by Iain Banks
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 – e
xtravagantly 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).
Chateau Musar is made by a man called Serge Hochar – son of Gaston, who started the enterprise – in circumstances which have, over the years, certainly – and frequently – merited the description ‘difficult’. When other wine makers talk about a difficult year they mean there was a late frost or a too-damp September; when Mr Hochar says it was a difficult year you suspect he means that there were landmines to remove from between the vines or that there was an unexpectedly high number of extremely brief, sudden and entirely unannounced visits from the Israeli Air Force. Chateau Musar is from Lebanon. Specifically, it is from the Bekaa valley, notorious over the decades as the location of training camps for terrorists/freedom fighters (the reader is invited to choose as appropriate to their dogma). Wags have been known to shake bottles of the stuff by their ear, claiming to be listening for the tell-tale chinking sound of shrapnel.
Despite all this, Mr Hochar has succeeded in producing a vintage every year apart from one, and not just producing any old harshly ropy but high-novelty-value gut-rot, either; Musar is in every sense a fine wine.
But very different; again, some people, solely through taste rather than prejudice, can’t stand the stuff. Just like Laphroaig it is sometimes referred to as an acquired taste, though I’m not sure about this. I suspect more people stick with their original reaction to both drinks rather than start out hating only to end up loving.
Whatever; Laphroaig in particular is a hell of drink, especially if you don’t like it. It’s oddly peaty (oddly because there’s much less peat involved in the making of it than in most whiskies we think of as peaty) and positively bursting with smells straight out of the medicine cabinet, the quayside, a road repair depot and even an industrial plant (mouthwash, disinfectant, iodine, cough sweets … actually make that cough sours … seaweed, tar, diesel, oil …). Pungent, no-holds-barred stuff, though arguably not quite as remorselessly astringent as it used to be.
I think the truth is that, as well as having changed somewhat over the years to a slightly mellower formulation, Laphroaig is just a very slow-maturing whisky; it still has enormous, restless, raw energy and character at an age when most other whiskies would be starting to take on too much of the character of the barrel they’ve been matured within, turning woody. Not this stuff. At ten years it’s ferocious, full of antagonistic flavours, sweet and sour and tarry, redolent of peat, pepper and burnt toffee. It shouldn’t all work together – and as I say, for some people, it never will – and yet it does, magnificently. Five years later it’s still powerful, though more balanced, slightly sweeter, less demanding, and deeper, while at 30 years it’s finally getting to the Hmm, just about perfect stage (apparently – I’ve never tasted Laphroaig this old; I’m relying on usually reliable sources here).
Lagavulin, barely a whisky-barrel’s throw away along the coast, is a close second on the in-your-faceness stakes, which was kind of the idea, as the guy who had the place built, Sir Peter Mackie, was trying to make a whisky like Laphroaig. What’s there on the site now is the result of a combination of three separate distilleries, themselves the distillation of about ten distinct bothies-with-stills which used to make spirit back in the pre-excise days when it was all just a cosy wee cottage industry and everybody was basically semi-pro.
Once upon a time: distilling as a cottage industry.
In the old days people made whisky because it was just part of the life of being a crofter (a croft being the Scottish term for a small farm). You grew barley, you harvested it, and what you couldn’t feed your family or your animals with, you could either sell, or make into whisky, which you could also use yourself, or sell. Turning barley into whisky was a good way of storing your surplus; barley goes mouldy in a damp climate. Whisky doesn’t.
To people like this, making beer or whisky from their crops was
as much part of their lives as sowing the seeds at the start of the season or bringing in the harvest at the end. To them the government was a distant entity with little day-to-day relevance to their lives; when, during the gradual commodification and commercial exploitation of whisky, the politicians decided that people would no longer be allowed to make their own whisky unless they did so on an industrial scale, and paid the government for the privilege, it must have seemed as outrageous to the crofters as if they were to be taxed for heating a kettle of water, or making soup. Little wonder the excise men, charged with policing these new and generally hated laws and bringing in the loot they would produce, were so despised, obstructed and vilified.
Lagavulin – made in pear-shaped stills which are so pear-shaped they look like they were deliberately modelled on pears – has a dry, salty taste, and is usually more sherry-influenced than a similarly aged Laphroaig, though still reeking of smoke and peat. For a long time this was my second favourite Islay, a short nose ahead of the wonderful Ardbeg.
My tastes do seem to have changed over the years, and these days I’d put Bowmore near the top of the list just under Laphroaig. Bowmore is north and west of the south coast’s Big Three, on the – relatively – balmy coast of Loch Indaal. As a producer, Bowmore has a richness throughout its range of whiskies that makes it one of the handful of very best distilleries in Scotland; as well as the 12, 17 and 21-year-olds they have others with names like Legend (eight to ten years old), Mariner (fifteen) and Darkest (probably about the same age as Mariner, though there’s no age stated). There are lots of other expressions available given sufficient time and money, but that’s enough to be going on with for now.