Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram

by Iain Banks

  I have never walked along Princes Street or up North Bridge without looking about me at this gloriously displayed riot of architecture, rock, hill and glimpsed, distant river and thinking, I love this beautiful city.

  The Scotch Whisky Centre is housed in a fine old late nineteenth-century building on Castle Hill, the continuation of the Royal Mile, and just a door or two away from the Witchery, a restaurant that I happen to know has Grange on the wine list. There’s a tour which includes a couple of short films, a live tour guide, a sort of animatronic model distillery with movable walls and bits that lights up (it’s a model of the architecturally dramatic Tormore distillery, on Speyside), and a ride round various tableaux illustrating the history of whisky, taken in slowly moving cars shaped like whisky barrels. I found some of this stuff a bit heavy on the hokum, but then I have a very low hokum tolerance. There’s a bit on the tour where the supposed ghost of a master blender gives us a short talk when I felt myself come over all literalist and was not far away from standing up and denouncing the thing as a fake and a blatantly obvious video hologram. I mean, I didn’t, obviously, but if I’d seen this after a Blue Moon or two, I might have.

  There’s a restaurant and bar, corporate hospitality spaces and a well-stocked shop selling loads of whisky and the usual collateral-association stuff of the trade; whisky-flavoured socks and that sort of malarkey.

  It’s actually a decent introduction to whisky as an industry and a drink. For purists and people who’ve done a lot of real distillery tours it’s basically beside the point, but it’s not designed for that sort of person anyway. And it does make some telling points, such as mentioning the historical chance that led to the phylloxera blight crippling the wine and therefore the brandy and cognac industry in France just at the time the whisky makers were properly able to take advantage of the fact and push their product as a fitting substitute for these more established – and indeed historically more respectable – spirits.

  Izabella is from Poland and while we’re sitting drinking our Blue Moons she writes a postcard in Polish to our friend Gary Lloyd and his wife Christiane, who I’m going to see at the weekend. Roger and I write two postcards. Bought on the Royal Mile, these have been chosen for maximum Bonnie Scotland kitschness, Roger’s showing a plate of haggis, neeps and tatties with a glass of whisky, mine a pair of cute Scotty dogs and some sprigs of heather. The point is the two postcards only make sense read together because we’ve swapped every second word. Under the influence of the Blue Moons this seems like just one of the wittiest things anybody’s ever thought of since Mr and Mrs Wilde conceived the boy Oscar. We are also spookily convinced of the rightness of our wheeze because when we write our messages out on the backs of beer mats before committing them to our hideously kitsch postcards (proper writers always do a draft first, after all) they are, coincidentally, exactly the same length.

  The three of us have already lunched well at Viva Mexico on Cockburn Street – best margaritas in Edinburgh – but shopping, the tour round the Scotch Whisky Centre, the Blue Moons and intensive high-concept postcard writing leave us fit for a decent dinner too, so we head next door to the Café Royal Oyster Bar for food (and some Chateau Musar – you need something robust and powerful to cut through to your taste buds after carpet bombing them with the multiple warheads of a Blue Moon).

  Roger and Izabella fly south and a few days later I head in roughly the same direction, taking the M5 to Chester to see Gary and Christiane. I’m taking them their wedding presents; they got married a few weeks ago in Sorrento, Italy, and while we were in Bruges earlier in the year Ann and I bought them some small things for their house. We could post the presents but I want to talk to Gary about music stuff (this, plus the fact it’s a long drive, is one reason Ann doesn’t come with me).

  I’ve always loved music and I’ve always loved making up tunes. When I was about eight I can remember sitting in a bus with my classmates going to see a circus in Kirkcaldy, and making up a tune in my head which became a sort of theme for the day. In my memory, naturally, it was and is a great tune, but it’s forgotten and gone forever. For some reason I never did take to music at school, and certainly never learned to read or write music. I had to wait until I got an ancient reel-to-reel tape recorder when I was in my early teens before I could save my tunes by whistling them into the thing.

  Later, at university, I bought a guitar but I never tried to get into a band, I just sat and taught myself a few chords and developed my unique, eccentric and highly inefficient fret-fingering style. The main change was that the tunes recorded into – by now – a first-generation cassette recorder were in the form of the sound of awkwardly plucked guitar strings rather than hopelessly inane whistling.

  Nowadays I have a small but impressive home studio setup. It’s not that comprehensive, and wouldn’t count as a studio at all by some definitions. I don’t have any audio facility, for example – I can’t record any acoustic instruments or vocals, but then, as those few unlucky souls who have heard me attempting to sing will confirm, this is entirely a blessing – but I do have lots of machines with a wide variety of numerous flashing lights, which is, of course, a Good Thing. It’s basically music processing, and enormous fun, better than any computer game, and Gary Lloyd is the man who showed me how easy it was to get started. Gary once wrote a long musical piece called The Bridge, based on my novel. This took years to write and record – certainly much longer than the book took to write – and is probably even more complex than the novel. It has my voice wittering over a few sections of the CD, but other than that it’s brilliant.

  Over the last half-decade or so I’ve been very slowly learning how to use MIDI and my musical gear and during the last year I’ve created a couple of CDs, one with lots of weird synthesiser noodling on it and one comprising of more conventional piano pieces. I sent both to Gary a while ago and now he’s got some thoughts to share.

  The CD of piano pieces was sent to a few other friends I thought might be interested, and all their views matter too, but Gary, as a professional composer and electronica expert, can probably offer the most cogent advice.

  I take the A701 towards Moffat; a fast, still unspoiled road through some roundly impressive Borders scenery, the wave-round hills stamped with great squares of forest. Like the far North-West, the Borders hold some of the best driving roads in Scotland. They’re a bit busier than the roads of Wester Ross and Sutherland, but there are more of them too, and they vary from the What-is-this-‘police-car’-of-which-you-talk, Earthman? to the A68. If you ever want to see a good road spoiled, drive the A68. I can remember when this roller-coaster of a route was worth taking just for the sheer fun of it, but now it seems to have at least one GATSO camera per mile and it’s just a chore. We have only ourselves to blame, I guess; too many enthusiastic drivers must have driven beyond their skills, or luck, and crashed on the A68, and the cameras are their memorials.

  The 701 doesn’t have any cameras yet, though it does appear to. Somebody’s got a mock one in their garden near Tweedsmuir. This is the first pretend speed camera I’ve ever seen. It looks quite convincing at a glance, before you realise it’s set too low, they never site them in gardens and the square lens aperture is a mirror. What’s worrying is that the place where it’s sited is on bit of a wiggle in the road, slightly uphill when coming from the north-east, and in the midst of a few houses; you’d have to be driving like a maniac to be going much over 60 here.

  Which is the other side of the coin for fast driving in the countryside, of course; country roads aren’t just routes for fun driving, they’re the roads that people live on, too, and if you don’t drive with consideration for those people then they’re going to demand GATSOs. It’s that whole issue of having your own speed limits, modulating speed according to perceived and likely risk and not just going on whether the group of houses ahead has a 30 sign stuck in front of it.

  A hot old day in Chester, sticky and still. It’s good to see Gary and Christiane. They met on a
train when Gary was on his way to North Queensferry. Gary and I have been working on a soundtrack album of Espedair Street for a few years now and both of us had made a few journeys, usually by train, to see the other and work on the songs. Originally conceived as the soundtrack for a mooted film of the book – another of Roger’s scripts – this project gradually took on a life of its own, especially after Gary had the brain wave of getting other artists to record a song each, as a kind of tribute album to a band that never existed. We’ve had a holiday from this for a year or so but now it’s back on track and we still intend to see what we can do with this idea.

  On this occasion it was Gary’s turn to travel to Scotland. The Virgin train was, to no one’s great surprise, running late and he asked this attractive girl sitting across from him if he could borrow her phone to call me. (I think Gary compensates for having to use all that electronic music gear each day in his work by resolutely not having a mobile phone, laptop or PDA. Until recently he even went to a nearby café to pick up email.) Christiane lived in Dunfermline, just up the road from us, and before too long Gary was making that long journey from Chester to see her. This had the advantage for Ann and me that we got to see Gary fairly often, but it also meant that Gary spent a lot of time on trains, and quite often in trains that were stuck in stations. So he started train spotter-spotting.

  As long as I’ve known him, Gary’s been a great note taker; he always carries a notebook (I don’t, which is one reason I often feel I’m not a Proper Writer) so he started a page at the back dedicated to the guys that hang around on station platforms watching trains. Years after Gary told me this, Paul Merton on Have I Got News For You came up with the same idea, but he didn’t have the time to develop it the way Gary did. Gary had columns to record whether the train spotter he’d spotted had a notebook, tape recorder, still camera, camcorder, one of those fisherman-type gear bags you can sit on, an anorak and, crucially, a thermos flask. There was probably a thesis in there on train-spotting attire, behaviour and associated para-phernalia, but then Christiane upped and left Dunfermline for Chester, and Gary’s research time was vastly decreased.

  We walk into town along the canal, catching up.

  The two of them went to see Goldfrapp in concert the night before, in Manchester. Christiane describes Alison Goldfrapp as being dressed, ‘like a demonic air stewardess on a special Concorde flight to hell.’

  It’s so hot that in one bar I have a whisky with ice, and decide that on a really hot, humid day a sweetish blend with ice cubes is actually not a bad idea. Only a blend, mind you. I’ll take some convincing a malt is to be treated like this.

  Hmm. Blends. These are not, of course, strictly speaking, part of the brief for this book, but then I’m in England right now and so such heretical thought might be tolerated. It strikes me that in principle, especially if you restricted yourself to malts, with no grain whisky being used to bulk out the mix, it should be possible to create whiskies that taste (in theory, as I say) as good as the best single malts, yet different – and different in an interesting and worthwhile way – to any given single malt. In the shape of their gold- and blue-label bottles, Johnnie Walker already make a couple of blends that damn well ought to be as good as the best single malts given their prices, and these may well show the way. Merely a thought.

  According to my diary we have a very good curry in a restaurant called Al Quaeda, but I’m sure that’s just a nick-name.

  The next day is hot too. Gary and I talk over the piano pieces, listening through each one in turn. He’s got a lot of stuff noted down about them. I’m mostly just glad he doesn’t dismiss them out of hand, but I can hear what he’s referring to as he picks out specific points and makes general observations. We take a break out at a weird little place called Parkgate, a seaside village with no sea, just a grassy plain with a few barely visible little creeks and pools of water, extending from the grass-front promenade out to the horizon, which is where the sea retreated to over the course of the last hundred years or so. Over rapidly melting ice creams we discuss whether instead of rowing boats you could hire lawn mowers to potter about on the sea of grass (apparently you’re not even supposed to walk out there because it’s Really Dangerous).

  I head northwards later, encouraged; Gary’s response to the music has been positive and practical. He’s quite analytical, so it just comes naturally to him, I suppose. Unlike a lot of analytical people though, he has extraordinary enthusiasm.

  Gary and Roger are both about the same age, a good eleven or so years younger than I am, but even when I was their age I’m not sure I had the same passion for work, for people, for arts and entertainment, interesting and/or weird shit and just life in general that these two have. They are both very clever and good at what they do, but even more than those qualities I think it’s that existential enthusiasm that I most admire in both of them. Sometimes I feel like I’m almost parasitical on these two, a jaded older brother osmosing their fresh fascination with everything remotely interesting around them.

  And so to Bladnoch, the distillery that sounds like it’s in Wales. Actually it’s the closest distillery to Wales. And England, obviously. Bladnoch lies way, way down on the south-west corner of Scotland, near the town of Wigtown, which is sort of between Dumfries and Stranraer.

  This bit of countryside is just packed with great roads; my route has taken us down some effectively deserted bits of tarmac through rotundly spectacular great hills and deep green valleys; wonderful open, rolling scenery incised with immensely fun roads. Near New Galloway, I stop to take a photo of a piece of sculpture sitting on a rise overlooking the road, a giant egg-shaped thing made of small rough slabs of red sandstone. There’s no plaque or notice to say who it’s by, but there’s something of a tradition of this sort of thing in this neck of the woods; further south there’s a whole collection of Henry Moore sculptures sited sitting in poses of calm liquidic ease in middle-of-nowhere fields.

  The area I’m in now is the Galloway Forest Park, and the road and the scenery both just get better. This is one of the least known bits of Scotland, and one of the most rewarding. It lacks the grand verticality and sheer scale of the West Highlands, but makes up for that with a more accessible, even friendlier landscape of rumpled hills, fertile valleys (down here they don’t feel like glens), high moors, a fine smattering of castles, small, winding lochs, lush fields of positively Irish greenness, huge forests and neat, idiosyncratic towns with names like St John’s Town of Dalry, Newton Stewart, Castle Douglas and Gatehouse of Fleet. And all this is before you even get to the coast, which feels sometimes like the least Scottish bit of Scotland (with the possible exception of St Andrews on Graduation Day). The Solway coast can feel almost like part of Dorset. Or South Wales. Hence Bladnoch having that Welsh connection, you feel (I mean, wrongly, obviously).

  Bladnoch distillery disappeared off the extant distillery map some years ago; United Distillers – as they then were – owned it from 1983 to 1993, when they closed it down and removed all the stocks of whisky, the pipe work and other whisky-making bits and pieces (save for the big, expensive-to-break-up things like the mash tun, washbacks and stills) and sold the buildings as very much not a going concern, with the condition included in the deeds to the place that it could not be used as a distillery in the future. And that certainly seemed to be that for Bladnoch.

  Then an Irishman called Raymond Armstrong decided he wanted to buy a holiday cottage on the Solway coast. He bought Bladnoch. Now, there is a cottage sort of attached to Bladnoch, but basically this is a whole sprawling complex of light-industrial buildings with what certainly looks like several acres of warehousing space adjoining; how the hell you’d cop for this lot while looking for a wee holiday home by the coast quite defeats me. Whatever; Mr Armstrong signed the papers, then thought, actually, it would be interesting to try his hand at distilling. Either he’s a real sweet talker or United Distillers were much nicer than Ravening Capitalist Mega Corps are supposed to be, because they agreed
to alter the terms of the no-distilling clause to let Bladnoch make up to 100,000 litres of spirit a year (it could make over ten times that at full production), and so Mr A, after installing the necessary pipes and ancillary bits and pieces and attending to the legal paperwork, had his working distillery.

  Sitting just outside Wigtown in the midst of fields beside the lower tidal reaches of the river Bladnoch, across from a pleasant little pub with colourfully impressive hanging baskets, the distillery is attractive and welcoming. When I arrived they had a pair of six-week old kittens called Sherry and Bourbon wandering around the courtyard and Visitor Centre in that dazed, not entirely coordinated, what-am-I-doing-here-again? manner that kittens tend to exhibit at that age.

  Bladnoch is basically a one-person-operated distillery; with its necessarily sedate production schedule, each stage of the process is carried out in discrete steps and only needs one person to oversee everything. Many more people are required to staff the Centre and manage the place than it needs to actually make the whisky. Perhaps because of this there is a distinctly relaxed air about Bladnoch, a sort of gentle feel to the place. Also, the tour’s a very reasonable one pound each, so it’s not as though they’re running it more to rake in dosh from the Visitor Centre while forgetting about the whisky itself. It feels like part of the community, too; the old bottling hall has been turned into a fairly sizable function space – something like a modern interpretation of a medieval banqueting hall – with a stage, bar and lots of space for dancing and general hilarity. Popular with the locals for weddings and birthday parties, apparently, and even on a sunny afternoon, deserted apart from our small tour group, it feels like is does indeed have an atmosphere conducive to serious fun.

  Very lightly peated indeed (3 p.p.m.), Bladnoch is a light, flowery, crisp dram, very appropriately Lowland in character. I’ve already got a Rare Malts Edition 23-year-old at 53.6 abv and it’s quite a forceful, dynamic dram for something so intrinsically light in character; a rapier to the cutlasses and broadswords of some of the heavier, more northerly whiskies. It’ll be 2010 before the first of the new-ownership bottlings become available from Bladnoch, and it will be interesting to see to what extent the character of the whisky changes then. It’s an easy place to like and the people seem enthusiastic. You find yourself wishing them all the best for the future, and looking forward to watching the development of the distillery and the whisky.