Raw Spirit (34 page)

We’re going to stay in Glasgow for the weekend with our friends the Fraters. Bruce is a partner in a surveyors’ firm and Yvonne – an old friend of Aileen’s – is a PE teacher. Their children are Ross and Amy. Right now Ross, who’s nine, wants to be anything that’ll earn him lots of money (though I secretly know he’s going to be a famous artist). Amy, who is a couple of years younger, is very lively, has bubbly blonde hair and is interested in extremes of pinkness and purpleness. They’re a nice, normal, busy family, but they are slightly unusual in
that
Bruce is a diehard Rangers supporter and Yvonne is an equally committed Celtic fan. (For a while there Ross wasn’t entirely sure who to support as long as it wasn’t a bunch of losers like Morton, however, now he’s a Celtic fan, and Amy, having established that neither Old Firm strip features pink or purple, isn’t particularly interested.)

Bruce has very generously offered to drive us down to the match in Greenock and is even going to come in to watch the game. For somebody used to watching Rangers, this is definitely slumming it. Bruce has been to three or four Morton games and I think he comes along partly out of basic palsolidarity, partly out of sympathy for us – we tend to need all the support we can get – and partly, perhaps, the better to appreciate Rangers when he sees them play. It’s a telling contrast that can’t help but flatter Rangers. Morton and Rangers met a few years ago in a Cup game played at Love Street in Paisley, and Bruce sportingly came with us into the Morton end. Morton did not disgrace themselves – we were quite proud we only lost one-nil – but the difference in the teams was blatant. It wasn’t just the speed and the skills, either. It was sleekness. The Morton players, despite being considerably more fit than any of us (Les and Bruce both run and cross train, Ray plays five-a-side and I … don’t), looked like raw, gawky schoolboys next to the Rangers players; donkeys compared to thoroughbreds. Next to our guys, the Rangers team – big, tanned, glowing, rippling with energy – looked like a different species. I understand that the technical term is ‘Athletes’.

I drive through to Glasgow in the Land Rover via the distilleries at Deanston, Loch Lomond, Inverleven and Auchentoshan. It’s actually rather a dull day for a change; clouds in the sky, some greyness, even a few light showers. After all the fabulous weather recently, this is positively refreshing. The roads I take constitute a kind of Sensible Route Bypass (GWRs are often Sensible Route Bypasses given a less pejorative title). The Extremely Sensible Route from North Queensferry to Deanston, near Stirling, is to cross the Forth Road Bridge and take the M9 to just south of Dunblane; the alternative Fairly Sensible Route is to take the main road to Kincardine
then
head for Alloa and then Stirling. Naturally I ignore these and take a variety of GWRs and WDRs (Wee Daft Roads) taking in the mellifluous delights of Coalsnaughton, Fishcross – ah! Romantic Fishcross! – and Menstrie before trundling through Bridge of Allan and taking the long-time GWR to Doune.

These are old stamping grounds for me; I walked all around this area when I was at Stirling University between ’72 and ’75, roaming as far as Gartmorn dam east of Alloa in one direction, and as far as Doune Castle in the other. I’d gone to Doune because I heard the Python team were there doing some filming. There was nothing happening and nobody about when I turned up one Sunday, but I did get to see the giant wooden Trojan Rabbit. About a fortnight later the notice appeared on the University notice board which led, a week later, to the not so minor miracle of the successful mobilisation of 150 mainly male students at 6.30 on a Saturday morning.

Suitably dressed in medieval-looking stuff – basically knitted string, sprayed silver to look like chain mail – we were whisked up to Sherrifmuir – scene of a real battle in 1715, during the first Jacobite rebellion – for a long day’s filming, part of which consisted of us shouting things like ‘Get on with it!’ and ‘Betty Maaaarsden!’ No idea why.

When we’d finished I got a lift back down to the campus in the Black Maria police van that suddenly turns up at the very end of the film; between the peat and some weird leaching effect of the silver-sprayed, knitted-string socks, my feet were black for a week. All for two pounds, which was the Equity rate at the time. But then I think most of us would have paid ten times that for the privilege.

Deanston is a dramatic-looking distillery in a handsome setting. It’s another converted mill, this time an old textile mill designed by Richard Arkwright. It was converted into whisky production in the boom years of the sixties but was closed between 1982 and 1990. The mill overlooks the river Teith, which is a major tributary of the Forth (actually, going by relative amounts of water contributed to the blend, it’s more the other way round, so we might, conceivably, have had the Firth of
Teith,
the Teith Bridge, the Teith Road Bridge and, presumably, the Mouth of the Teith. Narrow escape). The river not only provides the water to make and cool the spirit, it also powers the mill itself, though not through water wheels as it did in Arkwright’s day; there are two water turbines producing electricity, with any that the distillery doesn’t use itself going into the National Grid.

The daftness of the whisky regions comes into play here; like Glengoyne, Deanston is supposedly a Highland whisky, but it isn’t. This area just ain’t the Highlands and Deanston tastes like a Lowland whisky; quite light, very clean, the delicacy of the nose matching the paleness of the whisky’s colour, and with a very pleasant mix of nut-like spiciness and gentle creaminess about it. Deanston is a highly valued blending whisky, but it’s worth seeking out as a single malt; definitely another of those whiskies that could benefit from a decent promotional push.

I take an appropriately meandering route across the floor of the Forth’s flood plain, along a slow, tightish road past damp-looking fields heading vaguely towards the Trossachs, then head south past Scotland’s only Lake, the Lake of Menteith, crossing the Forth a mile or two later, traversing Flanders Moss.

From the commanding height of the Defender, I check out the Forth – barely more than a stream here – as I drive over the bridge. I committed a lot of these bridges to memory when Les and I were planning our downriver trip. This consisted of us putting two canoes in the waters – the very shallow waters – a mile west of Aberfoyle where the Forth is formed by the confluence of Duchray Water and the outflow from Loch Ard, and then – after we got past the shallows where we were pushing ourselves along with the flats of our hands on the gravel as much as actually paddling – floating and paddling down river to Stirling over the next three days.

It should have been two days but I needed a day off in the middle because my shoulders and arms were so sore (my Uncle Bob expressed genuine surprise we didn’t paddle upstream. Different generation; two of my aunts swam across the Forth
just
upstream from the Forth Bridge. There had been some publicity – even at slack water, swimming the Forth here is no joke and it didn’t happen very often – and when Aunt Jean got to the far side and saw there were lots of people and even a few reporters waiting on the slipway at South Queensferry for her and Aunt Bet, she just turned around and swam back again. Like I say; different generation).

Loch Lomond distillery is a bit of a shocker if you’re expecting a wee farm-like gem set amongst the heather with a breezy view over the sparkling loch. It’s a factory on an industrial estate. It used to be a calico dye works, so it too is a conversion job. They don’t do tours but next door there’s the Antartex Village shopping complex, a slightly rough-looking converted factory with garish red external walls and god-awful piped music of extreme Heederum-Hawderum-ness that’s patently been dredged from the very lowest, most crud-encrusted sump of the great festering bilge tank that is Scottish Cliché MacMusic from Bonnie Glen Grotesquo.

This drivel even extends to the car park so there really is no escape. I have a walk round, watch some skins being prepared to make leather jackets, stop off at the café for a cup of tea and a scone, walk round some more, find the Whisky Shop – a good selection, and I buy quite a few bottles – and, as I pay, realise that although I’ve only been in here 30 minutes, I swear this is the second time I’ve had to suffer ‘Oh Ye Canny Shove Yer Granny Aff A Bus’. I ask the assistant how he stands this music all day. He just smiles and asks, What music?

Loch Lomond – another so-called Highland distillery, though only by the skin of its aluminium cladding – is a bit of a multi-tasker; it’s set up so that it can produce quite different expressions according to which of its different stills are used. There’s Loch Lomond itself, plus Inchmurrin and Old Rhosdhu and, potentially, several others. There’s another distillery not far away on the banks of the Clyde near Erskine called Littlemill (correctly a Lowland) which is owned by the same company. This has just started production again after nearly ten years mothballed, and the same people own Glen
Scotia
in Campbeltown, so the Loch Lomond Distillery Company could end up with quite a selection.

Loch Lomond Pure Malt (no age statement on the bottle I bought) is surprisingly seaweedy. It’s a light, leafy Lowlander like the Deanston, with some sweetness in there too, but it has a definite scent of the sea shore about it. Definitely different. I like it for its eccentricity.

I’ve also picked up a bottle of Inverleven at the Whisky Shop in Antartex Village, a 16-year-old from ’86, and – after stopping to take a few photos of the long red façade of the old Argyll Motor Company factory, also in Alexandria – Inverleven distillery is the next stop.

Bit high rise for a distillery, but all the more dramatic for that, with soaring red-brick walls rising almost from the middle of Dumbarton, wide-stanced but with strong verticals from chimneys, pipes and tall, narrow windows. It has a nicely asymmetric and yet balanced look about it, and the way the set-back of it works, outer components leading in towards higher, narrower units, reminds me of a castle. It’s actually in quite a pleasant situation, too, close by one small tree-filled park and across the river Leven from another, at the point where the Leven debouches into the Clyde in the shadow of Dumbarton Rock and its uneven straggle of twin-set fortifications.

The 16-year-old Inverleven is not quite so well built or dramatic as the place it’s made, but a very approachable dram all the same; distinctively fruity with some smoke and peat, and dry and smooth at the same time. Chocolate Orange, was what I thought.

Last stop is Auchentoshan, just east of Old Kilpatrick, barely a mortar round’s lob from Jim and Joan’s place in Dalmuir and spitting distance from what’s left of this end of the Antonine Wall. I really must get one of those clip-on GPS units for my PDA. I spend a very frustrating half-hour or so trying to get to the distillery, going down one road that looks like it heads straight there only to find that it doesn’t, trying another that also looks promising but then loops round without even going close and then another one again, still without success.
What
makes it especially annoying is that for most of the time I can see the damn distillery, sitting there in watery sunlight looking quite smug in a trim sort of way. The only plus during all this tortuous maze-running is finding an interesting but deteriorating thirties art-deco style sports pavilion across some playing fields north of the rail line.

I finally work out that the way to get to Auchentoshan is not through any of the housing estates that surround it on three sides, but from the north via the main Glasgow–Dumbarton dual carriageway, just east of the Erskine Bridge approach road complex; there’s a single wire-fenced approach road leading off the westerly carriageway straight down to the buildings by the side of the dam that holds the cooling water. Wrong maps, again.

So, Auchentoshan. It’s an unusual whisky because it’s triple distilled, rather than double. Auchentoshan’s the last surviving fully triple-distilled Scotch, representing a style that used to be much more common. Partly this reflects improvements in distilling technology. Distilling is about reduction, about refining. Stills don’t make alcohol – the mixture of hot water, yeast and the sugars in the barley accomplish that. A still is just a way of separating that already existing alcohol from all the rest of the stuff that’s been left behind after the fermentation process has ended. In the old days a lot of places needed to go through the boiling-cooling process three times; now – with better control over every part of the process and fine-tuning the extent of the middle cut that’s taken – twice is generally all that’s required.

The result of triple distilling, other influences being equal, is to produce a light, delicate, usually quite floral and perfumy whisky. This probably suits a Lowland style of whisky better than an Islay South Coaster, say, though it would be interesting to experiment (I think there should be a big experimental distilling rig in a Scottish university where they can use all sorts of different types of heating, varying shapes of still, adjustable-length and adjustable-angle Lyne arms and so on … you might not find much that’s actually applicable to real-world distilleries, but it would be
interesting
!). As a
finished
whisky, Auchentoshan depends more than most on its casking, and the star of the readily available expressions is the Three Wood (no age given), which moves promiscuously from bourbon casks to oloroso barrels before ending up in the embrace of Pedro Ximenez. The result of all this serial experience is a seductive, full-bodied, rather fruity … well, let’s not get too tabloid here, but this is generally agreed to be a fine dram, though when I do taste the Three Wood I find it a bit oily for my taste (my three fellow tasters agree, so it’s not just me). It’s almost as though one of the barrels which went into the marrying process had held diesel or something. It’s another whisky which apparently ages particularly well, with 21-, 22 (22?)- 25- and 31-year-old bottlings amongst others, all of which sound – I confess I haven’t tasted them – well worth the finding. Providing they don’t taste like the bottle I bought. By all accounts, though, another very different and very pliable, very adaptive whisky.