Raw Spirit (11 page)

So whisky. More to the point, the making of it. The marketing of Scotch is everywhere and its distribution worldwide, but its production is legally limited to Scotland, its focus concentrated on this one relatively small country, and, within that small country, on barely a hundred generally modest, usually out-of-the-way sites many of which employ only a dozen or so people.

Of course, there’s whiskey from Ireland, bourbon from the States and Japanese whisky which is Scotch-in-all-but-name and they’re fine drinks in their own terms (and, as with individual whiskies, some are fine in absolute terms), but this is a book about Scotch, about Scots, about Scotland, and getting to know about the making of whisky, its history, its relation to the land and what it means to people both here and abroad is a way of getting to know more about the country where it’s made and the people who make it.

And there’s a further quest involved here, too, besides this search for the perfect dram.

I’ve never tasted it, never been offered it, never really heard anything about it, but I’m convinced that somebody, somewhere, must be making illegal whisky; whisky the way it used to be made, before it became first outlawed and then legalised, before it became taxed, before it became (and this is very much
a
relative term, given the small scale and considerable art involved in the process) industrialised. There has to be a secret still out there somewhere; probably there are many, surely there have to be several. I’d like to see a still in action but I’d settle for a taste of the product (I mean, providing it isn’t likely to blind me or anything). I’d like to talk to the people involved, if I can convince them I’m not going to expose them or report them to Customs and Excise, but it’s that taste I’m particularly interested in, because it’ll be a taste, to some degree, of the past, a link to the place where the whisky we know now came from.

Apart from anything else, I’d like to know why there’s so little illegal whisky in Scotland. In particular, why is it so uncommon compared to its Irish equivalent, poteen? Go to Ireland for long enough – blimey, stay in Scotland for long enough – and you’ll be offered poteen sooner or later, by somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody … But in over 30 years of sometimes casual, often determined and occasionally assiduous drinking in pretty much every cranny and indeed neuk of Scotland, I can’t recall ever being offered hooch which was actually made in the place, and none of my friends have either. This strikes me as odd. Given the nature of some of my friends, it’s practically preposterous.

I’m almost tempted to believe that the more likely explanation is that I’ve been offered whiskeen – or whatever it might be called – dozens of times and accepted it fulsomely on each occasion, only to, for some reason, forget all about it by the following morning, though this is of course a patently absurd suggestion and I’m mildly surprised I’ve even thought of it. Come to think of it, just ignore it. Actually, I’ll probably take this bit out of the first draft. In fact, I know: I’ll remove it tomorrow morning when I look back at what I wrote the night before.

Gosh, this ‘research’ stuff is fascinating. Now I know, from reading other books about whisky, that Scotch poteen is called peatreek.

Peatreek. It’s an old word, and has already fallen almost
completely
out of use, but that is the technical term for what I’m looking for. Actually, as a word, I quite like it. In common with a lot of writers and not a few readers, I kind of collect words, and peatreek seems like a good one to have in the collection.

But no sign of the stuff itself. Not so far, anyway. I’ve made a few inquiries and dropped a few hints, but to date nobody has come up with anything. I didn’t really think there’d be too much chance of illegal distilling on Islay just because there’s so much of the legal variety – you’d think that anybody with those sorts of skills could make a good, worry-free living working on the right side of the law – and Islay always feels quite civilised compared to some bits of Scotland, the bits I usually associate with whisky production. It really does feel like it’s part of Scotland’s central belt in places, certainly compared to the other Inner Hebridean islands, let alone the Outer Hebrides.

But then maybe if you’re a distiller in your day job and you find the whole process technically fascinating – and don’t just want to get away from it of an evening and put your feet up in front of the telly – you
would
try setting up a portable still somewhere in the wilds just to see if it can be done, and whether your skills translate to a smaller scale. After all, Islay is quite rugged in places, with its own relative remotenesses. I took a solitary drive out to the Oa, the nearly circular peninsula sticking out like a growth from Islay’s south-east corner, pointing towards Ireland, and it got really rugged and interesting down towards that fabulously fractured coast; all sea stacks, cliffs, ragged gullies and caves fronting the greyly shining sea and fringed by rocks covered with yellowing foam blown off the waves. You could hide a still on the Oa no problem. Goodness knows, the extravagantly cratered single-track road would be enough to put off any Excise man concerned about the springs and shocks on his government-issue car.

And though this is the fourth time I’ve been to this not exactly vast island, there are still a few roads I haven’t driven and lots of trackless hills and lochs scattered about which I’ve
been
nowhere near. These hills are walked on, and worked on by shepherds, foresters, estate workers and game keepers, but even so …

Whatever, if there is anything going on, nobody – probably very wisely – is talking about it, certainly not to a daft bumptious distillery-bagging scribbler from Fife. Book or not, research or not, I’m just a tourist here, but it’s a good place to be a tourist.

Some of the ancient, semi-desolate flavour of this long-lived-in place came out when Ann, Oliver and I took a turn off the main road from the Jura ferry and drove up to a small loch set in the low hills near Ballygrant. Finlaggan is where, on a small island set in the loch and connected to it then by a drowned causeway and now by a new wooden walkway, there was once the political and spiritual headquarters of the Lord of The Isles.

This was from a time when Scotland was supposedly united, yet still contained various chieftainships and clan lands which were something close to little primitive principalities in their own right. Most separate – almost independent, in practice – was the Lordship of The Isles. Back then social, political, economic and military cohesion was most easily guaranteed by the relative ease of access to and from the sea, not the land. One good ship would take you round any coast with material and matériel but getting to anywhere through the forests, crags and bogs meant hacking out a specific path or using the tracks an enemy would know much better than you. So the sea – and Scotland’s multitudinous lochs – provided an easier highway, if you had the talent for it.

Finlaggan was the centre of a small maritime empire for a time; you can stand in the old chapel, in the remains of the old houses and fortifications, and look around in the silence at the rushes bowing in the wind and the swans gliding by, and stare down at the old carved stones capping the graves and try to imagine the people who’ve passed this way.

The gravestones, with their staring images of the long-time dead, are covered with sparklingly clean perspex supported by thick little metal legs, to keep the weather off. They look
like
very low and slightly surreal coffee tables, and oddly like art.

Back home, we watch the continuing war on TV. Still no nukes turning up, still no biological agents, still no chemical weapons. The ugly mutations, the poisons, the corrosiveness are present though, just not where people are looking for them. Gary Younge, an award-winning
Guardian
journalist who’s just moved to the States, is on Channel 4 in a short programme about the effects of the war in the US homeland. He reports on a lawyer who wore a T-shirt saying Give Peace a Chance to a shopping mall in mid America. The other side of the man’s T-shirt displayed a peace symbol.

He was told by a security guard either to take the T-shirt off or to leave the mall immediately. The lawyer protested that his right to free speech was enshrined in the US Constitution (for all my many issues with present-day America, I’ve always admired the seriousness and genuineness with which Americans take, uphold and believe in this right). But no dice these days. The security guard summoned a cop, who promptly arrested the lawyer.

And so we bid farewell to the Land of the Free …

5: The Heart of the Water

NOW THEN. GLENFINNAN
. There are quite a few places that can justly claim to be the midge capital of Scotland and Glenfinnan is several of them. It also rains a lot. When my friend Les first moved to Fort William to start work as a teacher, it rained every single day for the first six weeks he was there. Not a continual, apocalyptic biblical downpour, obviously – well, not every week – but at least one shower in every 24 hour period, and usually a lot more than that. Even for a man raised in Greenock, that’s a lot of rain.

I suppose I ought to explain here, for those of you not well versed in the geographical ranking structure of Scottish Iffy Weather Areas, that Greenock has something of a reputation in the west of Scotland for being a rainy old place (the west of Scotland has something of a reputation in the rest of Scotland for having more than its fair share of precipitation, too, and it is probably fair to say that Scotland itself is perceived as being a tad rainier than the rest of Britain, while Britain as a whole is not necessarily a prime contender for the first word your average foreigner would come up with when asked to free associate with the word ‘desert’, or ‘arid’).

Basically Greenock is the Manchester of Scotland; people make jokes about how much it rains.

There’s always somewhere. In Norway it’s Bergen. When I first went there, hitch-hiking round Europe back in 1975, I heard my first – and for a long time, only – example of
Norwegian
humour: An Oslo man goes to Bergen on holiday. It rains without pause for a fortnight. At the end of his holiday, as he’s entering the station to take the train back to Oslo – shaking out his brolly, wringing out his tie, whatever – he sees a small boy and says, ‘Tell, me, small boy, does it always rain in Bergen?’ and the small boy says, ‘I don’t know, I’m only five years old.’ Oh well, maybe you had to be there; if you’re wet through and living inside a permanently anchored dark grey rain cloud with only the prospect of a half-year-long winter when the heavy rain turns to heavy snow to look forward to I guess you too would grasp at anything to relieve the gloom.

Even so, six weeks without a totally dry day was probably some sort of record even for Scotland’s west coast, and might, just possibly, have excited comment in Fort William, if anybody apart from Les had been counting. Les began to think he might have made a mistake. However, as the year wore on, a subsequent pleasantly hot and sunny summer – well, technically a brief but welcome Indian summer; okay, actually a warmish and not unduly damp weekend some time in late October – alleviated some of this feeling of doom and after a few years watching from a flat in Upper Achintore as the rain clouds drifted slowly up Loch Linnhe, Les and his wife-to-be Aileen decided to look for a house to buy. Aileen, also a teacher, was brought up in Cumbernauld, where it rains so little that the weather is probably only a few places higher on the average inhabitants’ List of Conversational Standbys than it would be for your standard Scot.

Naturally, after all that rain, they were looking for a change, and so settled on a place a mere fifteen miles down the road from Fort William but with a profoundly different microclimate and in a wholly different league when it comes to heavy drizzle, lashing rain, day-long downpours and sudden but prolonged thunderous tumults of water crashing without respite from leaden skies; in Glenfinnan it
really
knows how to rain. People notorious for having had the bad luck to have been born and raised in Fort William during a particularly catastrophic sequence of above-averagely rainy decades of
seriously
god-awful drenchingness – and hence no strangers to having apparently unending successions of black, moisture-laden cumulonimbi queuing up above their town to deposit megatons of water apparently targeted specifically on that individual’s cagoule hood – have been known to blanch and stagger when confronted with the prospect of spending longer in Glenfinnan than the amount of time it takes to drive – splashing – through it.

Glenfinnan has been, for several proud sequences of years, officially the rainiest place in Britain. There is, allegedly, a small village in the Lake District that occasionally beats it in the We’re Wetter Than You Are stakes, however this is only believed to happen when the rain-measuring device in this sorry hamlet actually slips into the lake concerned and thus gives a false and indeed unfair reading (or so the proud, damp, inhabitants of Glenfinnan will tell you, loath to surrender a distinction which, while they are unable to work to help achieve, they most certainly suffer for to be allowed to claim).

Having said all that, I’ve been going to Glenfinnan for nearly twenty years now. I absolutely love the place and an amazingly high number of my memories of it seem to be of stunning, glorious, breathtaking scenery baking under a high sun set in a totally cloudless sky of surpassing blueness.

Yep, beats me too.

But, hey, if it didn’t rain in Scotland, we wouldn’t have all that water to make whisky with, now would we? In fact, arguably, if all that at least partially rain-engendered Gaelic misery hadn’t needed relieving in the first place, whisky would never have been invented at all. Sitting in your cold, sodden hovel, wrapped in the ragged remains of a barely glorified blanket, ankle deep in animal excrement and choking on peat smoke while your wife wails a lament for her sisters who died giving birth and your children cough consumptively as they quietly work out how soon they can run away to the Lowlands or America and leave you with all the work to do is a pretty damn sure-fire way of turning a chap’s mind towards some sort of means to alleviate the sheer bloody
awfulness
of existence, via the ingestion of home-grown mood-altering substances if that’s what it takes.