by Iain Banks
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.
The restaurant in the Visitor Centre is exceptional; we meet Toby, apologise for being late, and have yet more wonderful Islay food. I’m convinced I can feel my belt tightening as we eat. Toby explains that a lot of Islay produce is almost-but-not-quite-organic because the farmers have agreements with the RSPB and the Nature Conservancy people that they’ll let the vast flocks of migrating geese use their fields when they come through; this means that they have no choice but to use fertilisers to bring on their crops and harvest them before the geese get here; otherwise the birds would neck the lot.
Fooded, we meet up with Stuart Thomson, the distillery manager. We’d actually said Hi the day before, when Martin and I were wandering around the place taking photos and Stuart was watching one of his children learn to ride a bike (a lot of distillery managers live on site). Stuart has been busy over lunch with a party of French food and drink writers, on Islay to sample what the island has to offer.
We end up in one of the warehouses, sampling a couple of astoundingly good whiskies. One is a 12- or 13-year-old, about 62 proof, out of a bourbon cask; very phenolic, slightly carbolic but zesty, and – once it’s pointed out to me – yup, has notes of American Cream Soda, which was my favourite sugary drink when I was young. This is deeply wonderful whisky, and tasting it in the fume-heavy coolness of the dark warehouse while the clear spring sun beats off the pure white walls opposite and illuminates the golden liquid in the sampling column can’t help but heighten the experience. Oliver and I swap superlatives, but I’m not sure that Stuart hasn’t made a mistake here; I’d have led with whatever comes next and finished with this, because this is simply wonderful; one of the best whiskies I’ve ever tasted.
I am, however, wrong, and Stuart knows exactly what he’s doing.
The second whisky is 28 years old, is down to about 46 proof and is from a fino sherry cask (most sherry casks used for whisky have held oloroso). This stuff is just colossal. One taste (albeit a taste that takes a few minutes, from first amazed sniff to last lingering sensation at the back of the throat) and it goes straight to the top of the list. Very peaty, smoky and salty, but that’s just the start; there’s a rich creaminess here too, powerfully but sharply sweet in a way that would swamp a less muscularly peated dram but which here is part of a kind of dynamic of phenolic smoke and something like musky perfume. It’s a changing dynamic, too, like having some immensely complicated integrated equation of taste working itself out in your mouth, developing as it’s held there to swirl from wood-smoke to sea-spray to sherry and back again; one moment it tastes like barbecued licorice, next it’s changing to honey-glazed fruit (though at the time my principal impression was, Wow!).
I look at my empty glass, then at Oliver the Editor.
‘This is the best whisky I have ever tasted,’ I tell him.
‘You mean we’ve found the perfect dram?’ He looks worried. ‘This could be a short book.’
I smile at Stuart and nod at the cask. ‘Is it possible to buy any of—?’
Stuart is already shaking his head. ‘All already spoken for, I’m afraid.’
I nod sadly and tell Oliver, ‘I think the search has to continue.’
‘Your readers will appreciate the efforts and sacrifices you’re so determined to make for them.’
For a moment I think I detect a hint of irony, but surely not.
4: To Jura
JURA. AN UNBAGGED island. Always wanted to go there, never been. Jura lies aslant between Islay and Argyll, and is very sparsely populated – well, by homo sapiens, anyway; there are only about 200 human residents. There are, however, zillions of red deer, though from what I could gather these don’t seem to have developed the same skills regarding ambushing innocent Land Rovers as their demoniac cousins on Islay, presumably through lack of practice and opportunity. Jura’s a steeply, roundedly mountainous, deeply rugged island that looks like it’s almost been torn in two by the Atlantic gales. (Actually, for the purposes of the geographical and historical background in my novel The Crow Road, it was torn in half; I’d decided I wanted to locate the fictional town of Gallanach near Crinan, on the mainland. I needed the place to have a deep-water port with easy access to the Atlantic and I didn’t want to edit out the Corryvrecken so I blithely cut Jura in two. You get to do this sort of thing when you’re a writer.)
Jura is a short ferry ride from Port Askaig on Islay’s east coast, close to the Caol Ila distillery, so – as we’re here, the weather’s fine and there’s a whisky book to be researched – it has to be done. The perfect trip will include a visit to the distillery, a look at the house where George Orwell wrote 1984, and then a hike to the northern tip of the island to see the tidal race there between Jura and Scarba, that wide, roaring whirlpool called the Corryvrecken where Orwell once nearly drowned.
We managed the first two of these, missing the Gulf of Corryvrecken because we need to make the last ferry.
Meanwhile we’ve visited Caol Ila, the slightly less remotely sited but even more precipitously shore-pitched neighbour of Bunnahabhain, a couple of miles up the coast. Standing between the big, modern still house and the sea, the view is stunning whichever way you look: to Jura, its mountains mounded high and hazed across the waves, or back at the great coppery bulks of the four great stills, gleaming behind giant windows in the maritime light of an unseasonably warm spring; Ann practically has to be prised out of the visitors’ waiting room, mesmerised by the vista.
Yet again, this is a whisky that could well be a total star by now if it had had a bit of marketing oomph behind it, and maybe a bit more consistency in its younger bottlings. It’s oily and seaweedy – hardly a surprise, so close to the water – toasty and brisk. Caol Ila is probably the least familiar, least lauded Islay, but find a good one and it’ll sta
nd up to almost anything. Arguably the very distinctive toastedness of Caol Ila has mitigated against it being well known as a single malt just because it is so in demand as a constituent in blends. (A couple of months later Jackie, one of the tour guides at one of Caol Ila’s sister distilleries, Blair Atholl, assures me it’s especially good with a cigar. So there.)
The Isle of Jura distillery at Craighouse is a friendly place – most of the small or out-of-the-way distilleries are. All the same, I start with slightly iffy memories of Jura malt because I once bought a bottle when I was coming back to Dear Old Blighty from France on a truck ferry after a couple of months spent hitch-hiking round Europe, back in the early seventies.
It was not a very good bottle of whisky. Drinkable, but poorer than most blends, which is a pretty damning thing to say of a single malt.
Happily only the waisted bottle shape remains the same and the malt itself is peaty-flowery, salty (again) and smooth. The bottle of the new Superstition expression we buy is all of these plus smoky.
* * *
Willy’s Definitive Dram Definition.
Willy, one of the guys at the distillery, comes up with what Oliver and I agree is the best definition of what a ‘dram’ actually is: ‘A measure of whisky that is pleasing to both guest and host.’
Favourite memory of the Jura distillery? They had a wooden ball on the end of a bit of string which could be swung against the neck of one of the stills, a bit like you’d swing a bottle of champagne against the stem of a ship being launched, though less destructively, obviously. This was a leftover from the Islay (well, Islay/Jura in this case) Whisky Festival of the year before, when the guys thought it would be fun to show people how, in the old days, a distiller would work out how far up the still the mixture was bubbling. Nowadays stills have wee vertical windows like glazed medieval arrow slits set into them, so you can just look and see whether the stuff’s boiling away nicely, not boiling hard enough (more heat required) or about to boil over and make a mess of the heat exchanger (less heat needed), but back in the old days, before this hi-tech glass nonsense, they’d just swing a wee wooden ball against the copper and work out from the dullness or otherwise of the resulting Dong whether their liquid was simmering anaemically, frothing nicely or about to blow the place up.
There is even a suggestion that all this whacking away at the copper stills with wooden balls might have led to the stills starting to get a bit dented, taking on the appearance of coppery golf balls, and that this might contribute to the character of the resulting whisky. Hmm, I say. (There is real, probably daft, pointlessly conservative and very superstitious stuff going on here; some distillers really do insist that when coppersmiths replace an old still – they only last about fifteen years or so with all that heating and bubbling, even with repairs and riveted-on patches – they deliberately make exact replicas of the old stills, down to the dents they received accidentally, and even down to the patches and repairs themselves … But hold on; what about the way the whisky they made tasted before they had the patches? And are these patches cumulative? Do they all add? Will future copies of these stills be so accreted with patches summed from all their many generations of ancestors that they look like patchwork quilts but in copper?)
Oh well; who knows and never mind. Following a very pleasant look round the distillery, the hotel across the road and the wee village of Craighouse – all resplendent in the sunshine – we stock up on a few snacking supplies at the village shop and head off to see Orwell’s old place.
After a little negotiation – there is a locked chain guarding the last few miles of the road, and permission to proceed beyond is far from automatic – we take the rocky road to Barnhill, where George Orwell wrote 1984. Five deserted, dwelling-free miles of sheer vehicle torture ending in a gentle, shallow glen of rock and heather, stunted trees and newly flowered whin, the rich yellow blossom yet to exhale the buttery coconut scent of early summer. The old, white-painted house forms a shallow U-shape when you include the one-time byres and stables on either side. (The track winds on over the hill to one last house further north, the final outpost of humanity before the Corryvrecken.)
We are greeted by two honkily suspicious geese – possibly the remains of a flock that was here in Orwell’s time – and a view down across the unkempt remains of garden and lawn over a slope-damp meadow of reed and coarse grass to the still bare trees above the rocks and the shining curve of bay. The rugged shore of mainland Argyll lies in the distance under the haze, more an implication than a presence.
George Orwell – Eric Blair, as he was born – came here to write, not die. I had the impression, before reading the latest biography, Orwell, by D. J. Taylor, that he’d slunk here like some wounded animal dragging itself off to breathe its last, but this was not really what happened, and nor was Orwell as alone as I’d thought, either. Orwell knew he was unwell, even if he was loath to admit to his friends that he might be suffering from tuberculosis, but the diagnosis was made after he’d come back to Jura following an earlier stay at Barnhill and a subsequent return to London.
There was a stigma to tuberculosis at the time; people knew it was infectious, and I’d thought that Orwell had exiled himself to a determined solitude which even then, when Jura had a few more inhabitants and the road was better (… surely. I mean, he drove a motorbike down this? With lungs close to collapse and haemorrhage?), must have been close to complete. The air was purer than anything in the cities – though, given that Orwell was a chain-smoker, this would not have made that much difference – there was little chance of infecting anybody else with the disease eating away at his lungs, and he would have the peace to write.
Yet he came here with a family of sorts, was involved in the local community and the seasonal tasks of farming life, and had various guests to stay. They were never as many visitors as he and they had hoped and planned for due to the sheer difficulty of getting to Jura, and especially this part of it, but even so it was a fuller and less doom-shadowed life than I’d imagined. A presentiment of death – and a desire to cling to life – informed Orwell’s choice of the place nevertheless; even in those very early post-war, post-atomic days, he was aware of the possibility of a nuclear holocaust, and saw that Jura might offer a greater chance of survival than most places in Britain if the Bomb did drop.
Orwell spent most of his last two years in hospital, and died in London.
Peering through the windows at Barnhill, I wonder if he turned his chair and whatever desk or table he wrote on away from that beguiling, ever-changing view to the south, but Orwell seems like the sort of writer, the sort of man, who might have kept the view there to be looked at, and yet still never let himself be distracted by it. Anyway, apparently by this stage he was so ill he was mostly writing in bed.
We return from Jura to Islay, for an evening of stories and laughter and lots of tears. The tears were mine; Belinda had made this wonderful lasagne and Toby had produced a big bag of green chillis to spice it up, leaving the bag on the table where I could reach it too, so that we sat there, tearing these fiery little chillis up and scattering them across the lasagne before wolfing it down (everybody else was sensible and stuck with the lasagne as it was). The chillis were very strong and I tore up so many I swear my fingers turned green. The resulting dish was utterly delicious, but then – laughing so much at one point I had to wipe the tears away – I used my chilli-tearing fingers to do the wiping, which was a major mistake.
I am convinced that the effect was so intense my eyeballs developed a sense of taste; I could taste green. My eyes streamed, my nose did too, I washed my hands, kept dabbing with a napkin, and thought of dousing my eyes with yoghurt (capsiacin, the hot stuff in chillis, is soluble in fat but not in water, so this might have worked … Complicity readers know this stuff already), but I opted for just keeping on eating even though I could hardly see for the wash of tears, and waiting for the symptoms to pass, which they did after a quarter of an hour or so.
I think it was
around here, people having been primed for how daft I can be, that the Toby’s Party/The Balcony Scene story got told.
The Toby’s Party/The Balcony Scene story.
End of August, 1987. Brighton, on the south coast of England. The World Science Fiction Convention. Entitled ConSpiracy. This seemed like a neat name for an SF Con until it came time for two of the Guests of Honour, the Strugatsky brothers, Arkady and Boris, to apply for visas to leave what was then the Soviet Union and travel to the UK to attend the Con; its breezy, just-for-a-laugh title did not play well with the humourless pre-modernists, non-ironicists of the KGB or whoever was in charge of issuing visas, because they did not get the joke and did not issue the Strugatskys with visas either. Doris Lessing was another GoH and gamely stood in for the Non-Flying Strugatsky Brothers on some of the programme items they should have featured in. Given that Alfred Bester had also proved unable to attend, the Con was having a jinxed time with its GoHs (Bester, author of at least one of the greatest SF novels ever written, had an even better excuse for not turning up, having recently died. Willed his estate to his bartender. Class).
But a fine Con all the same, with thousands of SF fans from all over the world enjoying a long sunny weekend; enjoying it mostly in the bars or at panel items in windowless function rooms, certainly, but enjoying it all the same. It was only about my second or third Convention and I was having a great time. Toby was my paperback editor at the time, in charge of the crowded and bustling satrapy that was Futura, part of Emperor ‘Bobbing’ Bob Maxwell’s vast imperial domain.