Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram

by Iain Banks

  ‘Good timing? Ha, just kid—’

  ‘It’s not funny!’

  ‘Well, no, but—’

  ‘I’m going insane here. I had some woman from the Scotsman on earlier—’

  ‘I though this was why we went ex-directory. How did those—? Never mind.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do!’

  ‘Well, take the phone out.’

  ‘I’m worried they’ll come to the house!’

  ‘That’s a point; the fucking Daily Mail doorstepped me that time I said, Drugs; just say Yes.’

  ‘And I’m missing you. Help!’

  ‘Well, why not come out here? Come to Islay. Harriet and Toby were, like, dreadfully disappointed when I turned up without you. A less secure person than myself could almost have formed the impression it was you they were really looking forward to seeing, not me. Bizarre though that sounds, obviously. But yeah, come on out.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Drive?’

  ‘Oh, come on, you know I hate driving.’

  ‘Well then … train to Edinburgh, another train to Glasgow, then … I think there’s a bus to Kennacraig. Or something like that. Probably.’

  ‘Oh, come on!’

  ‘Right. Well. Umm … Fly?’

  ‘There are no more flights till Monday.’

  ‘You’ve checked?’

  ‘I’ve checked.’

  ‘Ah, what the hell, just charter a plane.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Charter a plane. Drive over to Embra airport or get a taxi and charter a light plane from there.’

  ‘What, really?’

  ‘Well, no, not really, I was just—’

  ‘I could look into it, I suppose.’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Is that okay?’

  ‘Ah, well, umm.’

  ‘You really wouldn’t mind?’

  ‘I, well, I, umm, no. No, I suppose, if you’re really missing—’

  ‘Where would I find that sort of thing? Yellow Pages, I suppose. I’ll call you back. Bye.’

  Which is how, after a succession of false starts and on-again, off-again phone calls, John Jarrold and I find ourselves at an otherwise deserted Islay airport on a Sunday afternoon, meeting Ann off a dinky little twin-engine Cessna which left Edinburgh just 40 minutes earlier.

  ‘What was the delay?’

  ‘First one of the engines wouldn’t start, then the door wouldn’t close, then there was mist over the runway, then there was no air traffic control. The pilot was called Lorna and she was only 25. I said sorry for making her work on a Sunday but she said she’d only have been doing the decorating. It was brilliant!’

  (Me, suspiciously:) ‘Have you been drinking coffee?’

  The rest of Sunday – after Ann has settled in, had a welcoming dram or two with Toby and Harriet and promptly gone for a snooze – I spend with Martin the photographer, revisiting most of the distilleries John and I drove to yesterday. They’re still closed, of course, but looking very picturesque in the gently hazy sunshine with the calm sea lapping quietly against the rocks. We take what feels like about eighteen rolls of film, from which one frame later gets used.

  Martin is staying with friends near Loch Gruinart, in the north-east of the island, but later comes to stay in the other self-catering flat along with Oliver, and apparently turns out to be an extremely good guitarist, though Ann and I miss the impromptu concert. Later it turns out we know people in common; Martin’s done a lot of album covers, including one or two for Shooglenifty; one of my favourite bands, plus I know a couple of the guys. Actually, the last time I saw Malcolm the guitarist was at my birthday bash in February; I vaguely recall getting all excited about a plan we hatched together about doing a joint musical/literary tour of Cuba with – hopefully – British Council money. I have a nasty feeling I was supposed to write the letter proposing this to the BC. Durn; I’d better tell Malc about my gratuitous passport-destroying antics …

  We go mob-handed to the Machrie for dinner, utilising the bus-like carrying capacity of the Defender to transport everybody in one go. It’s on the way back in the darkness that I’m warned about the kamikaze proclivities of the local deer population, especially between the hotel and the farm, and so crawl dutifully along at 30 miles an hour, eyes peeled for antlers craftily disguised as branches lurking with malevolent intent amongst the roadside trees.

  Each evening, I’m watching the progress of the war. It opens without the shock and awe we’ve been promised, but on the other hand there are no sudden chemical or biological counter attacks either. Which is good, obviously. Yet just a micron suspicious, too. I mean, if you’ve got weapons of mass destruction – as we have been so assiduously and indeed almost desperately assured Saddam has – isn’t now, when you’re being invaded by troop concentrations heading straight for your major cities, when you’d use them?

  Anyway, it all goes very quickly and smoothly for the invading forces. The Brits sort of take Basra. The US Marines cross the Euphrates.

  Then everything stalls, and it almost looks like another of the nightmare scenarios is going to kick in, with stubborn resistance in depth and behind the various fronts, irregulars attacking the supply chains. Then that all fades away too and it’s on to Baghdad.

  Despite one or two scares, still no chemical or biological weapons turn up. I sit in the flat above the old barn each night, nursing a whisky, unable to believe this is really happening, that we’ve gone to war because, well, basically because George Dubya Bush and his right-wing pals wanted to, and Tony Blair was determined to do whatever Bush asked of him, seemingly happy to risk destroying the UN and sundering the EU just so that the US could have its second pushover war in two years.

  But then, hey, I couldn’t believe it a couple of years ago when Bush lost the election and yet got given the presidency, and hardly anybody seemed to get upset (certainly almost nobody in America was reported as getting upset); not much national or worldwide outrage at the fact the most powerful nation in the history of the planet had been taken over by a cross-eyed cretin backed by gang of drooling, mean-spirited, proto-fascist shitheads.

  My bedtime reading, when I’m not looking at other books about whisky, is Stupid White Men, by Michael Moore. It’s good – a little tabloid with the italics and so on, perhaps, but very to the point given the current situation. In fact painfully so; I can only take it a few pages at a time before my blood starts to boil.

  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 har
dback.

  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-ma
king 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.