of them. I have favourites amongst those seven basic malts, but they’re basically all in my top twenty Scotches. This may, I suppose, change over the course of the next two or three months as I visit distilleries throughout Scotland and taste whiskies I’ve only ever heard of before (and in a few cases, never heard of before), but I doubt it’ll make that much difference; it’s hard to believe there are tastes as dramatic as the Islay malts that have somehow escaped the attention of me and my pals.
The reason I’ve taken to them so much is, I suppose, that Islay whiskies are just generally bursting with flavour. Actually, make that bursting with flavours, plural. I came to the realisation many years ago that I like big, strong, even aggressive tastes: cheddars so sharp they make your eyes water, curries in general, though preferably fairly hot, Thai meals, garlic-heavy Middle-Eastern mezes, chilli-saturated Mexican dishes, hugely fruity Ozzie wines, and thumpingly, almost aggressively flavoured whiskies (for the record the things I don’t like are: Brussels sprouts, marzipan, cherries and Amaretto. Plus one other category of foodstuff that we’ll come to later … it’s a bit embarrassing).
Distinguishing between the different styles of Islays, the most obvious micro-area lies in the south, on the short stretch of coast – extravagantly frayed, wildly indented, profusely hummocked and multifariously cragged – facing south-east towards the Mull of Kintyre.
The three southern coastal whiskies of Islay – with Laphroaig in particular providing the most radical example – constitute what is almost a different drink from whisky. The distinction is that sharp; I know several people who like their drink, love their whisky – be it the stuff you’d serve to somebody who’s severely overstayed their welcome or the special reserve you’d only bring out for the most special of special occasions – who hate Ardbeg, Lagavulin and Laphroaig with a vengeance. Of the three, they usually especially hate Lagavulin and Laphroaig, and, out of that pair, reserve their most intense aversion for Laphroaig.
* * *
Pronunciation: a word.
In the paragraph above there are, in order of appearance – and coincidentally alphabetical order – one that’s fairly self-evident (Ardbeg), one that’s not as tricky as it might look to the untutored eye at first sight (Lagavulin), and one definitely iffy example (Laphroaig). Here’s the trick: there’s a pronunciation guide at the back of this book, after the bibliography.
I’ve even underlined the relevant bit to emphasise in each name because that might just make all the difference between success and failure when you’re trying to order a specific dram from a hard-of-hearing or just plain awkward bar person, especially late on when you might be drunk and slurring your words. Don’t say I’m not good to you.
And can we please deal with the difference between ‘lock’–which is either a thing found on a door or a way of raising or lowering a boat on a canal – and ‘loch’, which is generally the name given to a body of water in Scotland which in England would be termed a lake? The ‘ch’ sound (as in loch, broch, and indeed och) is a soft, sibilant noise made at the back of the mouth with the tongue drawn back and upwards. It sounds a bit like distant surf, if you want to get romantic about it. What it does not sound like is ‘ck’.
Well, unless we’re talking about either of the occurrences in Bruichladdich. Or Glen Garioch in Aberdeenshire.
And let’s not even mention the Lake of Menteith.
One last thing; back when I lived in London, in the early eighties, an ad agency was running a campaign for the Duty-Free shops at Heathrow and one of the posters I’d see in the tube stations showed a bottle of (if I recall correctly) Laphroaig, with the byline ‘Islay for less outlay’. This implies the two relevant words rhyme, and is wrong. The first bit of the island’s name sounds like ‘Isle’ and the end is just ‘la’. That simple. So let’s not have any more of these gratuitous cross-border mispronunciations.
Now, those southern Islays. Some people can’t stand the taste of the three but keep trying every now and again, wishing that they could appreciate these strange, fierce, acerbic whiskies the way other people obviously do, others are just perplexed that anybody would want to drink such bizarre-tasting stuff but leave it at that, while others seem to hate them the way you’d despise an especially loathsome politician. Their most intense regret, bewilderment or venom, respectively, is generally reserved for Laphroaig, as the most intensely different – even wilfully incongruous – example of Extreme Whisky.
The comparison I think is most apt in the wider field of drink is probably Chateau Musar. This is one of my favourite red wines in the world, but it is profoundly different from other reds, especially other reds generally considered to be worth a place on a decent wine list. It is spicy. In fact, it’s spicy in a way that is utterly different from what a wine taster will normally mean when they apply the word ‘spicy’ to any other fine wine. It’s a bit like the difference between somebody having red hair and somebody wearing a red wig the colour of a British postbox; the word ‘red’ is the same, but once you know the context, once you know what sort of red is being talked about, the image you have of the person being described alters drastically.
So with Chateau Musar; it’s so different from any other fine red wine it practically needs a separate category of drink to define it (in Michael Broadbent’s Vintage Wine, an authoritative and astoundingly comprehensive overview of 50 years of wine-tasting, it merits a categorisation all of its own).
as