Raw Spirit (17 page)

The Chivas Brothers’ Allt-A-Bhainne (1975) reminds me of a Catholic seminary for some reason; severe and inward looking, but elegant. I haven’t tracked down a single malt from it yet.

Auchroisk distillery (1974) is quite beautiful in a modernist kind of way, all steep roofs and interesting angles. There’s a slightly gratuitous-looking sort of ground-floor turrety thing that I’m not so sure about but otherwise visually it’s a peach. This is where The Singleton is produced; a very pleasant, smooth, medium-bodied dram, like an allsort that’s been briefly dipped in sherry.

I was kind of hoping to find a genuine undiscovered gem in amongst the folds and rolls of Speyside, a hugely flavoursome shy beauty that hardly anybody has heard of, but it was not to be; the stand-out whiskies, on taste, aroma, feel and general all-round wonderfulness were ones that any malt drinker will know well. I have yet to find any Speyside whisky that is less than drinkable and perfectly pleasant, but of all the drams we tasted during that first week on Speyside, two of the best came from Glenlivet and Glenfiddich, and one of them produced an expression that went instantly into my personal top ten. Another exceptional pair were Aberlour and Balvenie, which may not be exactly household names but they’re hardly unknowns either.

It’s hard to overemphasise how important Glenlivet was not long ago, not just as a whisky but as a defining standard, even as a region. The primacy of the whisky itself remains, but its nomenclative dominance has gone, and probably just as well
for
all concerned. One of the books I picked up second-hand for the reading part of this book’s research was a 1976 paperback of David Daiches’ 1969
Scotch Whisky, Its Past and Present
. Professor Daiches is one of the world’s most respected and authoritative figures on whisky, so it’s interesting that in the maps at the back of the book, there is, as usual, one map for the whole of Scotland with the various distilleries numbered, and another inset map showing all the Speyside distilleries of the time, except the area isn’t called Speyside, it’s entitled the Glenlivet Area. If there was ever a better symbol of the importance of the Glenlivet name at the time, I’ve yet to see it.

Not so long ago you could go into a bar which had a lot of whiskies, ask for a Glenlivet and something like this would happen:

‘A Glenlivet? Certainly sir. Which would you like? We have Glenbogus Glenlivet, Glendokery Glenlivet, Glenmunchkin Glenlivet, Glengeneric Glenlivet, Glennowherenear—’

‘Do you just have
the
Glenlivet?’

‘Hmm.’ (Bar person strokes chin.) ‘Not sure I know that one …’

Glenlivet was known as a fine whisky when it still had to be smuggled to its markets, and its name was being taken in vain even then. When Scotch started to go legit, Glenlivet’s owner, George Smith, was the first person to apply for one of the newfangled licences; this did not, it has to be said, meet with the universal approval of his peers, and necessitated Mr Smith carrying a pair of loaded pistols everywhere. His son was the J. G. Smith whose name appears on the bottles to this day, and who moved the distillery from its earlier even more remote location a mile away on the shoulder of the hill to where it is today.

It’s not a very inspiring set of buildings, but the Visitor Centre is one of the best in Scotland, the tour is, amazingly, free, and the whisky is still one of the absolutely definitive Speyside malts; light and fresh but rich at the same time, and with a scent like a summer meadow. The one I went for was a 21-year-old Archive, which was all that plus with a delicious hint of roast chestnut about it; refreshing and warming at the same
time.
When we finally started sampling this bottle in July, Ann, Dad and I found this expression
far
too easy to drink; one of those worryingly superb almost overly approachable drams that even people who don’t usually like whisky are probably going to like to the extent of asking for another. And this, to be brutally frank, is only ever an unambiguously good thing if you are a person of an exceptionally good, kind and generous nature. Which I have ambitions to be – it’s what my dad is – but have not yet really achieved.

Whatever; the Glenlivet is whisky to put a smile on your face.

Aberlour is one of those distilleries which exemplify something of a contradiction in whisky-making. It’s often the distilleries which physically stand out which are the least bottled as single malts, the vast majority of their production going into blends (95 per cent is the figure you hear bandied about most often), while the distilleries which seem to shy away from attention – which, in other words, blend in to their surroundings – are the ones most likely to be bottled purely as single malts. I guess it’s partly age, and size. The last heroic age of distillery-building in the sixties and seventies produced some very striking and prominent buildings which from the start were always going to produce whisky almost exclusively for blends.

Aberlour is at the other end of the spectrum; practically camouflaged amongst the other rather nondescript buildings at one end of Aberlour town. If the buildings are undistinguished, though, the whisky is anything but. This is one of the best Speysides you can buy; enormous – but not unbalancing – amounts of sherry, buckets of fruit, layers and weaves of spiciness, all of it silkily burnished; if Fabergé made whisky, you suspect this is what it would taste like. The a’bunadh – batch No. 8 – I got (no age given but generally reckoned to be a mixture of barrels between eight and fifteen years old) is a stonker; a powerfully, opulently spicy-sweet cocktail of flavours that makes your head reel.

The Balvenie is owned by the same people who own
Glenfiddich,
next door. This seems almost unfair, but there you go. Standing more or less in the shadow of the ruins of Balvenie Castle, the distillery still has its own maltings, which makes it unique on Speyside. One word starts to tell you about Balvenie, and that’s honey. Only starts to, though, because this is one of the most complex, balanced, elegant and harmonious whiskies on Speyside, packed with exquisitely proportioned amounts of gingery sherry-cum-port, fruit and spice, like the best Christmas cake in all the world. If there is one of the fairly-well-knowns that is arguably still undervalued and deserves even greater exposure, praise and appreciation, the Balvenie is it.

Glenfiddich presents as a trim, neat, well-manicured concern with everything positioned nicely in its place; it has its own bottling plant, unusually, and a splendid shop; worth taking photographs of all by itself. It was where we found one bottle priced at five thousand pounds, which Les and I assumed must be some sort of record for a bottle you could buy over the counter at a distillery retail outlet, until we found one nearby priced at ten grand. Kind of suspect they’re not the real ones out there on display.

There are a
lot
of stills here; 28 at the last count, with the spirit stills so small they need two per wash still (this small-still thing may be important – we’ll come back to this with Macallan, later). They’re coal-fired too, which is very traditional, and also unusual these days.

Glenfiddich is the best-selling single malt in the world, and it comes as a surprise to discover that it isn’t owned by one of the big multinationals. It’s really another family business, owned by William Grant and Sons, and they pretty much pioneered the single-malt revolution in the early sixties. Respect is due for that alone, but the whisky has remained a standard; floral (like most Speysides) with an accent on heather and a depth of honey that can make it seem halfway to a liqueur at times (a trait it shares with the Balvenie). They’ve kept innovating, too, which I think is admirable; there are various different finishes, all of them excellent, and one which is, to my taste, simply astounding.

It’s the Gran Reserva – originally Havana Reserve – a 21-year-old finished in old Cuban rum casks. This is a colossal, fabulously rich, endlessly, smokily sweet and succulent whisky, bursting with flavour, strong on the nose, long in the throat … just magnificent. And, as though this wasn’t enough, there should be more of it to go around than we have any right to expect, because it’s banned from the USA. The States’ punitive, mean-spirited and just generally disgraceful trade embargo against Cuba means that this particular Glenfiddich can’t be bought between Canada and Mexico. Well, I’m sorry for US single-malt fans, but, frankly, hallelujah; all the more for us. It is my firm intention to buy a crate of this stuff in the next week or two, on my next visit to Speyside, if I can’t find it closer to home. I might even buy two crates and give bottles out as Christmas presents.

The quest for the Perfect Dram very much continues and there are some very strong contenders indeed still to come – Macallan, Springbank and Highland Park to name but three – but as I write, this stuff is joint number one with the fino-finished Ardbeg tasted straight out the barrel as Best Dram So Far.

Zapping between the distilleries, we end up spending a lot of time on a wee road that parallels the A95, which has road works at a bridge necessitating these detours. On this wee road there are signs saying, ‘Slow. Young pheasants.’

These are the subjects of some discussion.

‘Do you think they’re meant to say “Slow, young peasants?”’

‘Maybe they’re directed
at
the pheasants, telling them to be slow.’

‘What they mean is, don’t kill these young birds with your cars; leave them for us to kill with our shotguns. Bit cheeky if you ask me. Typical toff arrogance. If I see one I’m going to aim for it.’

‘What, a toff or a young pheasant?’

‘No comment.’

7: Break for Curry

ANN HAS DECIDED
to join us. We head south and west back to Glenfinnan – to feed the cat, basically – then loop further south to the lower edge of the Campsies, north of Glasgow, to take in the Glengoyne distillery before following a succession of interesting B-roads over to Fife.

In the meantime we’ve found time to squeeze in a visit to the Speyside Cooperage, just outside Craigellachie, which is geographically pretty much the centre of the Speyside whisky industry. This is worth seeing; what we basically have here is Barrel City; this is the Wonderful World of Cooperage, a veritable cathedral of Barreldom. You can sit in giant barrels in the grounds, sit around barrels, sit on barrels, sit in barrel-seats, and buy barrel-related products, including – but not limited to – barrels.

There’s a tour, and you end up in a sort of gallery over the main floor of the workshop, watching these guys – a
lot
of tartan shirts – wheel barrels around, whack them with hammers, manoeuvre them into big machines that do unspeakable things to them (the barrels, that is), pick up their hammers and bash them some more, and just generally hit, split up, force together, rip apart, remake, compress, rasp, plane, pressurise to near bursting, singe, sear, kick, wallop and carbonise barrels as though they had something against wood in general and barrels in particular. You ever want to get an idea how resilient wood is, you come here.

It sounds noisy, even through the glazing protecting the viewing gallery. Actually, it even looks noisy. Some of the guys wear ear defenders, some don’t. I think I would. They have little sort of miniature anvils on metal posts on which they balance the metal hoops that go round the barrels and hammer away at those as well. These bashing-blocks are I-shaped in cross-section, like they’re made from lengths of railway line. I find myself wondering whether these were taken from old torn-up railways in the neighbourhood, and whether each guy has to rip a length of line off with his teeth as some sort of cooperage initiation rite.

The display stuff at Strathspey Cooperage is interesting, too; I hadn’t realised that the oak (
Quercus alba
from the US, making up 97 per cent of the barrels used in Scotland, as opposed to the remaining three per cent of
Quercus robur
from Spain) that goes to make casks has to grow for between 100 and a 150 years before it can be harvested, or that when the bourbon barrels shipped in from the States are reassembled, they’re bigger; it takes five US barrels to make four hogsheads each with a capacity of 56 imperial gallons. Hence a lot of the bashing and banging, I suppose.

And it’s a legal requirement in the US that bourbon barrels are only used once, not just some purist whim or tradition. I immediately start to formulate a mild conspiracy theory to account for this perversity. I mean, if Scotch benefits from being kept in old bourbon casks, why shouldn’t bourbon itself? Why not at least experiment with second- and third-fill bourbon? Treating these labour-intensive barrels as effectively disposable seems just plain wasteful. I bet a smidgen of research would reveal that it’s all a bit of, semi-appropriately, pork-barrel politics; this law will have been passed because some timber magnate had entire forests of oak to shift and got the law passed to help make this happen.

I’m wrong. It later turns out that it’s a rare, if dubious, instance of a victory for American organised labour; the US unions sponsored the law so that there would be more employment for
their
coopers. I find this quite heartening, though what real difference it makes that the Scotch industry
has
benefited from a depending-how-you-look-at-it slightly daft law promoted by some probably not terribly left-wing US unions rather than some megalomaniac forestry owner or seedy cartel of timber conglomerates is debatable.

Craigellachie the town is home to the Craigellachie Hotel (well, if you’re going to have a Craigellachie Hotel, that would seem the logical place to put it), whose Quaich Bar offers 500 different malts. A couple of execs from the Japanese Hankyu department store who visited the hotel thought the bar was so impressive they had an exact copy constructed in Tokyo for the November 2002 British Fair. They even had one of the bartenders flown out to staff it. So there you are; Scottish bars travel well too.

The fine weather continues. Speyside looks wonderful, and the distant glimpses of the snow still hugging the peaks of the Cairngorms just adds to the beauty of this warm, early spring. The three of us enjoy using the M5 on these Moray roads. The A95, when it opens again, is a good, open, quite fast if moderately busy highway, and the surrounding smaller roads are quieter, twistier and rollingly scenic, diving and looping through forests and small towns, past fields dotted with dozens of tiny lambs.