by Iain Banks
I have never gone entirely mad with this big brown book, but even keeping to the humbler examples there are interesting and out-of-the-way whiskies to be sampled if you choose carefully, and it’s really rather comforting to know that you’re in the presence – at the other end of the scale – of Extreme Whisky Pricing. I only hope that the people who do shell out hundreds of pounds for a dram aren’t doing it just to impress partners or people they’re trying to do a deal with. And that they don’t add bleedin Cola.
We stayed at Gleneagles over a long weekend with the McFarlanes, three years ago. Gleneagles has wonderful staff, brilliant food and drink, and has all sorts of sports and activities to take part in if you feel so inclined, or you can just be outrageously pampered. I believe golf is played there on occasion, too.
We went in opposite directions at the end of the weekend, the McFarlanes north to Glenfinnan, us south to North Queensferry. Ann and I were in the Defender at the time, which we’d bought a week or so earlier. It was still unchipped, with its original lowly horsepower quotient, and as we headed out of the car park towards the Glen Devon road, we were behind a brand new silver 911 Turbo. I naturally expected this beast to disappear into the distance in a red-shifted blur within about half a second of exiting the hotel grounds, but it didn’t. Instead it dawdled, rarely doing much more than 50. We stuck behind it in the Land Rover, driving fairly sedately, easily keeping pace. I swear if I’d really wanted to there were a couple of places I could have overtaken the guy. I didn’t – it would have seemed almost sacrilegious, and would basically have been showing off, even borderline aggressive – but I could have. I have no idea why the car was being driven so slowly, but it just goes to show; it ain’t what you drive, it’s how.
Glenturret is one of the smallest distilleries in Scotland (just one pair of stills), and one of the oldest (founded 1775), however it’s also one of the most up-to-date and visitor-friendly. It lies leafily beside the river Turret, only a mile or two from Crieff, and is set up to receive lots of visitors in a Centre displaying all the shiny newness of that Visitors Centre Vernacular, Reformed: blonde wood, lots of wee halogen spotlights, serious glass and cable-linked stanchions. Oddly, the stills themselves are one of the less visually appealing parts of the whole experience; they’re inelegant, almost square-looking things, but I suppose of all the qualities of a still its looks are the least important. There’s good Scottish food in a proper restaurant, various audio-visual bits and bobs, a well stocked shop and two statues; one of a giant grouse, at the entrance to the car park (for this is the Famous Grouse Experience, both it and Glenturret being owned by the Edrington Group), and another, much smaller one of Towser, the old distillery cat credited in The Guinness Book of Records with offing just under 29,000 mice. Actually with offing 28,899 mice, which is a very suspiciously precise number.
Roughly on a par with that warheads-ready-in-45-minutes piece of shite, come to think of it.
Well worth seeing, Glenturret, and well worth drinking, too. I go for the standard 12-year-old, which is all fruit and nut, like an extremely alcoholic chocolate bar. There’s dryness too, especially in the finish, with lolloping hints of grass and flowers. So; a chocolate bar sampled in a sunny meadow. Like an ad-exec’s dream from the seventies, really.
It’s a whisky that would probably particularly benefit from a vertical tasting, where the same drink is sampled at various ages. Reading what people have written about some of its older expressions it sounds like Glenturret changes more than most as it matures, and keeps on developing and getting better. Would that we could all perform the same trick.
14: The Ends of the Country
Welcome to the Free World.
IN THE JULY 17th 2003 edition of the Guardian, in an article headlined ‘We are now a client state’, David Leigh and Richard Norton-Taylor set out the case for Tony Blair having finally surrendered to the United States of America most of the few remaining shreds of British sovereignty.
They point out that Britain cannot target, maintain or fire its Tomahawk cruise missiles without US authority, that this same restriction has applied to the Trident missile system for the last decade and a half (so that Britain’s ‘independent’ nuclear deterrent never has been; basically the British taxpayer has been paying for at least one sturdy spoke of the US’s nuclear umbrella all these years), that Britain has already entirely and formally given up sovereignty in various British mainland bases and several overseas ones, like the Indian Ocean bomber base of Diego Garcia, where the native people were thrown out 30 years ago and left on the docks in east Africa, that we spend a fortune gathering intelligence at GCHQ, share all of it with the US intelligence services – those paragons of vigilance who did such a brilliant job preventing the atrocities on September 11th – but they are under no obligation to share all they know with our lot, that (and this is ongoing through recent and envisaged purchasing and equipment standardisation decisions), Britain is tied into the US war-fighting machine to such an extent that it will no longer be capable of fighting a war without the US’s approval and connivance, while being, by extension, entirely expected to muck in with any American military adventure where such participation will help make this year’s invasion look less like the exercise in naked imperialism that it in fact is.
They also make the point that your individual Brit cannot any longer rely even on the occasionally dubious protection of the legal system which we pay for through our taxes and at least nominally control through the democratic system of the country we live in. British nationals held in the fantasy counter-reality that is Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay on Cuba – prop. George Sauron Bush, Esq. – have effectively been abandoned by the Crown and government that is supposed to protect them (well, they haven’t got even the basic good sense to be white, they are self-confessed Muslims, Dubya says they’re all Bad People anyway so of course they don’t really count).
Finally, it now turns out that back in March, while we were distracted by all that spiffing fighting, British Home Secretary David Blunkett signed a treaty with the US which means that any British national, living in the UK or its dependencies, can be extradited to the US to stand trial for whatever crime an American court deems they might have committed, with no need for any prima facie case to be established in front of a British court before the alleged miscreant is hauled off. In other words, they just have to ask, and you’ll be handed over. The Americans, being the big Uncle Sam daddy rather than the quivering Britannia bitch in this abusively unequal relationship, and very sensibly having a written constitution which forbids such horrors, are of course under no such obligation to reciprocate, and indeed are legally unable to.
So the British legal system and the individual rights of any given Brit are now entirely subservient to the whims of any one of gawd-knows how many public servants and judges sitting in the United States, home of Dubya the Usurper and his grotesque squad of Cold War throwbacks. The Home Office press release covering the meeting during which this historic and unprecedented surrender of sovereignty took place failed to mention it had happened at all. As Leigh and Norton-Taylor suggest, maybe it was through shame.
Equally quiet at the time, once this treaty’s terms have finally slithered out into the light of day, are all the right-wing British newspapers which can be relied upon to foam at the mouth whenever they detect the slightest hint that Britain might be surrendering something as important as control over the shape of a fruit to Brussels. Suggest that there might be a standard Europe-wide definition of what you can call ‘ice cream’ or ‘chocolate’ and these charmers are spitting blood about faceless Eurocrats completing the job that Napoleon and Hitler failed to accomplish and dropping dark hints about leaving the EU altogether; abandon us all to the mercies of a proto-fascist rogue state 3000 miles away over which we have no democratic or legal control whatsoever, and there’s not a damn peep.
Last time I checked I did have an MEP to whom I could complain about any abuses within the European system, and w
ho I could, along with my fellow voters, remove from office; I have yet to be informed of the identity of my Congressional representative.
On the 18th of July, 2003, Tony Blair makes a speech before the US Congress (meanwhile a scientist called David Kelly is taking his last walk along a path in Oxfordshire). Blair as good as admits that he and Bush were lying about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction but says that history will forgive them. As one has to suppose it will, when it forgives Quisling, Pétain and Milosevic (I’d include Mussolini, but under Berlusconi the Italians seem halfway to forgiving that particular scumbag already). Then Blair tells America – and, more to the point, the illegitimate, far-right fundamentalist administration of Bush the Younger – that it has a mission to combat evil wherever it thinks it sees it, and bring its form of peace to all the world. ‘Destiny put you in this place in history, in this moment in time,’ he tells them. ‘The task is yours to do … Our job is to be there with you.’
To which the only reasonable, calmly considered reply any sane Brit can offer is, I think, ‘Oh no it fucking isn’t, you self-righteous warmongering git.’
To Aberfeldy with my dad and Uncle Bob. We whisk northwards in my dad’s automatic 528i. This is our old car and similar-in-some-ways to the M5 so I feel that I don’t do too badly making just the one grab for the selector in a vain attempt to change down. The guys don’t make any sarcastic remarks.
My dad is 85 and Uncle Bob is his young brother – a sprightly 70 and a bit. He lives down the hill in our village and is still a bit dazed looking sometimes after losing his wife, the wonderful, vivacious Isabel, last year. Aunt Isabel – Glammy Aunt Isabel as she was accurately christened by one of Ann’s nieces – always looked about fifteen years younger than she was, and was just full of life and love. She died very suddenly last summer, with no warning at all, leaving Bob and her children, Vicky, Donna and Bobby, bereft. You always wish a quick, unlingering end for those you love, but you forget that an unexpectedly sudden death leaves people unprepared, just stunned.
My dad is the man I’ve admired most in my life. I suppose objectively Nelson Mandela is more admirable, but of all the people I’ve ever met, could ever claim properly to have known, my father is the one I’ve looked up to the most. Like I said earlier, both my parents made me feel loved and special, and I feel that I owe them both enormously.
Uncle Bob is arguably the really artistic one in our family; he’s been an accomplished watercolour painter for 30 years or so and he’s had dozens of stories and poems published over the last few years in a variety of magazines (it occurred to me a couple of years back that actually my mum’s a fellow professional too, now, as she had a poem published, for dosh, in a magazine). Bob used to be a rigger on the Forth Road Bridge, and it’s thanks to him I got to the top of the bridge, twice. The view from up there, 512 feet up – the Forth Bridge is a mere 365 five feet – is simply breathtaking. The first time I went up there was on a beautiful clear day in the early seventies, when I came through to the Ferry on a day trip from Stirling; I thought I’d taken a whole spool of photos, but my camera didn’t. The second time, with Les, was on another calm, bright day not long before Bob retired. I took two cameras this time, just to be certain. Loads of photos.
We head straight up the M90/A9 with just the one wee detour at Logierait to take in an old disused railway bridge Ann and I discovered last year that’s been turned into a privately owned but open to the public route across the Tay. The 528 clatters over the bridge’s slatted wooden deck and briefly grounds its sump on a seriously vicious hard-rubber speed-bump, even at walking pace (there’s another one like it at the far end of the bridge; the trick – apart from taking it dead slow, obviously – is to brake as you go over and then release as the front wheels start to drop, letting the rebound on the springs provide the necessary clearance).
The Aberfeldy distillery and Dewar’s World of Whisky lie a few miles further on, on the outskirts of the town of Aberfeldy.
Now this is Extreme Whisky Glitz. The distillery itself is very neat, clipped and well presented, with imposing grey buildings topped with the traditional pagoda, precise lawns, lots of flowers, sharp paths and a steel and blond-wood bridge into the Visitor Centre, housed in the distillery’s old maltings. A nature trail meanders off into the woods and in theory we might have been tempted to go for a stroll, however it’s a day of on–off drizzle – a Soft Day as they’d term it in Ireland – and so we miss out on the nature stuff. There’s an old and well-preserved saddle-tank shunting engine in the grounds which used to haul the barrels from the distillery to the branch line that went via the old bridge we crossed earlier.
Inside is where the real plushness is. There’s a well-stocked shop – the Brand Store, no less – and for a fiver you get given a big flat stick-like thing like two very early mobile phones joined together end-on. This is a sort of personalised, opt-in tour guide, and available in different languages. Scattered round the place there are head-with-headphones symbols with numbers underneath; you key the number into the phone-like Audio Guide and listen to the solid-state recorded patter.
There are really two tours here; this one with the hand-stick thing of Dewar’s World of Whisky, then a more conventional distillery tour with a human guide. The W of W tour really starts with a good, not too embarrassing video which is shown in an auditorium that looks a lot like the sort of private film theatre I imagine Third World dictators have in their palaces; lots of red draping with fake white columns round the inset walls, with the three-part semi-wraparound screen – quite effectively used in the presentation – framed in scrolled gilt. This is very much just one side of tasteless but I can’t entirely decide which. Actually I can, but it doesn’t matter because once you leave the Auditorium and are batched into the rest of the display space, the glitz turns out to be entirely appropriate to the life of Tommy Dewar, the man and retail genius who really set the whole kit and indeed caboodle going in the first place, a century and a half ago.
There’s a darkly opulent study recreated in here, a blending room, lots of hands-on computer stuff – create your own blend, play a whisky trivia game, zap an Excise man in Speyside Invaders (okay I made that last one up), that sort of thing – and drawer after drawer full of Dewar family and brand memorabilia. You get the distinct feeling that the Dewars were not great ones for throwing things away. I fully expected to find a drawer full of Tommy Dewar’s old bus tickets. Perhaps I missed it.
The bulk of this genuinely fascinating display, however, is comprised of the Dewar’s brand advertising materials. Dewar’s have always been right at the cutting edge of international advertising. They made the first whisky film advert in 1898 – a film Tommy had projected onto a skyscraper in New York – they were one of the first to advertise on a balloon and they were the first to make a TV documentary on the production of Scotch. Clips of films ancient and recent, multitudinous posters of varying degrees of gaudiness and subtlety and dozens of promotional products make up a spellbinding Museum of Canny Advertising.
The tasting bit at the end of the tour is also a further nosing/blending teaching area, with a bar where you can sample the blend at different ages and the Aberfeldy itself, plus tables to sit at with little smell sample bottles and a Nosing and Tasting Notes form to fill out. There’s a café here too.
After this multimedia extravaganza, the distillery tour might seem almost a disappointment, however the guides do their best to live up to the brand vision. Well, our guy wore a kilt, which is a start. Actually he was really interesting. His dad had worked here in the distillery – he was present in a couple of the blown-up old black and white photos displayed on the tour – and he used to skelp about the place when he was a bairn and was given a whisky toddy every night from the age of about one. One month, that is. Claimed as a result never to have had a cold in his life, but developed a concomitant dislike of whisky, blended or malt (which is interesting but definitely not my idea of a good trade-off).
Aberfeldy is at the
heart of the Dewar’s blend and these days the distillery runs 24 hours a day for five days a week, employing eleven staff including the secretary and manager. There’s a big enclosed mash tun with a neat water-skooshing system to keep the window clear, two steel washbacks outside and eight inside, made from Siberian larch rather than the usual Oregon pine. The four big stills have nearly flat Lyne arms and the whole pace is as neat as the grounds outside, all cream and burgundy paint and looking positively polished and gloriously gleaming. This is real engine-room, full-steamahead industrial malt-making. About 90 per cent of the output goes for blending and the resulting malt expressions – I choose the standard 12-year-old – are not in a sense the point of the place, which is very much to make the principal component of the Dewar’s blend. It’s a perfectly palatable dram all the same, bursting with flavours, quite sweet and with hints of flowers and herbs. Big and boisterous and in a way almost asking to be blended, but nothing to be ashamed of. The whisky equivalent of somebody you wouldn’t kick out of bed.
Dad, Uncle Bob and I lunch in the Black Watch Hotel in the centre of Aberfeldy. This is fairly appropriate as the Black Watch was my paternal grandfather’s regiment. Dad and Bob’s father spent three years in the trenches of the Somme and I still have a ring he carved out of a shell fragment. It’s worn away a bit now but you can just about make out the figures and letters that spell out 1914 Somme 1917. He made it back alive and my dad was born in 1918.
One day when he was still in short trousers my dad and his dad were on the far side of the Forth, at Barnbougle estate, across from the family home near Granddad’s work place in the quarry near Inverkeithing. They were on the broad beach there, having rowed over from Fife, looking for coal and coke washed up from the Granton gas works down the coast, when a man carrying a shotgun approached from the trees and they got to talking. This proved to be the laird and local land owner, the guy whose estate my granddad and dad were on.