by Iain Banks
The view is magnificent, across the arms of the busy town spread out enfolding the harbour, with sheltering Kerrera just off shore, Lismore, Morvern and Mull in the distance. A few long banks of mist spill over the far sea, brilliant white in the August light.
Oban’s a proper urban distillery, even more so than, say, Tobermory, however it’s still very close to the sea, or at least the harbour. Good Visitor Centre, interesting tour (unique double worm-tub condensers, so there) and a well-stocked shop very definitely in Modern Vernacular style, with walls of thin-slabbed greenish glass, pale wood abounding, well up-tarted iron columns and lots of steel stanchions. All a bit cramped and crammed in, with a bustling town around it and a cliff behind, but interesting. Busy, at you might expect, given that it’s in the centre of one of the West’s prime tourist spots and the whisky itself is well promoted as part of the UDV/Diageo Classic Malts range.
As a dram, Oban is an interesting amalgam, with hints of Island – even Islay – and Highland characteristics. The standard expression is a 14-year-old with only a thimble of peat and wee breeze of sea about it. It has lots of caramelly, smoky sweetness, a sort of luscious thickness in the mouth and a reprise of seaweed towards the end. A little pot of gold at the end of a fabulous railway line.
The wait for the journey back isn’t too much fun, though the reason for the final delay is not one you could blame on Scotrail. The 1320 train had almost every seat reserved and so we stay in Oban – strolling, shopping and sitting in the bar – until the 1810 is due to leave. There is, however, a problem. There’s been a bad road accident just out of town which has created a huge tailback (and caused the wee roads I’ve referred to as the Oban bypass to jam up for hours). Our train driver is on the wrong side of the jam. For a while there’s talk of the train being cancelled. Oh well, I tell Ann, we’ll just stay another night, what the hell. We already know the Caledonian is fully booked for tonight, but I just walk round to the Tourist Information Centre, attractively housed in an old church … only to discover that Oban is having one of its Full nights, with no hotel rooms or B&Bs left. There might be some people left who didn’t normally do B&B who would put stranded tourists up, but even they might all be full …
Redman’s Blues.
Les and Aileen did this once years ago, when somebody from the Fort William tourist office got their number and – in some desperation – rang up about ten o’clock in the evening to say, look, they had all these people and nowhere to put them up for the night (Fort Bill Full); could they help out?
So the McFarlanes played host to a very nice young Japanese couple for a night. Les and Aileen are educated as well as educating types, but their Japanese is limited. To Hai, Sayonara and various brand names, basically. Their guests’ English was, if anything, even more sparse. Still, a bed was made up, breakfast was provided the next morning and the nice Japanese couple insisted on paying even though the McFarlanes were embarrassed and reluctant.
However.
I should mention that our pal Ray had been staying that night too, there for the weekend. Ray, being himself, could not resist singing what he claimed was an old authentic Gaelic folk song for the nice young Japanese couple, in a spirited performance, with actions, which they duly recorded on their camcorder. So, somewhere in Tokyo, or wherever, there was once a video of Ray singing. We like to think the nice Japanese couple had various friends round to see the videos they took while in Scotland, and so watched this. Ray sang the following, or something very like it, to the tune of Oh Flower of Scotland: ‘Ocha-lomine loashin, soagoo-phuid eadeskin, sheakital oot’an arhubitallin …’
Calamine Lotion. I’m saying no more. Work it out.
Anyway, so; maybe no way out by rail today, no way out by road for hours (we couldn’t hire a car – I’d not thought to bring my driving licence), and nowhere to stay. Yikes! Maybe we could get on the next ferry out and hire a cabin on a long round trip to Barra or somewhere. Maybe I should investigate the taxi fare to Fife. Maybe Ann could call her Islay Air pal Lorna and ask for the name of a good helicopter pilot …
The train driver gets through. He arrives at the station to considerable – and non-ironic – applause, which you can’t imagine happens all that often. It’s another hot journey, even as the sun sets. We arrive home just before midnight, still a bit frazzled and sweaty.
From our house, a reasonable time to Oban by car is not much over two hours. By train it’s nearly six. Unless you miss or haven’t booked on one train and have to get the next in which case it becomes eleven.
If it could have, I’m sure that the M5, tucked up in its garage all this time, would have shaken its suspension and rolled its headlights.
16: A Secret Still
THE SEARCH FOR the perfect dram leads to the quest for the secret still, just because whisky and the making of it is largely about tradition, about history, and so much of whisky’s past is written in the vanishing ink of clear, illegal, governmentally unsanctioned raw spirit. There is a feeling that by finding and tasting spirit produced recently from a small, domestic-scale still hidden in the hills, half buried with heather turfs by the side of a stream, the way they all used to be, somehow it will be possible to connect with a romantic past that modern-day whisky is still informed by and may well benefit from comparison with.
The search for the perfect dram leads to beautiful or honestly workmanlike distilleries scattered throughout the length and breadth of Scotland, their presence signalled by tall chimneys, acres of warehouses and white-on-brown tourist signposts, it leads you to Visitor Centres full of smiling, helpful people in tartan, it leads you to audio-visual displays, carefully lit blonde wood and gleaming stainless steel, it leads to precisely laid-out car parks, dainty flower beds, neatly stacked displays of whisky marmalade and whisky mustard and whisky fudge and bottles and decanters made in the shape of stills, it leads you to cash registers and credit card terminals and plastic bags with the distillery’s web address printed on them.
The quest for a secret still – inspired by a single lead, a years-old report from somebody who knows somebody – leads to a long journey in the slack water between summer and autumn and a breeze-stroked hillside with the smell of the sea curling from the distant shore. It leads to a short track and a locked gate, a clamber and a hike and a feeling of exposure, walking up the grassed strip between deep ruts, the soil and the slow-swaying grasses damp from earlier showers. It leads to a straggled collection of disused buildings, an old farm, all tumbled, broken down. It leads to tall grasses, banks of nettles and ancient bales of square-mesh wire, flattened by time and infested with weeds; to crumbling stone walls, half rough-casted, and to rotting wooden window frames, the glass so long shattered and resmashed the ragged, finger-high margin left feels nearly edgeless, merely cold.
The interiors are mostly open to the clouds, some mounded with chaotic, waist-high rubble, one sloped with rusting corrugated iron, one still mostly shielded from the elements; a half-intact floor and a view up the slope towards a small stream, angling beneath a low hill crowned with a dry-stane dike on the skyline, its silhouetted stones filigreed against a still bright sky of slowly sliding clouds.
The room looks like an old kitchen. There’s a wide chimney and a gaping dusty hole where an old cast-iron range might have been. A chipped Belfast sink under the window stands on rough-looking naked bricks, badly cemented. The single tap turns but nothing comes out. There’s no pipe beneath the plughole anyway, just a hole in the floorboards. No suspicious-looking pipe work or lumps of peat, no old copper water tanks lying around, not really anything that looks out of place or could be dual use.
Outside again, by the back doorstep, as another shower comes in over the fields, there are a few slim ears of barley, growing in a tiny brittle posy. Pale straw gold but flimsy-feeling, they are dry and light in the hand, barely more than husks.
Probably blown here from a far-away field.
A few grains, as a souvenir.
So a secret, still. I
suppose I effectively tasted what I was looking for – raw spirit – at Macallan and Old Pulteney and a few other places – whisky straight out of the still. I seriously doubt that the stuff these guys make would taste any worse than what might come out of an illicit still, and to the extent that genuine peatreek might have tasted different, it would probably have tasted worse.
Of course, it isn’t really the same, but I can live with this.
Time for some closing thoughts.
I like malt whiskies. And the malts I’ve come to truly love while researching this book are those which in a sense have least to do with Scotland. What I mean is that the whiskies I’ve really fallen for are those that have taken on the majority of their character from drinks made in other countries; from American bourbon, or Spanish sherry, or Portugese port, or French wine or Cuban rum. They are still very much single malts, they are still very much Scotch, but it’s the interplay between the raw spirit as made in Scotland and those other tastes brought in from abroad that have made the greatest and most enduring impression on me.
I love this assimilative aspect of whisky. I love the fact that single malts, those apparent paradigms of purity, actually show far more variety in taste than any blend, that they are much more influenced by outside factors than any other type of alcoholic drink made without the same seemingly limiting strictures of law and tradition. I love the fact that no other drink I’ve ever heard of has the same sort of ability to absorb (I mean, flavoured vodkas? Really). Maybe they could, of course; I’d guess that brandy or vodka or bourbon or any other spirit finished in wildly different barrels sourced from around the world could and would display the same amazing spectra of tastes and subtleties as single-malt whisky, but the point is that whisky already does, and we should treasure this, indeed we need to celebrate the fact.
Whisky really is an international drink in that sense too, and this ability to accept and combine with distinctive flavours from elsewhere, to enhance them and be enhanced by them, is, potentially at least, an important symbol.
The Scots as a people are the result of a great blending and marrying over the millennia, of Picts, Vikings, Angles, Saxons and countless others, and Scots people have been leaving Scotland and venturing out into the rest of the world for centuries. Like the Irish, they often had to go without much choice in the matter, but go they did, and they blended in, as a rule, while tending to retain a distinctive flavour, an identifiable note, within those other conglomerations of people across the globe.
Those Scots – often poor and fleeing injustice, with their homes burned behind them, victims of a corrupt and persecutive legal system which was glad to see the back of them and would not have welcomed their return – were the economic refugees of their day; they were, effectively, asylum seekers. Where they were allowed to put down roots, they flourished. Where they were accepted, they added immeasurably to the intellectual, cultural and financial wealth of the countries which had taken them in. It is only to our shame that we even think twice about extending the same basic human decency, the same self-interested courtesy, to those in the same situation now as we were in then.
In any event, we need to relax now and again, and a lot of us need to get out of our heads, with a little chemical help. If we’re sensible, we’ll accept this and set things up so that when we, or others, indulge ourselves so, we’ll be – or they’ll be – protected from avoidable harm within a sensible set of agreed rules. So a legal framework is required which on the one hand stops the unscrupulous from adulterating whatever it is we’re using for such recreational purposes, while on the other hand prevents us from inflicting the effects of our inebria on others, by, for example, driving, operating heavy machinery or taking flash photographs in wildly volatile environments.
We pretty much have this already with alcohol and tobacco, though arguably without the commitment to early education that might help prevent later abuse. The legal framework surrounding alcohol use needs to proscribe things like drunk driving because alcohol has such profound behavioural effects on us. The legal framework surrounding tobacco use is just there to try to stop the young getting hooked too early; tobacco is such a rubbish drug there’s no real problem with it affecting your ability to drive a car beyond the trivial aspects of needing to glance down at the lighter or ash tray now and again.
I speak as an occasional user myself here, a social smoker, and let’s face it, fellow tobacco junkies, it really must be the single most pitiful drug ever discovered. Its two most profound effects are that it gets you hooked and it’s deadly. That’s it.
Well, wow. Even ignoring the seriously weird shit you can experience through acid, ecstasy, bong-fulls of dope and all the other illegal stuff, just look at drink for goodness’ sake! You get effects generally including but not limited to: dizziness, euphoria, double vision, a hilarious inability to stand, all-consuming, tearful love for the drunken bastard or bastards you’re getting drunk with, the beer glasses effect whereby those of your gender of choice all become incredibly if only temporarily attractive, and pink elephants!
And with tobacco?
The first fag of the day gives you a slight buzz.
Right.
After extensive research, I can definitely tell you that single-malt whiskies are good to drink. Some are very good to drink. A few are exceptional.
There is, of course, no perfect dram. Or there are lots, depending how you look at it. What apparently tastes like a perfect dram now might not taste so good later. What tastes like a brilliant dram to me might taste awful to you. Your mileage, as our American cousins say, may differ.
To sum up, then.
I still love the Islay whiskies, particularly the three south coasters: Ardbeg, Lagavulin and – most of all – Laphroaig.
I’ve come to suspect that floor maltings might indicate a really good whisky – Balvenie, Bowmore, Highland Park, Laphroaig and Springbank all still floor malt, and all are amongst the very best. Whether this is really something to do with the taste that only traditional floor malting can produce, or is just a sign, a signifier of something else, something to do with how traditions are applied in the contemporary world, the way that the whole technology of whisky-making, ancient and modern, is applied to the task, I confess I don’t know, but I think the question is worth asking.
Being made on an island, or at least close to the sea, would seem a hopeful sign too. Even if you ignore all the Islays, Glenmorangie, Highland Park, Springbank and Talisker would support that argument by themselves.
Heritage, at least as a sign of vast accumulated experience, along with intense attention to detail, also make a difference, so Glenlivet (after a dip) and the ever-impressive Macallan would have to figure in any best of.
As a sort of meta-whisky – a virtual contender if you like – membership of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society and the close perusal of the Tasting Notes each season could easily produce at least one bottle per order which you’d swear was one of the very best you’d ever tasted, so it has to count as well.
Ultimately, the single malt that most impressed me without being outrageously expensive or simply unavailable was that 21-year-old Glenfiddich Gran Reserva. This is brilliantly different, complex, utterly assured whisky-making of the first order; a drink that tastes unimprovably stunning with no water added, yet maybe even better with a dash.
At 60 quid for a bottle (at time of writing, mid August 2003) it’s not exactly cheap, but then look at it this way; there’s over three times as much alcohol in a bottle of 40 abv whisky as there is in even a fairly powerful bottle of wine, and there’s way more than three times the amount of taste per sip, even if you water it down. So if you’d splash out on a fifteen or twenty pound bottle of wine, there should be no problem handing over 60 smackers for a brilliant bottle of malt.
In fact, if I’m right and this stuff is the equivalent of Grange or Pétrus, it’s a positive bargain; they work out at 60 quid or more for a single glass.
It is all subjective, of cour
se, and what I like, you may not. Your own perfect dram may still be out there.
The search is half the fun.
Further Reading
Ainsworth, Jim (ed.), Good Food Guide 2003, The, Which Books, London, 2002
Andrews, Allen, The Whisky Barons, Jupiter Books (London) Ltd, London, 1977
Bénitah, Thierry, Whisky, Flammarion, Spain, 2002
Binns, Ronald, The Loch Ness Mystery Solved, Star, London, 1984 (Open Books 1983)
Brander, Michael, Brander’s Original Guide to Scotch Whisky, The Gleneil Press, Haddington, 2000
Broadbent, Michael, Michael Broadbent’s Vintage Wine, Little, Brown, London, 2002
Brown, Gordon, The Whisky Trails, Prion Books, London, 2000
Bruce-Gardyne, Tom, Scotch Whisky Book, The, Lomond Books, Edinburgh, 2002
Collins Scotland Atlas and Gazetteer, Collins, London, 1999
Cooper, Derek & Fay Godwin, The Whisky Roads of Scotland, Jill Norman & Hobhouse Ltd, London, 1982
Daiches, David, Scotch Whisky, Its Past and Present, Andre Deutsch, London, 1969
Daiches, David, Wee Dram, A, Andre Deutsch, London, 1990
Darton, Mike, Dictionary of Scottish Place Names, The, Lochar, Moffat, 1990
Davidson, Neil, Discovering the Scottish Revolution, Pluto Press, London, 2003
Drummond, Bill, How To Be An Artist, Penkiln Burn, Bungay, Suffolk, 2002
Greenwood, Malcolm, Ramble Round the World, A, Neil Wilson Publishing (NWP), Glasgow, 1998
Greenwood, Malcolm, Unique Distilleries of Scotland & Ireland, Greenwood Publishing, 2001
Gunn, Neil M., Whisky and Scotland, George Routledge & Sons, London, 1935