Raw Spirit

by Iain Banks

  Anyway. In the tasting room Ann and I try clear, newly made raw spirit, plus Macallan at 12, 18, 25 and 30 years old. I’m just nosing because I have to drive afterwards.

  Even the raw spirit doesn’t smell too terrible; it reminds me of Pear Drops, the synthetic-tasting sweets I used to like when I was a kid. Otherwise, quite clean and spare. Faced with the choice, you’d definitely knock this stuff back in preference to a few rough vodkas I’ve had the misfortune to have tried over the years.

  The later and older expressions of the whisky itself just get better and better. With the 30-year-old I do take a small sip rather than just sniff. The oldest Macallan I’d tried until this point had been a 25-year-old.

  There is, obviously, lots of sherry-wood influence in the taste, and that influence increases with age, but the subtlety of the whisky is such that the result is a spectrum of different flavours which owe a distant debt to the alchemy between the spirit and the cask, rather than just a single dominant taste of sherry (if you want to test this, buy a cheap blend and mix it with sherry; it really isn’t the same at all). There’s honey, Christmas cake, heather, a whole fruit bowl of citrus tones, smokiness, syrup, peat (usually fairly elusive, but poking its head out of the thickets of other tastes now and again), vanilla, leather, straw, ginger and even other sorts of wood beside the oak you’d expect in there; cedar is one, and I thought I smelled something like the balsa wood we used for the initial few lessons in first-year woodwork class.

  It all sounds like a clanging, clashing orchestra-tuning-up kind of mishmash, but of course not all these tastes are in every expression, and the beauty of Macallan is that every single bottling comes out like a coherent whole, like a symphony, everything working together, all the tastes in harmony, complimenting their neighbours and creating something rich and deep and worth going back to again and again.

  You can pay gaggingly large amounts of money for very old Macallan. If you do have the money though, by all means go for the older stuff, because with Macallan, as far as I’ve been able to tell, you do tend to get what you pay for; this is a whisky that generally just gets better and better as it gets older, and while you will pay through the nose for the privilege, at no point are you going to get ripped off, paying more for less.

  The only proviso would be to do with opulence of taste. I love Macallan because it’s just so packed with strong flavours, and the fact that the longer it stays in the cask the more wood and sherry elements it’s going to pick up means that of course for me older will equate to better. For people who prefer a lighter, less intense dram, or who just don’t like the sherry and wood notes, the 10-year-old might be as deep into Macallan Land as they wish to venture, as even the extra two years of the 12-year-old makes a difference, producing a more sweetly potent, heavily flavoured whisky.

  The Gran Reserva I tried to impress John from Florida with the night before is eighteen years old, but a deliberately more forceful expression than the usual eighteen as it’s matured entirely in first-fill sherry casks (hence the name). This is an immensely powerful, imposing, woodily dominant expression, and while I love it, I can understand it might be just too much for people who prefer a more delicate dram, and would not be appropriate for every occasion or even every time of day.

  Personally I think Macallan’s good at almost any age – well, maybe not seven, capisce – with the widely available 10-year-old serving as a perfectly fine introduction to the oeuvre, while the best compromise between reasonable price and sock-knocking-off taste is probably the standard 18-year-old. This expression is released most years as a specific vintage, the aim being to produce a balance between consistency and year-on-year change. The consistency is achieved by tasting as many as 100 casks, choosing about 50 of those, marrying the whisky from those casks together and leaving it vatted for a month, then performing a sort of mini-bottling and tasting the result (for the 25-year-old, the married whiskies stay vatted for a whole year before being evaluated).

  The tasters are brought rather centre stage at Macallan. They’ve built a new and very tasteful tasting room with more groovily contorted but sexily smooth pale wood and comfy stools with wrought-iron legs. This is where you sit if you do the extended tour. It has a wall-wide window through which you can watch the distillery’s tasters do their work; sniffing and slurping, spitting and noting and choosing. This struck me as a bit of an invasion of work-space privacy (it reminded me of the overlooked coopers at Strathspey Cooperage) and I waited until the guys were out of the room before taking a photo through the wide-screen window. I think I’d find being watched a real distraction if I was trying to do something as concentration-demanding as choosing between a hundred-plus different whisky barrels, but maybe that’s just me.

  On the other hand, it has to be a bit of a compensation that you’re getting to work day-in, day-out with unarguably one of the very best whiskies in the world.

  One last thought, to let you savour that expensive Macallan with an even clearer conscience. The distillery is part of the Edrington Group, which also includes the Bunnahabhain, Glengoyne, Glenrothes-Glenlivet (so somebody still uses the G-word), Glenturret, Highland Park and Tamdhu single malts and the Cutty Sark and Famous Grouse blends. The Edrington Group is in turn largely owned and run by the Robertson Trust, a charitable body since 1961 which was set up by three sisters called Robertson who had inherited significant parts of the Scotch industry. The Trust gives about five million pounds a year to good causes, mostly in Scotland, so drinking any of these drams is practically a charitable act in itself. Good grief, how virtuous do you want to feel?

  Stop Press Handy Anti-Midge Tip.

  During our visit to Macallan, Gary and Margaret, our hosts in the Visitor Centre there, recommended Avon Skin-So-Soft as being an unintentionally effective anti-midge treatment. As you’d imagine that making your skin softer would serve only to help the midge introduce its proboscis into your epidermis, it must be something about the smell.

  Later in Glenfinnan, we’re assured it has to be the Skin-So-Soft Bath Oil.

  Later still we’re told the spray works just as well.

  Just thought you ought to know.

  12: Porridge and Scottishness, Football and Fireworks

  I DON’T LIKE porridge. There, I said it. The reason I don’t like it is not so much because of the taste – the stuff doesn’t actually have much of a taste of its own, though what it does have I don’t find very attractive – as because of the way it feels in my mouth. There is, for me, something unbearably, slidingly glutinous about porridge that pretty much does turn my stomach. Frankly, any time that I do try it, I can’t get over the feeling that I’m basically eating wallpaper paste.

  Now, I wish this was not the case; I feel a bit bad that I don’t like porridge, because I am Scottish, after all, and I even feel – albeit to a relatively small degree and with the usual liberal corollaries regarding nationalism, bigotry and the randomness of birth and subsequent identity – proud to be Scottish, and porridge is an undeniable part of my heritage. It’s arguably an important part of that heritage, because the seed it’s made from, oats, has played a vital role in keeping Scottish people fed over the centuries. Without oats – and barley – we might have had something like the Irish potato famine to add to our catalogue of Rubbish Things That Have Happened To Us.

  So I keep trying to like porridge. I attempt to eat a bowl every year or so, especially if I’m in somebody’s house who is known for making great porridge, or if I’m in a hotel with a reputation for prodigious porridge or brilliant breakfasts or just good food in general. I have tried it with the usual things people add to porridge to make it, well, taste of something other than porridge, I suppose (and this is the main piece of evidence I’d offer for this dislike of porridge not being just me; if the stuff’s so bloody marvellous, how come you have to add all these other things to it?).

  To this end, and to counter that familiar feeling that I’m eating something which would be better used to make rolls o
f anaglypta adhere to a wall, I’ve tried it the purist’s way, with a little salt (this makes it taste like salty wallpaper paste), with honey (it tastes like sweet wallpaper paste) and with strawberry jam (guess what?). Personally, nothing works. I just keep thinking the salt would taste better on an egg, and the honey and jam better on a bit of toast. There would seem to be these two basic approaches to adding stuff to porridge to make it remotely palatable; the sweet route and the savoury. The sweet way generally means preserves and the savoury starts with salt and ends with, well, Marmite, in the case of one of my sisters-in-law (if you’re grimacing at the thought of Marmite stirred into porridge, you are not alone). And/or you can add milk, which doesn’t really make the horrible, sloppy, squelchy stuff taste any better but does at least dilute it. Even this is a mixed blessing, of course, because although this means there’s less of the oily, mealy mass to consume in each grisly mouthful, the whole dish takes longer to consume, if you’re in one of those I’ll-finish-the-damned-stuff moods, or just don’t want to disappoint your hosts.

  What is odd is that I do like oatcakes, which, once you’ve crunched through them, produce a mouthful of something not unlike porridge.

  Then, of course, we have barley as one of our other historically staple foods. Which is fine when it’s made into whisky, but, again, I can’t stand it when it’s in Scotch broth. That glutinous thing again. And another national dish that I feel I ought to like but just can’t bring myself to eat.

  But then for a long time I rejected a lot of traditional Scottish stuff, like the kilt, bagpipes, haggis and drunken self-pity. I was twenty before I wore a kilt because I associated the things with the whole ghastly chintzy, gaggingly clichéd image of Bonnie fucking Scotland; Eileen Donnan on a shortbread tin with a sprig of heather in the foreground and the sound of Jimmy Shand or Andy Stewart in the background; Scotty dogs and some thick-necked twat in a skirt trying to outwit a telegraph pole. For a long time I wasn’t even that keen – whisper it – on whisky.

  Well, tastes change. I now own a rather splendid dress kilty outfit in one of my clan’s tartans; a simple black and white pattern that looks rakishly elegant with the black and silver Prince Charlie dress gear. Technically this colour scheme is the clan mourning tartan, but what the heck. I still don’t like massed bagpipes but I can tolerate and even enjoy a well-played single set, I now quite like haggis – though the best form I ever tasted it in was haggis pakora, an inspired example of Indo-Gael fusion that I did my best to take to ridiculous extremes in Whit – and as for drunken self-pity, well, I’m still working on that. I’ve not really had much excuse since I first got published, however there’s still plenty of time. Twenty-five years of desultory support for Greenock Morton Football Club, watching as they slid towards oblivion and the Scottish Third Division have to have had some effect, after all.

  Whisky I decided I liked long ago.

  It’s the last weekend of the season. Morton have one more game – a home game against fellow promotion contenders Peterhead – with which to secure promotion to the Second Division and the Third Division championship. Les, Ray and I think it behoves us to be there.

  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).