Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram

  The boat is an Orkney 5/20; it has a very small cabin you can squeeze about four people into if it’s raining (see above), a more generous open deck area, a 30 horsepower motor and a depth gauge/fish finder. Most people probably use boats like this for fishing, not that we do much fishing. We call it The Boat. It was called The New Boat for a while, while the boat we now talk of as The Old Boat was still just The Boat, but now what was The Boat is The Old Boat and what was The New Boat is just The Boat. Hope that’s clear.

  The Old Boat was a Drascombe Lugger I bought off a policeman in Glasgow, years ago; it was a more versatile and characterful boat than the Orkney, but it was showing its age; we retired it to Fife when we bought the Orkney a few years ago, then last summer I took it down to Cornwall to one of my cousins with whom, hopefully, it’ll start yet another new life.

  The great thing about the Lugger is that as well as having a small (very small) engine for puttering around, and being rowable (if a bit heavy for rowing any great distance), it has two masts and three sails. And not just your standard namby-pamby effete white sails, either; these were tan sails, manly sails, butch sails; sails that looked like they’d been dipped in Forth Bridge paint before being hoisted to the winds.

  The Lugger isn’t fast using any of its three power sources, but it has always felt sturdy and reliable, and it’s fun just because boats are fun. It’s even moderately safe for singlehanded sailing because it’s loose footed. This means that there’s no dirty great lump of wood hanging out underneath the bottom of the main sail, so it’s much harder to knock yourself out than it is on an ordinary sailing boat.

  We all had many happy seasons coasting down Loch Shiel under those tan sails, but the Orkney is more practical and gets where it’s going a lot quicker. Actually it feels like a speedboat to Les and me after years of waiting for the Lugger’s original 4hp motor to break surface tension and actually move us anywhere, though we still haven’t tried the water-skiing experiment yet. The other thing we haven’t got round to is Les and Iain’s Guide to Sensible Sailing, a video to demystify the confusing world of nautical terminology.

  * * *

  Les and Iain’s Guide to Sensible Sailing.

  (Sample dialogue)

  Les: Now, Iain, I believe some people would call this a sheet, is that correct?

  Iain: Well, that’s right, Les, they would. However I think you’ll find that the correct technical name for what you’re holding there is, in fact, a ‘rope’. A sheet is something you put on your bed.

  Les: I see. And if I put this ‘rope’ over here, that would be on the port side of the boat, near the bows, yes?

  Iain: No, port is a drink. Made in Portugal, by the way, so it’s quite easy to remember where it comes from. No, that’s what we call the ‘left’ side of the boat, at the ‘front’.

  … You get the idea. We took it too far, of course. Masts became sticks and sails big flappy things. I mean, really.

  It’s yet another amazingly good day. One of the compensations of trailing the boat and so having to stick below 50 is that there’s more time to look around at the scenery; I drive this route via Lochearnhead and Glencoe a lot but it never ceases to amaze. The air is so clear the sunlight seems bright as mid-summer, but because it’s early April the snow still coats the mountain tops, sparkling like icing sugar. The ragged scatter of lochs across Rannoch Moor are deep blue on one side of the road, light blue and glittering on the other, already surrounded by fresh growing grass and rushes and a carpet of tiny, early flowers.

  A single day like this isn’t so unusual, but this is just the latest dry, warm day in a very dry winter and a positively sunny and almost balmy early spring. It’s been a year of unseasonable weather all round, it feels. In late February Ann and I were in Cyprus with her parents, staying in a villa near Pissouri looking out across to the British base at Akrotiri in one direction and the Troodos mountains in the other. We weren’t exactly expecting Death Valley heat in February, but apparently the snow we got was unusual, too; the locals were out taking photographs of the stuff because it hadn’t snowed in Pissouri for nearly 30 years.

  When I arrive at Glenfinnan, there’s not a cloud in the sky and Loch Shiel is just lying there, barely ruffled in the faint breeze, disappearing into the pale distance between the surrounding mountains, shimmering.

  Loch Shiel: an appreciation, with reservations.

  Loch Shiel is a great loch. Well, I like it, anyway. It’s never more than a mile wide but it’s nineteen miles long. Fairly deep, too, at 120 metres. At its head is the village of Glenfinnan, where our friends the McFarlanes live. Their house looks out to the water and the place where we moor the boat, then along the shore, past the Lodge (the Glenfinnan House Hotel to give it its full title, and effectively the local) to the stone tower that is the monument to the 1745 rebellion. Everybody seems to assume that the figure at the top of the monument is Prince Charlie; it isn’t, just a representative Highland chief. Beyond, on a clear day, you can see Ben Nevis. There’s a National Trust centre for the monument, the Glenfinnan viaduct – as seen on postcards, shortbread tins and in Harry Potter films throughout the world – another hotel called the Prince’s House, a photogenic Catholic church with a bell in the grounds which you’re allowed to ring, a pier and a railway station and that’s about it. No shops apart from the souvenir shop and café in the Trust. There is a shed that doubles as a Post Office, but only when the wee detachable sign’s displayed.

  At the other end of the loch there’s the even tinier village of Acharacle, and between the two nothing but scenery; loch and mountains the whole way, the hills descending in height as they head south-west. There is a forestry track on the south-east side but it’s locked at both ends; only the forestry people and the postie have keys. On the north-west side it’s trackless.

  There are beaches, fish farm cages and platforms with incongruous wooden sheds perched on them, numerous little islands, submerged rocks to avoid and rivers to explore. At the far end you could conceivably shoot the rapids – if you were in a canoe – and end up in the sea (a century of global warming could well turn Loch Shiel into a sea loch).

  Every year Les and I say we’ll take the boat back out of the loch and onto the trailer and go to another loch or even down to the sea, and every year we find there’s ample to do on Loch Shiel alone without having to go anywhere else. This does mean, though, that we are unable to describe ourselves as a pair of old sea dogs. We’ve settled for being loch puppies instead.

  Back in the early part of the twentieth century, when the local roads were either non-existent or little better than tracks, there was a steamer service linking the far end of the loch with the railway station at Glenfinnan. These days the good ship Sileas plies the waters during the season, and very relaxing it is too; it’s generally insect-free out on the loch and anyway the Sileas, though it always seems very quiet and even sedate as it putters along, is easily faster than any midge.

  I do have slightly mixed feelings about this stretch of water, all the same. When we had the Drascombe rigged we discovered Loch Shiel has extremely capricious winds. Capricious is what Les christened them, anyway. I believe my term was ‘fucking annoying’. You could be tacking happily across the loch in a fine strong breeze one second, only to have it disappear utterly in the next moment, and then, a random and therefore completely unpredictable amount of time later, just as you were beginning to think about firing up the motor, the wind would come back. Usually from exactly the opposite direction from before, necessitating some rapid resetting of sails. We put this meteorological eccentricity down to the numerous tall mountains at the Glenfinnan end of the loch; they get in the way of the wind and make it swirl.

  Sometimes the wind wouldn’t come back at all and we’d be left sitting there in perfectly calm water, as though we’d been deposited on the world’s biggest mirror. This led to behaviour that Les designated – rather unkindly, I thought – as Speculative Sailing.

  Speculative Sailing cons
ists of sitting in one’s boat in conditions of absolutely zero wind speed, with no appreciable movement whatsoever, save possibly that of the general mass of water in the loch moving from its head towards its distant outflow (worth, oh, a good millimetre per day or so), under a sky that is either cloudless or, if clouded, utterly still, Then, when one’s chum (played here by Mr Leslie McFarlane) – understandably bored after an hour or so of languishing becalmed like this going nowhere – suggests starting the damn engine, oneself has to jump up, point three or four miles down the loch and saying something like, ‘Why, no! Look; there’s a wee sort of ruffled looking bit of water way down there. See? There is! No, really! And it’s sort of heading this way. Let’s just leave it a bit longer …’

  Pitiable, really.

  My other resentment dates from the time of Joanie’s party down the loch. This was last summer (2002 as I write this). Donald-John and Joanie, like Les and Aileen, are both teachers who live in Glenfinnan. For Joanie’s 50th, Donald-John thought it would be a laugh if the party was held at one of the pebble beaches a few miles down the loch, so people set up a makeshift pier, an oil-drum-size barbie, a couple of shelters in case it rained (it didn’t) and we all took boats and drink, food and fold-up camping furniture. Ann and I went with Les, Aileen and their daughter, the lovely Eilidh. A very fine time was had. My principal memory is of Ian McFarlane (no relation) piping energetically while his dad Charlie tramped back along the shore with an unfeasibly large tree trunk perched on his shoulder, bound for the fire. That and Donald-John’s T-shirt, which bore the legend ‘The Liver is Evil and Must be Punished.’

  Later, in the post-party gloaming, on the beach in front of the house, we started to unload the boat. I think I must have overloaded myself with, well, with whisky, obviously, but also with two camping seats, a camping table, a cool box and my camera, because I fell in. The water was only about a foot deep, but this was quite sufficient to ruin my camera, drown my mobile, soak me to the skin and fill my waders. Allegedly I sort of teetered for a second or two, which supposedly made it even funnier. Eilidh was heard laughing from the house. She claims seeing me fall in the water is the funniest thing she’s ever seen, but then she’s only fifteen, so what does she know.

  The camera was eventually repaired, but the mobile was a goner. I wouldn’t have minded so much but I’d only replaced it the previous year after an unfortunately similar incident while canoeing with Les on Loch Eilt, just up the road.

  So, Loch Shiel and I have issues. But it’s still a great loch.

  We get the boat safely into the water, the engine starts first time and we zap down the loch a few miles to a pebble beach and back, just to make sure everything is working. There are maybe a dozen other boats on the loch, which is a lot, for Loch Shiel. This, it turns out, is because it’s one of the three annual Glenfinnan Fishing Competitions. Then it’s time to sit in the garden with a beer (pre-midge season; no worries). After a very fine dinner of venison and a sensible amount of fine red wine – a Red Wine Frenzy is always a danger on such occasions – Les and I have a couple of cask strength whiskies, just to get into training for the week of intensive researching ahead.

  Cask Strength

  Drinking cask strength whisky, especially if it has only been roughly filtered, gives you a chance to get back to something more like whisky as it used to taste. Not so long ago there was very little whisky available at cask strength; too much of even the best whisky had been chill-filtered, watered down and – in some cases – mixed with caramel to produce a darker colour.

  None of these processes will absolutely ruin a malt, and the whisky manufacturers would argue that in each case they were simply giving the whisky-buying public what they wanted, but it was certainly the case that this was an imposed taste; if you wanted your whisky without any of these processes having been applied, you had to live near a distillery or a very good off-licence, know somebody in the trade, or resort to buying your own cask.

  I was told about the whole chill-filtering, caramel-adding thing by a guy in Cadenhead’s whisky shop on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, not long after I’d moved back to Scotland in 1988. I’d just bought a flat on South Bridge and I was exploring the area when I found this shop that sold nothing but whisky, much of it stuff I hadn’t seen in other off-licences or even heard of at all. The guy was almost messianic in his zeal, and I duly left the shop clutching several bottles of cask-strength, completely unadulterated whisky and with a certain degree of righteous ire that our national drink had been interfered with, emasculated and basically laid low by blandly vicious corporate suits with dollar signs in their eyes.

  Something of all this duly got into Complicity, a novel I wrote a year or two later; Cameron Colley, the journalist who’s the central character, works on a story about this and is personally and professionally affronted that his tipple of choice isn’t as hairy-chested as he’d always assumed it was.

  So what does chill filtering do? It takes out of the whisky certain oils that would otherwise make the stuff go cloudy when it’s chilled. The story I heard was that this was the fault of the American market; most people in the States take their whisky with ice, and – because the whisky has been watered down to get it to a consistent strength – this makes the resulting mix look cloudy, like there’s something wrong with it, when the oils come out of solution. The remedy is to chill the stuff before it’s bottled and run it through a fine filter (at one time the filter was made of asbestos, which wasn’t something the industry used to publicise heavily; there’s no evidence that anybody ever came to any harm through drinking asbestos-filtered whisky, it’s more guilt by association, though you do have to wonder if anybody ever contracted asbestosis from handling the filters themselves). The whisky will now remain clear when ice is added, but the oils that have been removed will no longer be there to be tasted, or contribute to the feel in the mouth.

  The watering-down bit is just to get the whisky to a standard strength, and means the manufacturer doesn’t have to keep altering the print on the label that tells you how strong the whisky is. It also makes life easier for the tax people, as they do their calculations. This is the least problematic alteration, always assuming that the water that’s added is stuff you’d want to drink neat in the first place. Most Scottish water is quite soft and drinkable straight from the tap; if you wanted to be really purist about it you might want to specify that the water added to your whisky should come from the same source as the water that went to make the whisky – via the mash tun, etc. – in the first place, however even the most nit-picking taster is usually happy with water that simply and neutrally dilutes without adding any taste of its own.

  Adding caramel is done to make whisky darker. Some whiskies are just supposed to be dark, according to the public’s perception and the manufacturer’s promotional efforts. If the whisky isn’t dark enough, some distillers will add caramel. It’s done in relatively tiny amounts, and caramel itself is a pretty innocuous material – just heated sugar, basically – so if it imparts any taste whatsoever it’s surely completely swamped by the flavours left over from the barrel’s earlier bourbon, sherry or whisky fills.

  What it boils down to is that adding caramel is cosmetic, and – if you are any sort of purist – does seem a bit like cheating.

  The trouble with whisky as a product is that it’s so variable; each barrel will produce a different whisky, and each charge of the still will have created a subtly different spirit in the first place; even the season of the whisky’s production has been known to make a difference to the final taste. This is why the blender in a distillery, or at a bottling plant, is so important; even with a single malt they will mix together different barrels to create something as consistent as possible over time compared to earlier examples (the blending of different whiskies from different distilleries to produce blended whisky is an even more complex task – there are blends with dozens of different whiskies involved and up to a hundred-plus is not unknown).

  Les a
nd I drink our whiskies from glasses based on Spanish copitas …

  … No, I don’t see how we can avoid this. I’m going to have to say something about how whisky should be drunk.

  * * *

  Drinking: you’d think it would be obvious.

  Now, real purists will tell you that nosing a whisky and tasting it are quite different things, and require different glasses. This, I submit, is taking things too far for us civilians. Frankly, a fine malt taken from an old enamel tea mug will taste ten times better than an indifferent blend sipped genteelly from the most carefully designed whisky glass (always providing the enamel mug is clean to start with, natch). Take your whisky from a tumbler if you want – though the old-school cut-glass or crystal tumbler is more about making room for the ice than letting the whisky breathe – but a brandy glass is probably as good as anything, and lets you get your nose into the glass for a good sniff.

  Proper professional nosers/tasters will tell you the best way to sniff a whisky is to draw in the aroma while keeping your mouth slightly open; apparently this improves the sensation. I haven’t noticed the difference yet (I was only told this last month at Macallan) but I’m going to persevere.

  So, what to add, if you don’t want to drink it neat? Look, if you’ve bought the damn stuff you can drink it however you like, but adding, say, Cola or lemonade to a fine malt whisky is a bit of a waste. It’s rather like buying a Ferrari and never taking it out of first gear; you want to ask the person concerned, Why did you waste your money doing this? Are you just showing off? Look; I have a small belt and a barely used syringe; let’s just inject your favourite dram and see what that does …