Raw Spirit (16 page)

‘I’m getting 22 miles to the gallon!’ I protest (Les and I are both of an age where we still think in terms of mpg rather than km per litre). ‘For a five-litre engine, that’s bloody good. Actually it probably means I’m not driving the car hard enough. I’ve been known to get 350 miles out of a full tank on a long run. In an M5 that’s probably some sort of record.’

‘Yeah, but our A6 gets 800 miles between refills,’ Les says.

‘It’s a
diesel
!’ I screech. Not unreasonably, I think.

‘Yeah. So?’

Dear Enzo preserve us true petrol-heads from the smugness of oil burners. Les likes fast cars as much as I do but I can see he’s on the cusp of being turned by that damn five-cylinder diesel. The sooner we get him behind the wheel of the M5 the better.

‘Well, anyway,’ I splutter. ‘I mean, it’s just not fair to compare … hold on. Wait a minute. Where’s Aileen?’

‘Uh-oh. I think I saw a sweet shop back there.’

G-on-S has a great sweet shop called the Candy Box; one of those time warp places where they measure boiled sweets out of big jars and sell stuff you thought they’d stopped making years ago, as well as having lots of intriguing-looking modern sweets and some terribly tempting Belgian chocolates. Aileen beelines for shops like this the way I go straight to outdoor outlets.

Astoundingly, we don’t bump into anybody who knows Les the whole time we’re in Grantown. This is genuinely
remarkable.
I’ve never known anybody more prone to meeting people he knows where all concerned least expect it. Usually this happens abroad in the middle of nowhere, and I speculate that maybe we’re just too close to home. Then Les reminds me that actually he did bump into another Lochaber High School teacher while we were at the top of the funicular.

We eventually drag Aileen out of the sweet shop before she can do a deal on buying the whole stock for less than trade and sweep off along a wee road through the woods towards Glenfarclas distillery, though only after promising her there are bound to be things like whisky-flavoured fudge and similar goodies to be had in the distillery shop.

The three of us plus my notebook take the tour at Glenfarclas. The tour costs £3.50 each, which seems fairly close to standard for distilleries with decent Visitor Centres (though there are exceptions); as a rule you get vouchers with the tickets which entitle you to get almost all the money back if you buy a bottle in the shop afterwards, which is not such a bad deal. It would be nicer – and feel more like proper Highland hospitality – if all distillery tours were free and ended with a complimentary dram, but visitor facilities cost money and the charges don’t seem to have put many people off.

Besides, at the end of the Glenfarclas tour you get to see the beautiful wood-panelled room in the Visitor Centre which is constructed from pieces salvaged from the old
Empress of Australia
. The liner was built in 1913 and broken up in 1960, in Ward’s ship-breaking yard, by Inverkeithing, a mile or so away from where we live, in sunny North Queensferry. I have to declare a personal connection here; quite a few of my family on my dad’s side worked in Ward’s over the years.

Whatever, the tour at Glenfarclas is worth doing. It’s not a huge distillery but it does have what looks to me like a pretty enormous malt mill, equipped with dirty great magnets to weed any metallic stuff out of the barley, and the big, bulb-shaped stills are the biggest on Speyside. More interesting than all the technical stuff though is how truly autonomous, cohesive and family-run the distillery is.

The Grant family have owned and run Glenfarclas for five
generations,
with the sixth generation learning the ropes right now. It’s a reflection of the fact they have to do all their promotional and other bureaucratic work in-house – rather than leaving such overhead-heavy stuff to be done by a central HQ somewhere else – that while the distillery itself employs only eight people, the office side needs fifteen. Mash tuns, washbacks and stills just fill the warehouses up; it takes dedicated desk-work to keep the whisky moving out of them, onto the market.

A true independent in an industry that has grown increasingly corporate over the centuries, and especially over the last few decades, it would arguably be something to be treasured even if the whisky they made was only good, but it’s much better than that. The Glenfarclas 105 (the 105 proof translating to 60 per cent alcohol by volume) has long been one of the best strong whiskies widely available, and it’s hard not to make comparisons between its robust, self-confident style and the independence of the firm that makes it. Given that the effectively cask-strength 105 is only about eight to ten years old, this is a sweet, full and amazingly rounded whisky. The bottle I bought was the 21-year-old, which is even more developed, smoother – only to be expected given that it’s 43 per cent rather than 60 per cent – and quite spectacular in its complexity, packed with spicy, fruity flavours all wrapped in a subtle smokiness.

In a sense, it ought to make no difference who makes a whisky, or where it’s made; all that should matter is the taste, and that’s it. Yet, part of the reason for visiting a distillery is that seeing where the stuff is made, meeting the people who make it – and often breathing in the scent of the place where it rests for umpteen years – undeniably adds to the experience in the future, just for the simple reason that that is what we are like; we are connection-making creatures. You might be on the other side of the world, sweating in a climate Scotland hasn’t seen since the pre-Cambrian, when most of its land mass was somewhere over the Equator, but the smell of a dram from a distillery you’ve been to years before will suddenly whisk you back to a collection of black-walled buildings on a chilly hillside in Angus.

It’s a subjective encounter, drinking a whisky. You’re bringing as much to the event as the drink is; maybe more. Just as touring a distillery adds to the sensation of drinking its products subsequently, bringing in resonances that have nothing directly to do with the smell or taste or feel of the liquid, so knowing you’re making a link to a proudly independent family firm, not a vast conglomerate, however well run and relatively benign, allows you to enjoy the dram with just a little extra relish.

In any event, on taste alone, Glenfarclas is one of the Speyside greats, and deserves to be ranked with the more heavily promoted brands.

We stay at Muckrach Lodge. The owners turn out to be called McFarlane too, though they don’t seem to be any sort of close relations to Les and Aileen (I mean, not that we’d actually have asked for a discount if they were. I have a brother-in-law who’s a Penfold, but do I ever ask for a discount on Penfold’s Grange Bin 95?).

Faced with the irresistible attraction of the Muckrach’s Full Scottish Breakfast – pretty much the complete whangy; a typical Highland-hospitality-gone-mad wide-spectrum belly-banging megabrek – I go into Hotel Mode, which consists of having one of these big-boy breakfasts (well, you tell yourself, you’re paying for it so you might as well eat it), a snack for lunch – usually just soup – and then the equally generously proportioned evening meal. The temptation is to have a big lunch as well, because your stomach is getting kind of used to these enormous portions, but this leads to Expanded Waist Syndrome and is a Thoroughly Bad Thing. I suspect a lot of tourists go into Hotel or B&B Mode while they’re here.

We get down to some serious research. Speyside is the focus of the Scotch industry, its epicentre, its spiritual headquarters; if the industry was ever going to have a theme park (may the thought perish), this is where it would be. Whisky Land! Whisky World!

Round here they have the Whisky Trail (they have a Castle
Trail
too, which both Les and I feel we should do one day, but one interest at a time) and round here it seems you can barely drive a mile without seeing a distillery; sometimes the whole thing, strewn across a hillside, sometimes just the pagoda roofs poking up above the trees or the steam-bannered chimneys standing out over the long roofs of a few acres of bonded warehouses. Sometimes all you see is a brown tourist information sign, pointing the way, and sometimes there’s just a very discreet sign by the roadside, for trade visitors and contractors, if a distillery is not set up to accommodate tourists. A lot are, though, and personally I find them very civilised places to be.

There is now a kind of Visitor Centre Vernacular, a recognisable, getting-on-for industry-wide style of layout and furnishing that might seem twee if you’re one of these minimalist people who like their houses to look like operating theatres, but which kind of suits the nature of the process that goes to make whisky, and which is anyway changing gradually.

There will probably be lots of wood and sometimes quite a lot of exposed stonework, there will be a darkened area where you can sit or stand and watch a visual presentation which will tend to major on sparkling streams gurgling across moody moors and over bulbous boulders, swaying sunlit fields of barley, gleaming great stills, old buildings wreathed in steam and atmospherically lit barrels in dark warehouses. Often there will be an example of an old illicit still, sitting glistening in a coppery sort of way in a corner, usually in a mocked-up bothy setting. Frequently there will be lots of old distillery tools, from when each concern was more self-contained than today: adzes, malt shovels, rummagers and the rest.

Almost always there will be impressively massive old ledgers and enormous leather-bound books that are the genuine articles from a hundred years ago, detailing aspects of the distillery’s processes and general book-keeping. In the bit where you do the tasting there will definitely be lots of wood, various seats, benches and tables – almost always in wood – and sometimes there will be couches and chairs, usually in leather.

These are intensely comfortable places to be. Ideally you want to be able to sample the product as well, to have a decent taste or two and not have to worry about driving, but even if you’re unable to indulge there are few more pleasant public spaces. For all the slightly formulaic feel of a standard Visitor Centre – and this may well be something that you’ll only recognise if, like me, you’re doing them by the dozen – there is a sort of honesty about them, just because they are so close to the production process itself.

They are in the end anyway all different, just as the malts themselves are all different. The people who staff them add an extra flavour to the mix as well: the awkward but knowledgeable ones who you can tell really just want to be back doing the technical stuff, opening valves, sniffing the air outside the spirit safe, waiting for the time to take the best cut of the spirit, but who can answer any production question you ask them; the totally enthusiastic types who really want you to know what a great thing they do here and how wonderful their particular whisky is; the usually slightly diffident manager or even owner who’s unsure quite how to modulate their enthusiasm and how much depth of knowledge to go into; and the slightly wacko characters who at their best keep you wide-eyed and laughing and at their worst still make you laugh, even if they do seem to be part of some bizarre care-in-the-community light-industrial outsourcing programme. I’m sure I’ve encountered somebody on a tour or behind the counter in a Visitor Centre who was just plain boring and uninterested, but obviously I’ve succeeded in forgetting about them.

One of the plusses of going round lots of distilleries is meeting up with people who know each other, or are related to each other. It is a small industry; less than a hundred distilleries, each one often only employing a dozen people in the actual physical process and usually fewer than that in the onsite office. The skills involved are very transferable within the industry as a whole, and because a lot of the distilleries are owned by larger concerns, people are able to move round within that company’s sites and see how it’s done elsewhere.
I
lost count of the number of times I bumped into somebody’s mum, dad, son, daughter, brother or whatever, once I’d told them that I had been to all these other distilleries. ‘Och, you’ll have talked to so-and-so …’

Come to think of it, when you’re a writer, especially one who’s managing to keep the wolf from the door, there aren’t many professions you encounter which make you think, Hmm, actually this must be quite a decent job. I wouldn’t mind doing this … but working in a distillery is arguably one of them. That’s not to suggest that it must all be sweetness and light incessantly, or that in the end you don’t have bosses, who may well be as stupid and/or as malicious as bosses everywhere can be, or that your job isn’t subject to the vagaries and volatilities of the market and the changing tastes of the international public, but given that most of this applies to most jobs, it could be argued that working in a relatively safe environment in some of the finest scenery in one of the world’s more beautiful countries while helping to make something to be proud of, within a tradition stretching back hundreds of years, can be quite rewarding.

Put it this way; I never did meet anybody who couldn’t wait to get out of the industry and away. I’m sure they have existed, but maybe they’ve all already left to become fashion photographers or skateboard wizards or party planners to the superrich or far-eastern golf-course designers or something.

Wandering round Cardhu distillery – heart of Johnnie Walker, Scottish larch washbacks rather than the more usual Oregon pine – watching some ducks silently preening themselves on the neatly clipped grass by the side of the gently steaming pond where the cooling water goes to relax, looking round the smart, cream-coloured buildings, listening to the quiet hissings and distant creaking noises of the place, surrounded by sloped fields and lines of budding trees, a pleasant glow manifesting itself after a modest tasting – Les was driving – Speyside suddenly seemed like one of the best places in the whole damn world.

Stand-out distilleries? Architecture first. The Tormore is my favourite. Bit old fashioned, given that it was built in 1958, but
fabulously
dramatic; fountains, manicured lawns, topiary, ornamental curling pond (what?) and an enormous great black chimney sticking up at the back that looks like a super-gun barrel (the original idea was to make it look like a giant whisky bottle, which would have been even more insane). Brilliant building, and nicely matched outbuildings. Why this place doesn’t have a Visitor Centre and tours is beyond me. The whisky itself has been criticised as being too metallic, though the 15-year-old I tracked down seemed all right to me; moderately voluptuous, in fact.