by John McPhee
“The way a plant is operated is as important as the design,” he says. “You get better whisky if you run fairly slowly. Modern demand causes many distilleries to run fast. We have small, individual stills. Like anything else you are cooking, smaller boilings are better for flavor.”
When the whisky runs out of the condensers it is as clear and colorless as water. Whether it is heavy or light it all looks like water, and the amount of color that is ultimately given to it is almost strictly a matter of show business. Whisky is aged in casks of new oak, or in used casks that previously held sherry. The sherry colors the whisky. If the maker wants a light-colored whisky, he uses fewer sherry casks per lot. Makers try to match the color to what they think the taste is, but color of whisky has nothing whatever to do with its true lightness. Harbinson is holding his glass up before a window in what is now fading daylight. “Sherry does, to a minor extent, affect the taste of the spirit,” he says in a ruminative way. “We’ve tried putting it in refilled whisky casks, in brandy casks, in Madeira casks, but the whisky was a wee bit spiritous. Freshly emptied sherry casks are the best. They placate the spirit. They calm it down.”
Macallan and J. & J. Grant’s Glen Grant together form the baseline of the triumvirate of malt whisky. The apex above them is George & J. G. Smith’s The Glenlivet, the finest whisky made in Scotland. Why do the Scots think so? What is the secret of The Glenlivet? Could it be the altitude? The distillery is the highest in Scotland, but is only nine hundred feet above sea level. Is it the Livet? The Livet is a clear, tumbling tributary of the Spey, but the distillery uses its water only as a coolant. Is it the shape of the stills? the quality of the malt? the source of the peats? Or is the nature of the whisky in the nature of the man, the owner, the chairman, who now, in his offices in the distillery, waves a brace of pistols that his great-grandfather, the founder, was the last man to fire in anger? The two greatest individual names in the history of malt whisky are Smith and Grant, and this man’s name is Captain Smith Grant.
He went to Downside and Sandhurst, years ago. There could be little doubt that he would have retired from the Army as Field Marshal Smith Grant had he not gone back to the stills in his youth. He is in his sixties, tall, powerfully framed, with a large head, a heavy face, and a look that, despite its elements of weariness, suggests that life has been good in Glenlivet. Captain Smith Grant seems completely unbound, and in that sense must be the loosest man in the Highlands. He wears his Highland Brigade tie and his kilt in Hunting Grant. He waves his great-grandfather’s pistols. “Venomous-looking things, are they not?” he says. “I mean, if you got hit with a bullet out of that …” His full-bodied voice fades for a moment as he thinks about his whisky and the process by which it is made. ‘“There’s nothing secret about any of it,” he says. “It just happens that it comes out like that. People come here and ask if they can measure the stills. ‘Measure them,’ I say. ‘Photograph them. Do anything you like with them so long as you leave them here.’ Many people have copied them. Actually, we chucked out a still three years ago that was ninety-eight years old We put in a new one and it didn’t seem to affect anything. We buy our peats from a subcontractor in Tomintoul. We’re using British barley, the same barley everyone else uses. We have used California barley, Danubian barley, Karachi barley—Tunisian, Australian, Danish island barley. It isn’t the barley. We can’t be bothered malting our own barley. We buy it from maltsters in the south of Scotland.”
Captain Smith Grant takes a walk around his distillery. It is a beautifully unprepossessing compound of buildings set in high, open, hill country, looking out over a field of oats, in which stand the semi-ruins of Blairfindy Castle. The distillery—its long, low buildings covered with roughcast; its eaves, window frames, and doorways painted dark red—might be a dairy farm. Its warehouses, full of butts and hogsheads stacked over an earth floor (some think the best whisky ages closest to the dank ground), reek of malt whisky. The Glenlivet wash stills, plump and very narrow-waisted, are buxom. There are just two of them, twenty-five feet high, pure copper, and they look remarkably like a pair of tightly bodiced Victorian women, hardly promising as vessels for the gestation of a drink whose very name in Gaelic—uisge-beatha—means “the water of life.” The lynne arms droop unimaginatively. The spirit stills, also two in number, are small replicas of the wash stills.
“It’s not really the stills,” says Captain Smith Grant. “I think it’s ninety-nine and a half percent the water—the water, and a sort-of certain fiddle-faddle in the manufacture. The water comes from Josie’s Well. Who Josie was I don’t know, but the water comes from Josie’s Well.”
Talking all the way, Captain Smith Grant goes out the front door of his distillery, crosses the road, lifts his kilt, climbs a fence and moves through the waist-deep golden oats toward Josie’s Well. He regards the hike as insanity—“to see a bloody hole in the ground”—but he is cheerfully willing to go. “The Invergordon people thought they would expand into the malt market a few years ago, and they built a distillery just up the road here, built a distillery to produce a million gallons a year,” he says. “They’re struggling to get about two hundred thousand gallons. They make bloody awful whisky. We think it rather heavy. They’re not in the same watershed, quite. We produce seven hundred and fifty thousand gallons a year. Ninety-eight percent of it goes into blended whiskies. John Walker uses thirty thousand gallons of The Glenlivet a year, Black or Red, we don’t know. We fill large orders from Haig, and so forth. Our job is to sell to the blenders. They use The Glenlivet as a top-dressing, to cover up the multitude of sins in the vat, to give it some sort of quality. People have spread the fact that there is nothing to touch The Glenlivet, so we must eternally turn out the same whisky. We could make it more cheaply, but we don’t dare try. It might change it. It is a full-bodied, slow-maturing whisky which has a great deal of quality. The Scotch whisky trade have come to rely on it as an unaltering standard.”
This reminds him of the way the name of his whisky has been poached and poached again, and he fulminates. His is the one distillery in Glenlivet, but whisky-makers all over Strathspey have long made use of the name, slipping the word Glenlivet onto their labels in order to arrogate to themselves some of The Glenlivet’s stature.
“In the United Kingdom, you can’t have a geographical name as a trademark,” he explains. “That’s why they’ve had so much trouble over Harris tweed. A few years ago, damned near all whisky was labelled as coming from Glenlivet. Glenlivet was the longest glen in Scotland, with all the people stealing the name.” He pronounces the name glen leave it, although nearly everyone else in Scotland says glen live it. “We’ve succeeded in shoving everybody off,” he continues. “We took the case up to the House of Lords and spent God knows what, about twenty thousand quid. The people of Speyside argued that they put Livet water in their whisky, for the Livet flows into the Spey. We should have put the Provost of Grant into the box and asked him where he puts Grantown sewage. He would have had to say that that, too, goes into the Spey. All whisky distilleries use water from springs and burns, anyway, not from rivers. Rivers are too dangerous. The water is different at different times. We settled it, finally, after a fashion. These people in Speyside have to hyphenate the name Glenlivet with their own name, if they’re going to use Glenlivet. And they have to print both names the same size—Glenfarclas-Glenlivet, Mortlach-Glenlivet, Longmorn-Glenlivet, Linkwood-Glenlivet, nearly all of them do it. The full name of the Macallan company is R. Kemp, Macallan-Glenlivet. But our whisky is The Glenlivet, and no one else can call their whisky simply that”
Striding on, he drops into a calmer mood. “Macallan is nice whisky. I had some two years ago. Glenfarclas is a very nice little whisky, but it has no particular stature or character. It’s a well-made, above-average Highland malt. I had some seven years ago. Glen Grant is a thinner whisky than The Glenlivet. It does not have the same body. It’s sweet, and useful for blending. I had some last fall. A drop or two of water brings out t
he nose. I know no one who does not drink whisky with water. There doesn’t seem to be much future in just knocking it back. You have half a taste of it and it’s gone.”
In the middle of the oat field is a small, fenced enclosure, eight feet square. The fence is made of wood so old that it is dark gray and covered with lichen. Three rails are broken down. Bits of rusted wire hold the rest together. Sheep that have somehow got into the field have left wool on the barbs of the wire. On the ground, among weeds and buttercups in the middle of the enclosure, is a large flagstone five inches thick. Grant heaves away the slab. Beneath it is—just as he said—a mere hole in the ground, almost square at the surface, eighteen inches across, and fully five feet deep. At the bottom, water voluminously rushes out of the earth, out of some fateful crack in the granite of the glen, whirling, eddying, prodigiously, noisily gurgling. A three-inch pipe carries it under the oats to the distillery.
“What if Josie’s Well should ever go dry?”
“It’s not allowed to go dry. We couldn’t do without it.”
Grant’s kilt is blowing in the wind. He leans on the fence. A rail cracks. He almost falls.
“Why don’t you build a brick enclosure here? Why don’t you make a shrine out of this place?”
“If someone mucks about with that well, it may disappear. The mason may put his foot in it. I think we can class ourselves as fairly prosperous. We want to stay that way.”
Captain Smith Grant is hungry from the open air, and after returning from the oat field has his lunch. Beforehand, he pours a glass of The Glenlivet, drops just enough water into it for a perfect nose, and hands it to me. Then he mixes for himself a gin and tonic.
From Birnam Wood to Dunsinane
IN MOST FAMILIES, a generation or two is time enough to erase even a major infamy, but centuries upon centuries have not in this respect been kind to the Macbeths, as anyone knows who knows one. I’ve known several Macbeths, and I particularly remember the moments in which I met them, because in most instances a faint shadow seemed to cross their faces when their surname was exposed to yet another stranger. The latest of these is R. G. Macbeth, of Scarsdale. We were introduced—as travellers, as strangers, in a small town in New England—by a motelkeeper who was serving our breakfast, and who in her friendly way seemed to think that we would have much to say to each other simply because our names were derivationally Scottish. This Macbeth was a big, broad-shouldered man with bright eyes and an engagingly unprepossessing manner. As it happened, he did have a lot to say. He had scarcely sat down before he was well into a mild harangue about the injuries that had been done to his family through poetic license and dramatic journalism—manipulations of the pen. He said that his collateral ancestor Macbeth, King of Scotland, was a good king and is buried with other Scottish kings on the island Iona in a sanctuary where only authentic and duly entitled kings are at rest; that no one who had poached the throne of Scotland would ever have been buried, or at least would have long remained buried, on Iona; that Macbeth, in 1040, killed King Duncan not in bed but in battle; that Macbeth’s claim to rule the Scots was as legitimate as Duncan’s, each, through his mother, being a great-grandson of King Kenneth I; and that Macbeth settled the claim, as was the custom in his time, with his sword in fair and open fight. His reign lasted seventeen years. I could be well assured that something quite different from tyranny or depravity was the atmosphere that generally emanated from his fortress on the summit of Dunsinane Hill.
I said to Mr. Macbeth, “I’m sorry you have this cross to bear.”
Macbeth lifted his coffee cup, indicating that he would drink to that. He drank. Then he said, “I’ve never been to Scotland. In a year or two, though, I’m going to go.”
I said, “Let me give you a name and address. Donald Sinclair, Balbeggie, Perthshire. I’ll write it down. He’s a farmer. He’s the cousin of a friend of mine. I don’t know Sinclair very well, but I don’t think he would mind if you were to seek him out, which is what I did once. I was in Scotland with my family, and one day—just for the experience—we went by the most direct way we could find from Birnam Wood to Dunsinane. It’s a ten-mile trip. Sinclair calls himself a tenant farmer. Technically, that’s what he is, but his father-in-law happens to be his landlord, and the family owns a very handsome piece of Perthshire—five thousand acres. Their estate is called Dunsinnan, and more or less in the middle of it is Dunsinane Hill.”
Macbeth slowly set down his plastic coffee cup on the Formica surface of the table. I told him the details of the pilgrimage as I had made it.
Birnam Wood, on the edge of the Craigvinean Forest, stands across the River Tay from a medieval town, Dunkeld, and has been replaced to some extent by Birnam, a village that developed in the late nineteenth century. Birnam Wood now is deep and thick, dark green, with an understory of gorse and bracken, and white slashes of birch angling upward among larches and pines. In all likelihood, the boughs of such trees could not have been the boughs that went to Dunsinane. Apparently the forest was once predominantly oak. The present Birnam Wood, cut who knows how many times, seems to be merely a collateral descendant of the forest that once was there, for the presence of a number of slim oaks among the pines suggests what must have been, in the virgin stand, the climax tree. The army assembled by Siward, Malcolm, and Macduff would have marched under oak leaves. By the river is one immensely impressive piece of evidence suggesting that this was so. One tree, an oak, remains from—according to local testimony—the time of Macbeth. It stands in a riparian grove of grasses, weeds, and rusting junk. Nothing much is made of it. I used up half a morning finding it, A postman on the principal street of Birnam had told me about it. “The old trees are away now, unfortunately. But there is still one left. It is propped up.” We picked our way downhill—my four small daughters, my wife, and I—along dirt pathways strewn with discarded plastic bottles and fragments of broken glass. The groundscape was somewhat cleaner and more inviting closer to the river, where another path ran along parallel to the current and passed under the high canopies of trees at least a century old. These were whips, seedlings, saplings by comparison with the tree we finally found. There it was, standing without fence or fanfare, its trunk outmassing the Heidelberg tun, its roemerian canopy all but stopping the sunlight: the last tree of Birnam Wood, a living monument to the value of staying put.
My wife and children and I joined hands, and we wrapped ourselves to the tree with arms extended. The six of us reached less than halfway around. The big oak was so gnarled that it appeared to be covered with highly magnified warts. Each of ten principal limbs had the diameter of a major oak in itself, and the lower ones, jutting out almost horizontally, were supported in six places by columns set in the ground. One great limb was dead. In the base of the trunk were cavelike holes. Lichen grew on the bark as if the tree were already down and moldering. But despite all that, the tree was green throughout its canopy—leafy and alive. This big oak alone could have camouflaged an army.
We sat down on the riverbank and had lunch. The Tay was fast, clear, and shallow, and about two hundred yards downstream was a small rip, a touch of white water. The flow was southerly, in the general direction of Dunsinane, so the army would have moved for some distance along the river on its way to the hill. We ate cold roast beef, white chocolate, and Islay Mini-Dunlop cheese. I reached up and took a leaf from the great oak, and we began the journey.
First, we stopped in at the Esso Autodiesel & Petrol Agency in Birnam and had the tank of our car filled, for five shillings sixpence halfpenny the gallon. The attendant gave the children Esso tiger tails. Below Birnam the riverine countryside was lush with wheat fields, haycocks, oats, barley. Multicolored lupines and wild foxgloves grew in meadows where herds of Aberdeen Angus were sleeping, all draped together with their necks across the necks of the cows beside them. It was a clear day, warm but not hot. A tractor plowing a field was followed by flights of seagulls. The gulls were eating the worms that the tractor turned up. We moved through a
grove of seventy-foot cedars, copper beeches, and hemlocks on a dark lane running among standing stones, through weirdly overgrown formal gardens, and past an Italianate castle no more than a century old, now boarded shut and falling to ruin. We later found in a book on Dunkeld and Birnam that this (Murthly Castle) had been the home of an exotic peer who had once ornamented the grounds with herds of buffalo from Wyoming. In his milieu, he may not have been eccentric. Even today, we know someone in the same part of Perthshire who keeps a considerable herd of pet red deer, and when he goes off in summer to the far north—to Caithness—he takes his red deer with him in chartered freight cars.
Murthly Hospital, for mental patients, came soon after Murthly Castle and was about a third of the way from Birnam Wood to Dunsinane. Like the decaying structure upriver, the main buildings of the hospital, amorphous and ugly, must have been about a century old, and in their setting among woods and fields by the Tay they did not seem as forbidding in the sunlight as they must in the gloom of rain. The place belied itself, if it ever could, this day. Women sat on benches in brightly colored straw hats. Men in coveralls bowled on a lawn. Others gardened. Distress was invisible, but nonetheless my children were unnaturally quiet. Doctors crossed the grounds in white jackets. A big nurse, whose size was a kind of manifesto of control, carried a fragile and extremely old woman in her arms. Rows of stone cottages had names over their doors like Tuke, Robertson, Bruce. Among them, a giant and rusting television aerial was planted in the earth like a tree. One of the men on the bowling court left the game and ran toward us, smiling and waving his arms. I did not for a moment know what I wanted to do. He was running hard. Was I going to avoid him and renew, in one more way, his hurt; or was I going to become enskeined in a dialogue that could, in the end, be even less successful in the breaking? I left him behind, standing by the road, without expression, watching us go.