Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram

  Whether he was coming to move them on or not we don’t know because he and granddad got to talking and discovered that, like most of that male generation, they’d both been in the trenches. The laird, of course, had been an officer, but the experience had arguably left them with more to unite them than to separate them, which was maybe one of the few good things to have come out of the whole catastrophic War To End All Wars.

  My dad remembers Granddad gesturing towards him and saying something like, Well, at least the boy here won’t have to go through the same thing I did.

  This was the late twenties. The laird shook his head sadly and told my granddad that he was very afraid he was wrong, and there would be another war, just as big and just as bad, if not bigger and worse, before too long. And quite possibly just in time for my dad reaching call-up age.

  Granddad grabbed the barrels of the laird’s shotgun before he could do anything to stop him and levelled the gun at my dad’s face. My dad stood stock still, staring terrified into the double barrels. The laird stood frozen goggle-eyed as well, though still holding on to the rest of the gun. ‘If I thought you were right,’ Granddad told the laird, ‘and this wee lad would have to go through anything like what I had to go through, I’d blow his head off here and now, and know I was doing him a favour.’

  Then he handed the man back his gun and marched off back to his boat, followed an instant later by my still quivering father.

  The laird was right about the coming war, of course. Dad served in the Royal Navy during the war, based at Scapa Flow in Orkney for a large part of it. Granddad died just outside the quarry one day when he was 65, playing football during his lunch break.

  In the news, Uday and Qusay, Saddam’s sons, displayed dead. Saddam’s grandson died in the same attack but they don’t show his body. It occurs to me that if Saddam is creeping round the desert in a pick-up with one big barrel of anthrax left over from his patently long-deceased WDM program, now is the time he’d use it. Nothing of the sort happens. On the other hand, the continuing attacks on American soldiers in Iraq are supposed to stop now. They don’t, and another few die.

  The quest continues; I’m off to Inveraray, Campbeltown and – hopefully – Arran. Then if the timings work out I’ll join some pals in Greenock for a card school. M5 again, alone, so the CD player is loaded with completely self-indulgent premium Iain-pleasing stuff; both Led Zeppelin Remasters, OK Computer by Radiohead, Strange Brew, The Very Best Of Cream, As If To Nothing by Craig Armstrong, and a collection that came with the June ’96 edition of Q magazine called Mmmmm … (these sample CDs are usually extremely hit-and-miss but this one always struck me as hanging together brilliantly, with not a weak track on it).

  I set off along the M8 at what seems like a really early hour to me, however the roads are already pretty busy. When I get to the turn-off for the Erskine Bridge near Bishopton it’s 0755 and I’ve got 25 minutes to get to Gourock for the ferry to Dunoon. I reckon I’m not going to make it so swing north across the bridge, up the side of Loch Lomond as far as Tarbet – this is where Rog’s mum lives but it’s a bit early to drop in for a cup of tea – then onto the basically brilliant A83, roaring up the Rest and Be Thankful. This is a pass that marked the summit of a once-steep road which must have been murderous for horses hauling people and goods and which was pretty demanding of old cars too. Then we go zapping along through Glen Kinglas. I pass the Cowal peninsula road junction at 0835, five minutes before the ferry I was aiming for would dock at Dunoon, so coming this way has definitely been the smart move.

  Out of Lochgilphead I pick up a tail; what has to be a local in a modest-looking Rover driven easily well enough to keep up with the M5 on this twisty stretch of road.

  Now, I absolutely don’t believe in road racing but we are going fairly briskly – I don’t want to hold the guy up, after all. There’s one straight stretch where I could go a lot faster but don’t, to give my new chum a chance to overtake, but he chooses not to, so I guess we’re okay.

  It’s a bit drizzly and the road is wet from earlier showers; the M5’s traction warning light flickers once or twice on the display, indicating that it’s sensed a momentary loss of grip. The BMW does finally get away from the old Rover for a bit but we’re back together by the time we enter Tarbert, where my shadow pulls in. I always wish there was some hat-doffing gesture to perform at such points; I have no real doubt that if this guy had been driving the M5 and I’d been driving the old Rover – even knowing the road – he’d have lost me in the first couple of miles.

  The A83 south of Tarbert, certainly past the Islay ferry port at Kennacraig, is something of a corker; not ultimately fast – too many wee settlements and too lumpy a surface for that – but nicely open and pleasantly undulating. It reminds me a lot of a similar west-facing stretch of seaboard road on the A77 heading from Girvan to Stranraer. It’s a clear day in between the rain showers, and in the distance I can see Ireland, cliffed across the horizon.

  Springbank distillery’s entrance lies on the main road into Campbeltown.

  There are now only two or three fully working distilleries in Campbeltown. Once there were dozens.

  Blame that whole boom-and-bust thing.

  What happened was that back in the latter part of the nineteenth century Campbeltown grew to become, in effect, the whisky capital of Scotland, never quite eclipsing Speyside in terms of its productive capacity but almost equalling it in the number of distilleries in the region and certainly providing a more focussed concentration of whisky-making than anywhere in Speyside or the rest of Scotland could boast. The place fairly reeked of whisky, stank of distilling; soon the local grain supplies proved insufficient and loads were brought in not just from the rest of Scotland but from Denmark and even Russia. The dried draff was exported as far as Germany, allegedly to feed the Prussian army’s horses.

  The local whisky barons built mansions on the profits. Campbeltown became a boom town, the unchallenged Whisky Metropolis of the west coast. By 1891 this essentially wee daft town in the middle of a watery nowhere with a population of less than 2000 souls had the highest per capita income of anywhere in Britain, and all because of whisky.

  It couldn’t and didn’t last.

  A degree of complacency set in, and standards fell. In an industry where you don’t reap what you sow for at least three years and probably a lot longer, this is both an ever-present temptation and an act of complete and almost inevitably utter and terminal stupidity. Even more to the point, speculators started to buy up supplies of product, investing in entire warehouses of still-maturing spirit, so encouraging the production of more of the same. What looked at the time like a virtuous spiral set in, investment encouraging production, until the boom’s bust point was reached, there was a tiny blip that turned into a big one, the premium was suddenly on quality not quantity, and the whole shaky speculative, down-marketed edifice fell apart. The First World War didn’t help matters, however it was the combination of punitive tax hikes by Liberal Chancellor Lloyd George, along with post-war mass unemployment in Glasgow and the local coal beds running out which completed the destruction.

  In the twenties, when the US was undergoing its honourably intentioned but basically insane experiment with Prohibition, Campbeltown started to blossom again, but it was still predominantly bottom-of-the-range stuff, and after a reprise of the boom-and-slump trajectory it had experienced two decades before, the place sank back into the productive stagnation that lasts till this day.

  The one great shining light in all this sorry tale of commercial darkness is Springbank. Springbank distillery does all the things that almost nobody else does; it malts its own barley – grown locally – it flavours and dries the barley over smouldering local peat, it directly coal-fires its stills, it does not chill filter or use caramel colouring plus it two-and-a-half or even triple distils its spirit.

  The result is a whisky of enormous provenance and genuinely magnificent taste, an unparalleled, uncompromising contender for a p
lace in the Top Ten Scottish malts. And, going on past experience, a whisky with a real chance of displacing even the great Gran Reserva as my Best Dram So Far. It has strong hints of Island – even Islay – whisky in character, with a deep, convoluted, yet zesty and somehow youthful character. A real surf-and-turf whisky, with notes of the sea-salt airs and the root-tangled earth about it. The 15-year-old I buy in Cadenhead’s shop in Campbeltown itself – Cadenhead’s being an outlet owned by Springbank since 1969 – is a surprisingly peaty monster, all competing tastes of salt and soil, riddled with sweetness and a whole spectrum of oily, quayside-tarry notes.

  A singular, beguiling, uncompromising whisky from a place that was once a whole region and is now reduced, concentrated down to Springbank itself, plus Longrow and the quite separate Glen Scotia, which I’m sorry to report is the the only other whisky I’ve tasted so far apart from Auchentoshan which has proved a real let-down. Les and I sampled a 1990 bottle from Signatory at the same time back in May and immediately looked at each other, somewhat aghast, unwilling to believe that what we were tasting was supposed to be a good single malt. Oily – in a bad way – and kind of off, frankly. Signatory is usually an extremely reliable source of rare and interesting whiskies, so I like to think we just got a bad bottle.

  Anyway, it’s too hard trying to decide exactly where Springbank sits in the hierarchy right now; best wait until I’ve got them all in front of me and try to decide then.

  Longrow, once a bottling from an old set of casks owned by Springbank – who own the name Longrow and have done their creditable best since to produce a quite different whisky from the apparatus that usually produces Springbank – is an even heavier, peatier – in fact quite intensely peatier – and altogether more forceful dram with a bouquet like a deep breath in a pine forest. My Cadenhead’s’ bottle is a fairly standard 10-year-old and I like it a lot, but as I’ve said I kind of like fighting with my flavours, and those of a more delicate disposition might find it too bruisingly combative to enjoy.

  I walk round Campbeltown for a bit between showers, soaking up its pleasant sea airs and admiring the Victorian exuberance of architecture obviously built, or at least commissioned, at the height of the town’s commercial success.

  Then, after a bit of unashamed road-bagging round the glans of the peninsula, it’s off northwards to Claonaig on the shaft’s east, Clyde-facing coast, to pick up the ferry for Lochranza on Arran, and a visit to what is, at least for now, Scotland’s youngest distillery.

  The Arran distillery, opened in 1995, looks quite spankingly new. It’s set on the outskirts of the village a kilometre or so from the ruins of Lochranza Castle, with the hills rising steeply on three sides. There are two main distillery buildings, plus a smallish warehouse hidden away behind them. The main two buildings have purely decorative pagodas which I think you’d have to be a real knickers-in-a-twist purist to complain about; basically pagodas are stylised signs that shout Distillery! the way that a red and white striped pole used to shout Barber Shop!

  One building houses the offices, the Visitor Centre with the usual blonde-wood-and-stanchions décor, a shop, an enclosure of what looks like real growing barley and a impressively large indoor waterfall feature faked to look like a bit of hillside. Upstairs there’s a café/restaurant serving interesting, above average fare (I have a very late but delicious lunch consisting of a venison sausage and black pudding baguette, but they do food for normal people too). The only negatives in the café/restaurant seem to be the seat backs, which bend alarmingly when you put any weight on them and feel like they’re about to send you tumbling backwards. The other building contains all the whisky-making equipment.

  They’re having their quiet season at the moment so photos are allowed in the production building, which in appearance is quite refreshingly different from most distilleries. For one thing it’s effectively open-plan, with the mash tun, washbacks, stills, condensers and ancillary bits and pieces all in the one big square space. You head up steps from ground level onto a metal mesh floor covered with mats where people are likely to walk during the tour. There are lots of windows and so there’s lots of light and there are tubs of pot-plants scattered about the floor, which is an unusual sight at the business end of a distillery (must get hot in here for the plants when it’s sunny and the stills are running; on the other hand maybe the greenery benefits from the CO2 given off by the washbacks. Whatever, they look real and in good nick).

  There are attractive banisters in the shape of barley stalks round a well that holds the intermediate- and low-wines receivers. The wash still has a much thinner neck than the spirit still, and the Lyne arms are both almost flat. Our guide tells us that the sharpness of the angle of the Lyne arm’s elbow does a lot to determine the fierceness of the spirit, a sharp bend producing a sharp spirit, which is a detail I hadn’t encountered before. One interesting point is that there has patently been no evolution whatsoever in spirit safe design over the years, because the one here looks like it could have come out of a distillery established in 1795, not 1995.

  Arran has taken the off-site handling of barley a stage further than most, buying its raw material not just already malted but already milled and gristed too. There’s no peat in the malt itself, the local water – which was the principal reason for siting the distillery here rather than anywhere else – being judged peaty enough by itself. Most of the production has to be matured on the mainland because the distillery could only get planning permission for that one relatively small warehouse behind the main buildings.

  I buy a bottle of the non-chill-filtered whisky at 46 abv. As in the Cadenhead’s shop in Campbeltown, you can pour your own bottle of whisky here from a cask set up in the shop; they’ll cork it and label it for you while you wait, which is a neat retailing idea (Tommy Dewar would have been proud). There’s no age stated on my bottle but obviously it can’t be more than eight years old given that the place started up in 1995 and I’m buying the bottle in 2003. It’s a fresh, appley dram, sharply sweet with hints of peat and wood. Positively refreshing, and it’ll be fascinating to see how older expressions turn out.

  The good ship Caledonian Isles lands me in Ardrossan (Cal-Mac ship, restaurant, usual menu, late light baguette-lunch no longer filling tum, no evening meal arranged; you guess the rest) and I head home. I’ve made such good time I’d have to kick my heels for too long in Inverclyde before the card school starts, plus I’ve caught myself yawning rather a lot already after my early start this morning and I’m not sure I’d be safe to drive back later on tonight. Anyway I need to be up at a respectable hour tomorrow because we’re off to Orkney.

  I’ve listened to my six CDs once by now and so channel-hop on the radio on the way back instead, catching some government apparatchik wittering on about how they must be winning the war against drugs because they’re intercepting so many more shipments these days. Oh good fucking grief.

  Illegality: a thought experiment.

  Okay, here’s the scenario:

  A kid, say ten years old or so, finds a tenner on the pavement. Or maybe they nick it out of their mum’s purse. Whatever. They go to an off-licence. They reach up, slap the note on the counter and in a high, childish voice say, ‘Bottle of vodka, please, mister.’

  What? Nine out of ten? Nineteen out of twenty? Ninety-nine out of a hundred? (Adjust according to level of cynicism or outright experience.) Regardless of the exact proportion, the vast majority of people behind the counter at an off-licence are going to tell the kid to get out; they can’t serve them. And most would say the same thing if the kid asks for a packet of fags.

  So the kid goes back onto the street, finds a dealer and says, ‘Can I have a tenner’s worth of heroin, please?’

  Again, we’re probably talking nine out of ten, nineteen out of twenty or ninety-nine out of a hundred. Except this time the numbers are reversed, and it’s only one dealer in ten, one dealer in twenty or one dealer in a hundred who would turn the child away and not sell them what they’
ve asked for.

  So what is the best way of protecting our children, controlling mind-altering substances and ameliorating the damage to society caused by these things, given that the demand is unarguably there?

  Don’t forget that in the off-licence the drink will be of a guaranteed quality and effectively unadulterated because if it ever isn’t there will be commercial hell to pay. Don’t forget that the dope can be as contaminated, cut and crap as the dealer thinks they can get away with, because nobody’s going to complain to their local M.P. or Food Standards lab. Don’t forget that tobacco sends 110,000 people to an early grave in Britain alone and alcohol over 40,000.

  Seriously; which way protects the best: legal control or simple illegality? Can you honestly see any excuse for sticking with the absurd system we have at the moment? I mean apart from sheer conservative-with-a-small-c idiocy?

  Right, rant over.

  Big silver bird in sky! Well, medium-size silver bird, anyway; a BA/Logan Air twin-prop Saab 340 from Edinburgh to Kirkwall via a brief touchdown at Wick. As we’re on the approach into Wick I see the Old Pulteney distillery but otherwise it’s been a frustrating flight because there’s been so much cloud. Flying – preferably not too high – over country you know is one of life’s great pleasures. Must learn to fly. Maybe next year.

  I suppose I’m getting a bit demob-happy at this point; the quest is almost over (just the paperwork to do, but then I generally enjoy that too, so what the hey), plus there’s a feeling that I’m saving some of the best for last; I know Highland Park pretty well already and there’s a lot to look forward to here. I’m also feeling slightly smug because I got through security at Edinburgh with my Swiss Army Card. This is a sort of Swiss Army knife in a credit-card-sized bit of plastic; it has a little knife with a three-centimetre blade and a dainty pair of miniature scissors.