Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram

On the A86, passing the Fersit sign, I point out where the P-reg 911 came to grief. No, let’s be honest; where I brought it to grief.

  What Happened to My Car.

  High summer, 1998. You could tell that it was the weekend for the annual T in the Park music festival just up the road from us at Balado because it was bucketing with rain. We were the proud owners of two 911s at the time; the old blue K-reg we still have, and a dark blue Carrera 4 coupé which was Ann’s car. I was going up to Glenfinnan for the weekend and asked to take the coupé because the soft top has a bad and very un-Teutonic habit of leaking if left out in heavy rain. Ann was happy for me to take the coupé and the car and I had a grand old time even though it was raining so hard I almost thought I was in Glenfinnan already. Everything went fine until that bit of road approaching the sign for Fersit.

  I’d been pressing the car fairly hard over the last few miles and couple of dozen bends or so, whenever I could see I had a whole clear road ahead to play with, and the car hadn’t shown any sign of going skittery at the back or anywhere else, but I just overcooked it totally on that curve; the rain was the heaviest it had been during the whole journey so far and there was a lot of standing water where the verges were struggling to clear the rain fast enough off the tarmac. A slight change of surface where one bit of road met another as I set the car up for the bend, and the back of the car spun away, sending the rear arcing round to my right.

  What was really annoying was that I thought I’d caught it, twice; I opposite-locked, thought I’d got it straight, but then it went the other way, heading for the gentle slope of grass and heather on my own side of the road. I corrected again, still not braking, but the rear went whipping back to the direction it had first thought of and almost immediately we left the road and whumped up onto the very slightly uphill side of the road, connecting with a small raised ridge hanging a couple of metres over the tarmac. There was a very loud bang indeed and the airbag detonated. I think I must have closed my eyes at this point because when I got this terrific whack on the head it took me a moment or two to realise I’d rolled the car and I was now upside down, skidding along the road on the 911’s roof. I’d have been hanging by my seat belt if the roof hadn’t caved in to press on my head and the top of the driver’s seat, so keeping me wedged in.

  The bang on my head transmitted itself down my spine and I felt something sort of click in the middle of my back. (This didn’t hurt at the time but gave me painfully sleepless nights a fortnight or so later when we were in South Africa, holidaying and doing publicity; I found the only way to alleviate the pain sufficiently to get to sleep was to lie in the bath.)

  Round about here, sliding along the road upside down, I put my hands over my head (or under my head, if you want to be technical about it, given that I was inverted at this point). It did occur to me even at the time that this was a fairly pointless action, but I couldn’t really come up with much else to do. I remember thinking, quite clearly, Oh, bugger; I could die here, and being kind of annoyed with myself; somehow there still hadn’t been time to feel properly afraid. The sliding went on, then there was another not quite so dramatic impact, and then another thud, this time from beneath, and then silence.

  I had, I realised, smelled the whole accident. There had been a damp, fresh, new-mown grass and earth odour as I’d slammed into the bank at the side of the road, then a sharp smell of something like flint, like rock when you strike it with another rock, then a scent of chalk, then burning, charring paint and hot oil.

  I opened my eyes and looked around.

  Well, I certainly appeared to be alive. The car was the right way up, sitting on what was left of its wheels just off my own side of the road on a patch of fairly level grass by a shallow slope of heather and fern. Definitely not poised rocking over a high cliff in an Italian Job kind of way. I moved my extremities, waggling fingers and toes, and everything seemed to be working. I couldn’t feel much pain; back and head a bit sore, ears ringing, and I guessed I was slightly in shock so might not be entirely aware of any other injuries I might have, but really this was quite a good result after thinking only a second or two ago that I might be about to die. And no fire; the car did not appear to be showing any signs of going up in flames. That had to be a good thing.

  On the downside, I recall thinking, it is still raining.

  There was a white car stopped almost opposite me on the far side of the road with two people in it; they must have seen the last part of the accident as the car sailed upside down across the road in front of them and then flipped the right way up just across from them. The driver’s side window was lowered and two pale young anxious faces, one male and one female, peered at me through the rain. I undid my seat belt, kicked at my door – it opened with only a minimum of complaint – got shakily to my feet on the grass, made a show of brushing myself down and said, ‘Aren’t airbags wonderful?’

  My only excuse for this pathetic piece of sub-Bondian attempted drollery, miserably inadequate though it may be, is that I must indeed have been a bit in shock.

  The pale young couple were from New Zealand. There was no mobile coverage on that stretch of road so they very kindly took me to the Stronlossit Hotel in Roybridge, left me their address in case I needed them as witnesses (though all they had really witnessed were the final stages of the result of my spectacular stupidity) then went on their way.

  I phoned Ann and then the cops.

  ‘Hello. I’ve just had an accident on the A86 by the junction with the wee road to Fersit.’

  The guy at the other end took my name and details and established that I basically had a few minor cuts and bruises and that there were no other vehicles or persons involved. Then he asked, ‘Was there damage to any road furniture, Mr Banks?’

  In my slightly dizzy state, this question caused the sudden, bizarre image to come to mind of a remote Highland road buffeted by driving rain, with a nice easy chair and a standard lamp with tassels on the shade sitting in the middle of the tarmac.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Were any signs or crash barriers affected, sir? Any fences, that sort of thing?’

  ‘Nothing. All the damage was to my car. Oh, and a dirty great rock about the size of a washing machine; think I hit that when I first left the road. It sort of tumbled into the ditch.’

  (I had the firm intention of having a brass plaque made to stick on this rock, commemorating the death of the P-reg 911, but before I got round to this the council cleared and re-formed all the ditches on that stretch of road, and my boulder disappeared.)

  ‘But there’s nothing blocking the road, or any damage to anything else at the roadside?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Well, you’re actually through to the Inverness control centre here, Mr Banks, because the officer who’d normally deal with this sort of thing in Fort William is away. If you’re sure you’re all right we’ll just leave it at that. Have you called anybody to remove the car from the roadside?’

  ‘I’m going to call the AA next.’

  ‘Well, that should be all right then. I don’t think we need take any further action.’

  ‘You mean you’re not sending anybody out?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s necessary if everything’s as you say.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Okay then. Right. Bye then.’

  I felt cheated. I called the AA. They said it’d be about an hour before they could get to me, and so, standing in the bar at the Stronlossit a little later, talking to the sympathetic young barman, I ordered a large glass of Laphroaig and a cigar. Might as well celebrate my narrow escape, I thought. I had the cigar between my fingers and the glass at my lips when the door opened and an AA man looked in. ‘There a Mr Banks here?’

  I looked at the barman; he looked at me. I sighed and pushed the whisky over to him and left the cigar beside it. ‘Here; be my guest.’

  The AA guy found he couldn’t tow the 911 on its undamaged wheels because it didn’t have any and so had to call a local breakdown co
mpany with a ramped flatbed truck and a winch. I got a lift into Fort William and then a taxi to Glenfinnan, carrying the stuff I’d rescued from the car. I finally did get a whisky, sitting in Les and Aileen’s house while Les answered a call from Ann, making sure I was still okay.

  ‘… aye, he mentioned he took a bump to the head,’ Les said, standing in the hall looking in at me. There was a pause while he listened to whatever Ann was saying in response to this, then he told her, ‘No, he’s telling the truth; no bleeding or anything.’ A further pause while Ann spoke, obviously asking another question, then Les nodded, looked at me in a serious, measured sort of way and said into the phone, ‘Well, no more oddly than usual.’

  11: The Smell of a Full Scottish Breakfast in the Morning

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK we have a slightly delayed birthday celebration for my dad’s 85th. My dad is the most easy-going man I know and professes himself quite happy with either no celebration at all or the prospect of just going down the hill in the village to the Ferrybridge for a meal there. This is not to be sniffed at because they do very good food there these days and the wine list has got really interesting over the last year or so; they’ve got Chateau Musar on there for one thing, a wine I find it hard to see past (or, following a third bottle, after).

  However, a fine and rich tradition has evolved in this family of remorselessly exploiting the birthdays of our elder-folk as excuses for slap-up nosh-fests, and Dad is rapidly persuaded that what he really wants is for Ann and me to take him and Mum to the Champanay Inn across the river in Linlithgow, for enormous steaks and, oh, maybe a bottle or two of something nice from a sunny continent of an antipodean persuasion.

  We used to celebrate Mum and Dad’s birthdays at the deeply wonderful Peat Inn, not too far away from us, near St Andrew’s, but my mum’s a bit frail these days and doesn’t like to stay away overnight anymore, so – being a lot closer – it looks like the Champanay has kind of inherited the dubious honour of hosting parental hoo-has. The fact they have Grange on the wine list certainly doesn’t count against the place either.

  Like the Peat Inn, the Champanay is a restaurant with rooms. The relatively recent accommodation section is built on top of the wine cellar, which I got to visit once and is what my idea of Heaven would look like if it didn’t have windows. And if I wasn’t an atheist.

  The Champanay’s main dining room is housed in an impressively appointed octagonal mill house. Like the less formal Chop and Ale house next door, it majors on steaks that are hung for three weeks in an ionised chill room. In the main bit there’s a proper restaurant pool with darkly lurking lobsters of various sizes, their claws peace-bonded by rubber bands. Altogether not a place for vegetarians of a delicate disposition.

  We eat wonderfully (apart from me; I habitually use my fork upside down for peas, but there you are) and drink accordingly. We have Cullen Skink – spelled correctly – cream of parsley soup, scallops and cold smoked salmon to start, washed down with some Chassagne Montrachet, then rib-eye steaks, fried cod and more scallops for main courses, with a bottle of ’91 Grange and a delicious ’90 Nederburg Eminence to finish.

  Now then. Grange.

  How much? Nested digressions around Aussie wine.

  Penfold’s Grange Bin 95, as it used to be called, is red wine made from the shiraz or syrah grape – in the past usually with variable though generally small amounts of cabernet sauvignon added – from southern Australia, specifically from near Adelaide. This is my favourite wine, and trust me I’ve tried a few. Ann’s favourite is the even more gulpingly expensive Pétrus from Bordeaux, but I just don’t get it with Pétrus, or any of the other fine French wines I’ve sampled over the years in my valiant attempts to find one that surpasses Grange. They may well all be great, but Grange is, for me, just in another league; I am simply in love with its fruitily unplumbable depths. That subjectivity thing, I guess.

  Ann and I first tasted the stuff in a brilliant little restaurant called Floodlite in Masham, Yorkshire. Masham is the spiritual home of Theakston’s Old Peculier, the lunatic broth of Yorkshire, the famed and – at the time – idiotically strong real ale of sweet, chewy darkness and sudsy strength. Ann and I’s first date, back in London in 1980, involved Old Peculier. We went after work from Denton Hall and Burgin’s offices on High Holborn to the Sun on Lamb’s Conduit Street. I’d heard it was a good real-ale pub and had wanted to check it out for a while. I was confident this attractive blonde secretary I’d invited for a drink would be on the Bacardi and Cokes, but at least I could have a decent pint.

  ‘Oh, they do Old Peculier,’ I said as we approached the bar and I saw the sign on the tap. ‘I know what I’m having.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Ann.

  ‘So, what’ll it be?’

  ‘A pint of Old Peculier,’ she said, indignant at not having been understood.

  ‘What, really?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Brilliant.’

  It was not brilliant, it was embarrassing. We drank and drank and I ran out of money and had to borrow a fiver off Ann, which has never been a cool thing to do on a first date. Plus she drank me under the table. We had a pint of Sam Smith’s down on the Strand and I saw her onto a bus home, then I somehow got myself back to McCartney’s flat, where I was staying while I looked for a place of my own. I lay on the floor and told a bemused Dave I had just met this wonderful girl who liked a drink as much as me! Hurrah!

  Some of this was Les McFarlane’s fault (I imagine you’d already guessed that). He’d been to Tadcaster in Yorkshire on a field trip with his Economics class from Paisley College. some years earlier and had come back enthusing about this wonderful beer called Theakston’s Old Peculier. We discovered that you could buy this strange, darkly powerful ale of insanity in Glasgow, and became its apostles. A bunch of us had gone on a pilgrimage to Masham, taking in York and Castle Howard en route. Later a contingent of us London-living Scots would meet Les and a few other Scotland-based pals halfway, in York, again to sample the delights of Masham’s finest product.

  Well, things change; we went back to Lamb’s Conduit Street a few years ago on one of our infrequent trips to London, but the Sun was no longer the mazily eccentric real-ale nirvana it had been back in the early eighties; just another pleasant, open, sensibly laid out café-like bar with too many alcopops and flavoured vodkas. And OP isn’t what it was either, changed long ago into a less powerful formulation and made in Carlisle, not Masham; still a fine beer, but not the mad, bad, brilliant stuff of near hallucinogenic power it once was. One of the Theakston family fell out with the others and started brewing another beer, back in Masham. You could tell he’d fallen out with the rest of the family because he called this new real ale Black Sheep (itself a fine pint, but no Old P.).

  Masham, on the other hand, seems only to have changed for the better. The first couple of times I went it felt a bit too quiet and sleepy; now it appears more lively, without being exactly frenetic (though it positively bustles on market day). Set in beautiful rolling Yorkshire scenery Masham is full of Good Things, like the White Bear Inn (which appears to have some connection to Jethro Tull, a band I still have a real soft spot for), several other great pubs, the old brewery, the King’s Head Hotel, not one but two brilliant delicatessen/sweet shops, some interesting craft outlets, the wide central square where the market still takes place, and the Floodlite restaurant. Which brings us back to that first bottle of Grange.

  In 1995 I decided Ann and I ought to start a new tradition of going to Masham every April, as close as possible to the anniversary of that first date, to drink at least one pint of Old Peculier. The first time we went we stayed at the King’s Head Hotel and on the second night ate out, at the Floodlite, which was one of those instant finds, where you immediately know you’ve stumbled on to something special; just amazingly good food. Plus it had a bottle of Ozzie plonk on the wine list for 75 quid. I’d decided a few years earlier that I was a real fan of the way Australian wine tasted in general compare
d to most French reds, plus I’d just had a royalty cheque and was therefore feeling relatively flush, so, though I’d never heard of this Penfolds Grange Bin 95, I stopped and thought about it.

  I remember thinking that 75 was an awful lot of money to spend on a red that wasn’t a Bordeaux, but I felt kind of encouraged by the quality of the food in Floodlite and the fact that everything else on the menu and the wine list seemed reasonably priced; maybe this 1989 Bin 95 stuff was entirely worth the money. So we ordered a bottle. It became my favourite wine from the first mouthful.

  I started looking out for it. I began, when we were going posh, to choose restaurants largely according to whether they had Grange on the wine list or not (so that, in London, Quo Vadis and then the Oak Room became favoured hang-outs in succession). I even started making notes about Grange; where we tasted it, what vintage it was and how much it cost. I never quite got round to the more esoteric business of rating it for taste, though I think I was on the brink of that before deciding it was all starting to get out of hand. It’s thanks to this now discontinued practice that I know the next two bottles we tasted after the Floodlite were an ‘87 at Sharrow Bay in the Lake District and a 1990 at Inverlochy Castle, outside Fort William.

  So I’d like to thank Les, Yorkshire, Masham, the Theakston family, the Floodlite restaurant, the Sun on Lamb’s Conduit Street, London, in its early-eighties real-ale period, my automobile’s feng shui consultant, both my eyebrow stylists, my dog’s therapist …

  On our return from the Champanay, heading back the few miles to the Forth Road Bridge in a people carrier taxi, we suddenly plough through a drift of whiteness in a little dip in the road. The fields for about 50 metres on either side shine in the moonlight, covered with – we work out after some confusion – hailstones. Otherwise the night is quite mild and the countryside as dark as it ought to be at this time of night and year. We have to check with the taxi driver that we’re really seeing what we seem to be. More weird weather.