Raw Spirit (8 page)

This is where a stiff whisky really does make all the difference. No matter how fucked-up the world may get, a good dram will make it at least slightly more bearable.

And A-flippin-men to that.

Our first proper distillery visit – doing the tour, talking to people, checking out the visitors’ shop, me assiduously taking notes – is on the Monday.

I take John to the airport and meet Oliver the Editor off the wee plane that will take John on the first leg of his long journey back south.

Oliver the Editor – Oliver Johnson – is a big, friendly, comfortable-seeming kind of guy. As well as both being writers and having a certain interest in whisky, we’ve definitely bonded over two more important, character-defining interests; curry, and maps. Oliver is a fellow cartophile. We’ve met a couple of times before. The first time was to seal the deal on the book in The Vaults, HQ of the estimable Scottish Malt Whisky Society. That’s where we started, anyway, with quite
a
lot of single malts. Then we took in a bar across the road where I had entirely the worst whisky I’ve ever tasted (it was some sort of home-made blend made specifically for a regular in the bar, allegedly), whereupon we ended up in the Omar Khayyam, my favourite Edinburgh restaurant.

The second time we met was a month or two later in the middle of February when we went with Martin the Photographer and a video film-maker to Dalwhinnie, to make a short promotional video for the book to be shown to the Random House sales force at the next sales conference. This also let Martin take some photographs, one of which ended up on the cover of the hardback.

Dalwhinnie was in a sense the first distillery visit of the book. (I’d been round exactly two other distilleries in my life; Highland Park in Orkney and Ardbeg on Islay.)

As an introduction to the whole business, Dalwhinnie could hardly have been bettered. We met up with some extremely helpful people from Diageo, the company that owns the place (Diageo – formerly United Distillers and Vintners – own 30 other distilleries in Scotland, giving them nearly a third of the total and making them the biggest players in the market). We were treated to some very good and extremely welcome soup on a very cold day, and given a comprehensive tour round the distillery itself and the Visitor Centre. Plus they let us clamber all over the place, taking photos from the roof and all over the grounds.

Dalwhinnie is the highest distillery in Scotland, lying at over a thousand feet above sea level. It was originally called Speyside, which is technically not as daft as it sounds given that the Spey passes about five miles due north of the distillery. It’s just that the area is so not what people mean when they talk of Speyside. I confess I hadn’t realised the Spey rises so far west and south of Speyside proper. In all the years I’ve been swinging along the road near Catlodge it had never crossed my mind that the river briefly looping around on the plain near Laggan was the glorious Spey.

As a distillery Dalwhinnie looks very proud, distinct and smart, standing on a swell of ground beyond the village, its
pagoda
towers rising above the surrounding trees. The day we visited there were piles of snow in the car park higher than my head, but the staff were still doing their best to make the place look presentable. Indoors there are two big onion-shaped stills and outdoors there are a couple of condensers, making use of the cool air. They had a really neat-looking and colourful program running on their computer in the still house, displaying and controlling all the valves, pipes and containers the raw materials for the whisky have to negotiate on their way through the process, which – computer and remote control apart – is pretty standard whisky-tech. Traditional, in other words.

The whisky itself represents the Highlands in Diageo’s Classic Malts range, so is pretty well known these days. The 15-year-old has a light, new-mown-grass kind of smell to it, very green and scenty. There is a hint of peat and some sweetness, but it’s the dry, herby notes that hold sway, making Dalwhinnie a light, zesty kind of dram, something you could put in place of a fino sherry at the start of a meal, or take, diluted perhaps, instead of a dry white wine. Not really that similar to most Speysides, then, and practically on another planet compared to an Islay dram.

After saying goodbye to John at the airport there’s a quick dash to Toby and Harriet’s farm so Oliver can dump his bags then he, Ann and I zip round to Bruichladdich. We’re running a little late and it’s on this journey, on a cheekily tightening bend sculpted into the dunes north of Bowmore, that I discover the Land Rover’s ability to set its tyres a-squealing. My passengers forbear to make similar noises, but I suspect it’s a close-run thing. We proceed a little more circumspectly after this and arrive safely at Bruichladdich, which faces across Loch Indaal towards distant Bowmore.

Bruichladdich is a distillery on the way back. It was closed between 1996 and 2001 and has anyway tended to be one of the Islay also-rans. Most malt drinkers would know it’s an Islay even if they might not be certain how to pronounce it (with Bruichladdich and Bunnahabhain, luck has handily put
the
two arguably most tongue-twisting whiskies on the one island, and even had them start with the same letter). Your average malt tippler might also have a vague recollection of a light blue bottle label and a rather un-Islay-ish lack of peat on the nose, but that would be about it for anybody who wasn’t already a committed fan of the stuff.

This could all be about to change; there’s a new guy in charge called Duncan McGillvray who has a reputation as an adept marketeer, there are new – and very interesting-sounding – expressions on the way, new technologies and old traditions are blending harmonically and there’s a general air of optimism and energy about the place. Maybe it helped that we visited on another sparklingly sunny day, though I think the sunniness was more in people’s disposition. It also matters a great deal to the people we talk to – and should probably matter a fair bit to us consumers – that the distillery is owned not by some giant impersonal multinational, but by a consortium of people who live on Islay itself, so any money made here is likely, largely, to stay.

I get out my little Black n’ Red alphabetically indexed notebook and prepare to start Covering The Story.

Notes: a note
.

Taking notes; this is not like me. I usually just remember stuff, or very occasionally jot briefly in my diary if I happen to have it on me, or scribble something in the margin of my telephone list or CD list. Long ago in my wallet I used to carry a tiny notebook which I’d made myself; it was smaller than some stamps I’ve seen – I can write very small – but that was back when I was about twenty or so and having loads of ideas all the time; now I’m officially a boring old bastard of nearly 50 I don’t have the same number of ideas these days and so have no pressing need to have a notebook always to hand (mind you, quality not quantity; a lot of those so-called ideas back then were just god-awful puns).

What I should really do, of course, is use a Personal Digital
Assistant;
one of those tiny hand-held computerette thingies you can write onto and use as sketch pads, diaries, GPS displays and god-knows-what else.

And I do have one, I just don’t use it. It’s a Palm Tungsten T which I was going to use to write this book on as Rog, Brad and I trundled our way through the forest and across the taiga on our way to Vladivostok on the Trans-Siberian. I had thought of taking my laptop but I’d heard things get nicked a lot on the train so I preferred something I could carry on me at all times.

I’d coveted the full-size but collapsible keyboard that connects to these things since I’d seen fellow skiffy writer Charles Stross using one in an Edinburgh pub a couple of years ago; in fact I nearly bought one of the keyboards just on aesthetic principle, to own as an object, because they are simply so damn neat, even though I didn’t particularly want one of the computers themselves at the time. The keyboards fold down to a size barely any larger than the hand-held itself, and then unfold once and then twice, with bits gliding and snicking as a little sprung-loaded cradle clips up to support the tiny computer. Beautiful. Nowadays, as well as these fold-outs, you can buy keyboards made from flexible plastics which you can roll up, but even if they’re lighter and better, it’s the jewellery-like intricacy of the fold-out that intrigues me.

Anyway, I have one of these things but I haven’t yet started carrying it around; I have a bad habit of buying glitzy bits of new technology in a fit of retail feeding-frenzy excitement and then losing interest in it for subsequent months or even years, by which time it’s usually obsolete.

Later Rog borrows the hand-held/folding keyboard set-up to write stuff while he does the Trans-Siberian all by himself (Brad, too, has had to drop out).

We’re shown round Bruichladdich by David Barr, the Bottlings Operations Manager, a pleasant guy with various tattoos on his arms from his time in the merchant marine. They’re proud of their bottling plant at Bruichladdich. It’s the only one on the island – the other distilleries ship their malts to the mainland to be bottled – and uses local water to bring
the
whisky to the right strength. Before all that, of course, it’s the mash-tun/washback/still house standard tour with a bit of the history of the place thrown in.

Now, obviously I’m not going to detail in this book all the different tours round all the different distilleries, because that would be boring. You probably do not really need to know, for example, that Bruichladdich currently produces 300,000 bottles per year, or that the temperature of the second of the three waters introduced into the mash tun is 79 to 80 degrees centigrade, or that the distillery dog is called Tiny, all of which – along with much, much more – I duly noted down on my tour.

I’ve given a rough guide to whisky-making above, and it doesn’t vary much between distilleries. Where it does and I think it’s worthy of note, I’ll let you know; otherwise, just make the relevant assumptions. The stuff I’m looking for as I make these journeys is the interesting bits and pieces that always crop up during every tour, especially if you ask questions and keep your eyes open and senses engaged; the grace notes in a familiar theme.

What I find intriguing is stuff like the fact that now they’ve got their new bottling plant, next on the list of improvements at Bruichladdich is a Whisky Academy they intend to open in the summer in an old de-bonded warehouse, to teach people about whisky in depth, or the fact that a family of seven dolphins seem to have adopted the place, showing up at the same time each year in the bay across the road from the distillery, or that it has the tallest stills on the island (taller stills give the vapours inside a harder job getting out to the bit where they’ll be condensed and so tend to produce lighter spirits), or that what they call their computer in the mash room is a blackboard … and yet they have webcams set up at various sites throughout the distillery so you can watch what’s going on, live, from anywhere in the world.

It later turns out, as I discover through a
Guardian
article in early June, that Bruichladdich only got the broadband connection that makes the webcams possible due to a mistake by British Telecom. The contract was signed and legally binding before BT realised that the distillery wasn’t where they
thought
it was. So the outgoing signals have to be bounced from Islay to Northern Ireland – admittedly only about 20 or so miles away – then away back over to Edinburgh before disappearing into the Web.

It’s this mixture of tradition and newfangled that’s going to keep cropping up over the next few months and (nearly) one hundred distilleries; very old tech and very new tech existing together and helping, in the end, to make and promote a drink that has itself changed and evolved over the centuries, sometimes with the grain of change in society, sometimes not.

Evolution, in the way the stuff is made, marketed and appreciated and indeed in the taste of the finished product itself, helps keep whisky interesting. At one of the earliest stages of the process at Bruichladdich we’re invited to taste some of the heavily peated malt they intend to use for a future expression. This comes as a surprise because the Laddie – as it’s sometimes known – is not a very peaty whisky at all, certainly not compared to the reeking giants of the island’s south coast.

The peatiness of malt is measured by the parts per million (p.p.m.) of the aromatic chemical phenol it contains, and modern maltsers are able to produce accurately and consistently pretty much any degree of peatiness a distiller requests. Of the Islay whiskies, Bunnahabhain has the least peat at 5 p.p.m., while Ardbeg has the most; 50 p.p.m. In between come Bowmore with 20, Port Ellen (as was) with 25, Caol Ila with 30, Laphroaig with between 35 to 40 and Lagavulin with 40. Bruichladdich is usually the second least peated whisky, with 8 p.p.m. of phenol in the mix, but the malt we’re given a few grains of to chew on is absolutely loaded; it has ten times as much as they’d usually use here; fully 80 p.p.m. It’ll be a while before this monster of a dram thumps onto a bar or counter near any of us, but – always assuming that it doesn’t overwhelm the seaside freshness Bruichladdich is famous for, but works with it and adds to it instead – it should be a mighty piece of work, worth waiting for.

While we’ve been here, a couple of guys and a digger have been tearing up a large part of the central courtyard
Bruichladdich
is built around; demolishing old foundations in preparation for putting down new ones, allowing glimpses of old brick-lined drains and sections of ancient wall. They’re still doing this when we leave, late, to head for the south of the island, where we’re due to meet Toby for lunch and have a look round Ardbeg.

If Bruichladdich feels like a place still very much in development, Ardbeg exudes an air of having already achieved the sort of transition the Laddie is aiming for. They produce a lot more whisky here (I’m not going to mention the bottles-per-whatever much more, honest); 35,000 bottles per week, or over six times what Bruichladdich does. This is the result of a lot of rebuilding, both physically and, more to the point, promotionally. Quiet through most of the eighties, Ardbeg is now owned by Glenmorangie, who have built the Ardbeg brand into something accepted (once more) as being worth mentioning in the same breath as Laphroaig and Lagavulin. They spend 35 per cent of their budget on advertising and promotion – most companies spend about sixteen per cent – and this has to make a huge difference. This all makes it sound a bit too corporate, though; the feeling you get when you’re in the place is that it’s been lovingly restored to and beyond past glory.