Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram

by Iain Banks

  I stop in Wigtown on the way back. It’s Scotland’s Book Town. They’re hoping to turn it into a northern Hay-on-Wye and while it’s not really there yet in terms of the sheer numbers of book shops, it too is developing hopefully and seems encouragingly busy. Even has a bookshop that specialises in SF and related stuff, which is no bad thing. I struggle to restrict myself to two shops and as many books as I can carry. I head back via the coast and the A75. The 701 from Moffat is equally inspiring in the opposite direction.

  The fake speed camera at Tweedsmuir is still there.

  By now it’s June and I’ve started writing the book. We’ve played host to Ann’s sister Susan and her husband Phil as well as to Ann’s parents, Denis and Christa, so Ann doesn’t feel too left out or lonely as I sit in the study clattering away at the keyboard. We’ve been abroad with Denis and Christa in Cyprus back in March, of course (cue that unexpected snow in Pissouri) and we went to Berlin – one of my favourite cities since I hitchhiked there from Hamburg in 1975 – with Sue and Phil back in November. Cue perfectly expectable temperatures of umpteen below. On the way to Berlin, changing flights at Birmingham Airport, I picked up a copy of Whisky magazine. By November I’d already signed up to write this book, and besides, the magazine had an article about whisky bars in Berlin. We don’t actually visit any of these bars, though we do stroll round the Charlottenburg Palace and visit another great palace, in this case of retailism, KaDeWe. KaDeWe is a monumental department store whose two top storeys are devoted to food and drink. These two floors make Harrods Food Hall look like a corner shop. Seriously; if you ever go to Berlin, don’t miss KaDeWe; if you have any interest in food and drink at all those two top storeys are just another vision of heaven.

  Later I take out a subscription for Whisky, strictly in the interests of diligent research.

  I’ve settled into a routine of writing, doing all the usual domestic stuff, and – to try and keep even slightly fit while being basically sedentary through most of the day – augmenting my usual short walks round the village with longer walks in the forests and hills within a half-hour’s drive.

  There are still distilleries to be investigated, however, and malts to be drunk. The next couple of unwitting guests to be press-ganged into some gratuitous distillery-researching are the Obasis.

  Michelle Hodgson used to do my publicity. She’s working for the Guardian and Independent these days and – as an aspiring writer – writing novels in her spare time, but for a good decade or so she was the person who had the task of arranging my promotional tours round the country and then accompanying me round the bookshops for a fortnight at a time. Michelle did this for lots of other writers too, of course, but my book-a-year schedule meant that she probably had to endure more time with me over those ten years than any other scribbler. Despite this, she became good friends with Ann and me – to the extent that our spare room was renamed the Hodgson Suite – and we’ve kept in touch since she left Little, Brown.

  Michelle is another of these approximately-eleven-years-younger pals, about the same age as Gary and Roger. The girl takes her novel research seriously. She lived on Guadeloupe in the Caribbean for almost half a year to research a novel set there, and moved out for three months to Benin, next door to Nigeria, a couple of years ago, to work on another book. In both places the national language is French, which Michelle is fluent in, and part of the idea was to go somewhere hot and exotic, certainly (research should be fun, as I’ve always thought and am trying to prove), but more importantly somewhere hot and exotic off the more usually trodden tracks for English speakers. Ann and I duly went out to Guadeloupe for a week when she was there – just to make sure she was okay, obviously – but missed out on Benin.

  Maybe just as well. While Michelle was there she contracted malaria. She got through it, and it was one of the not-quite-so-serious, non-recurring types, but it sounded unpleasant enough from the symptoms she described. One of the main reasons she got through the illness was a young Nigerian man called Tom Obasi, who looked after her while the disease was at its worse. They were married a few months later.

  Why Roger and I have mixed feelings about Brad.

  Bradley Adams is a great tall chunky man of quietly riotous good humour and a passion for films and for making films that can even get through my near-invincible filmic disillusion. He was the producer of The Crow Road, and, if the money is ever got together, will produce the films of my books that Roger has been working on the scripts of. He has an enormous reservoir of Really Funny Film Stories (many of them libellous), is great company and, in a modest, unassuming way, is profoundly impressive.

  Roger, Brad and I were sitting in the secret underground HQ of Brad’s production company in Soho (well, I usually get lost when I’m trying to find it and it is in the basement). We were in what I think is supposed to be the script development room but which always feels to me like the staff room or the common room or the officers’ mess or something, sitting round the table drinking wine and chatting. Roger and I were about to leave to meet Michelle for the first time since she’d got back from Africa, before rendezvousing with Brad again later so I could do research for my novel Dead Air (this consisted of going to a huge early Christmas party being thrown by Working Title Films at the RAC Club on Piccadilly, then going on to the Groucho Club and the Soho House and then the Century Club where I had a great time but then completely forgot all about until we had the book’s launch party there, coincidentally, most of a year later. After that we went back to Claridge’s and sat talking nonsense, mostly, all night).

  So, just before Roger and I were about to leave the secret bunker to go and meet Michelle, I mentioned to Brad that Michelle had gone to Africa and got the two big ‘M’s: Malaria and Married. This was an observation of such minor wit even I wasn’t remotely proud of it, but people kind of expect this sort of thing when you’re a writer and it’s hard to get out of character sometimes. Brad just nodded once and said, ‘Ah yes; first bitten, then smitten.’

  Roger and I looked at each other, faces falling.

  We were supposed to be the writers; we do the quips, the funny dialogue, the one-liners. Not producers. And we rarely expect to generate all the above stuff in real time; it can often take hours of work (or what certainly feels like hours of work) to create what looks and sounds like a single snappy off-the-cuff remark.

  Naturally we pointed out this basic film industry professional demarcation issue to Brad at the time, but I doubt the scamp took any notice.

  In any event, maybe now you can see why we both love the guy and – when he says something like that – really really hate him.

  So, Michelle and Tom come to stay in what is now the Obasi Suite. We go to the Omar Khayyam, come home and play lots of pool. This mostly means Tom and me being competitive and me being lucky. Tom is a breezily cheerful guy with a neat turn of phrase. He looks fit as an ebony fiddle (well, maybe a viola) but declares that he has to be careful not to eat too much because as he tells us, ‘I am vulnerable to expansion’. Nobody who sees Michelle and Tom together could doubt they married for love, but he’s had predictable problems getting a residency visa for the UK. It’s been sorted out now and he’s set up his own company to install security camera systems, though what he wants to do is start up an import-export business shipping goods to and from Nigeria.

  The next day we load up the M5 and head for Mull, to visit the Tobermory distillery. Music comprises three CDs of soul classics, Buzzin’, the second Bumblebees album, Specialist in all Styles by Orchestra Baobab and Loss, by Mull Historical Society.

  We take the Glen Devon route to Crieff, then head on down the A85 for Oban. The stretch between Tyndrum and Dalmally is the best bit, with intestinally sinuous curves and fabulously long, open straights, then after Lochawe village there are more fast lengths along the side of Loch Awe through the Pass of Brander.

  There’s a power station built into the mountain of Ben Cruachan and one day I really intend to visit it. The power stati
on uses off-peak electricity generated by other power stations during the night to pump water out of Loch Awe up to the Cruachan reservoir 1500 feet up the mountain. It takes so long to shut down your average power station efficiently that it’s cheaper to keep them running overnight and use the power for schemes like this. During the day, when there are peaks in demand, the water’s released from the reservoir and flows back down to Loch Awe through some humungous pipes and a huge turbine hall hollowed out of the middle of the mountain. The turbines drive generators and the electricity they make goes into the National Grid.

  There’s a Visitor Centre here so it’s not as though you need to ask somebody nicely before you can see all this, which basically sounds like exactly the sort of Big Engineering Stuff that I’d really get off on, but the trouble is that when we pass here we’re usually either, as today, on the way to catch a ferry, or on our way back after a holiday and just wanting to get home. Plus it is a great bit of road, so we tend to have already gone whistling past by the time we think it might be an idea to stop and have a look. Still, one day.

  At Connel, tyres swishing through the remains of a light shower, we look for the Falls of Lora, but the tide’s wrong. The falls are tidal rapids caused by a broad lip of underwater rock at the narrows where Loch Etive joins the sea; twice a day, unless it’s a neap tide, the whole width of the narrows fills with wild, surging surf. It’s kind of nature’s equivalent of the Ben Cruachan pump-it-up/let-it-flow-down setup. Actually it’s mildly surprising it hasn’t been dammed with a tidal barrage.

  The falls lie almost underneath the bridge at Connel. This is an old, narrow girder bridge which used to carry both road vehicles and trains, when the line still ran to Ballachulish; traffic lights stopped the cars when a train was approaching (I remember seeing this happen, back in the early sixties when we were on holiday and Mum and Dad’s car was stopped at the Connel side. The steam engine roared past only feet away from us. I recall being immensely impressed). Even without the trains the bridge is still too narrow for two-way traffic, so the lights at both ends remain.

  The ferry is inbound a mile or two out of port as we arrive in Oban. I’ve always liked Oban; it can get so busy in the height of the season that the whole town is basically full, with nowhere to park and nowhere to stay, but I suppose that’s down to geography. The place grew up around its harbour, and the same intricate foldings of the landscape that made the anchorage sheltered by hiding it from the open waters mean that the land nearby is highly convoluted, all steep hills, cliffs and outcrops of rock with relatively little flat ground available. At such times, if you don’t need to go through it but it lies en route, it’s arguably quicker and certainly much more pleasant to take to the network of wee roads east of the town which I tend to think of as the Oban bypass, but for all its its dizzy bustle the place has real charm and the ferries, fishing boats, yachts and trains give it a buzz that by Highland standards makes the place positively colourful.

  As the ship quits the harbour, we pass the ivy-smothered ruins of Dunollie Castle. I climbed this once, on a day trip by train from Edinburgh, and did a circuit of the walls’ broad summit. That was after the first instance of What Happened To My Car, back in 1987, when I was travelling by train quite a lot because I’d picked up a twenty-month ban for drunk driving. Broke Jim’s ankle, wrote off a very large Volvo and demolished a not insignificant part of a Kentish farm. Long story.

  I do not have chicken curry and chips on the ferry.

  We pass Duart Castle shortly before docking at Craignure. This is another much filmed location; the most recent film I remember seeing it used in was Entrapment, but it’s been in a few others. We’re staying at Druimard Country House Hotel, in Dervaig, right beside the small but perfectly formed Little Theatre of Mull, about twenty minutes away from Tobermory, the island’s capital.

  The food at Druimard is excellent, though only Michelle and I turn up for breakfast. Tom, like Ann, seems to number Sleep and Having a Long Lie amongst his hobbies. I am tempted by the kipper, but we’ll be in the M5 for a good few hours today, and in-car belching etiquette dictates that scrambled eggs are probably a safer bet. When we eventually round up our respective spouses we head over the wee twisty road for Tobermory, like Oban another clinging-to-the-land-by-its-fingernails kind of town, but very colourful.

  Tobermory has probably been on more postcards and magazine and book covers than any other Scottish town of its size just because it’s so picturesque (and these days it’s almost better known as the BBC’s Balamory); every harbour-front building save the church seems to be some freshly painted and very bright primary colour – usually with contrast detailing round the edges and apertures – and the whole wildly motley crescent is backed by wooded cliffs and reflected in the clear waters of the harbour. One of those places you practically have to have a degree in camera klutzhood to take a bad photo of.

  At the distillery, we register an interest in taking a tour – they need a few more than just us to make a quorate tour group. However after a look round some interesting craft shops and a chandlers on the spectrum of seafront, we get together with some more people to do the look-round.

  Tobermory distillery instantly gets the prize for Hottest Still Room So Far. It’s not even that hot outdoors but the still room is small and relatively cramped, and with the stills operating as they are now, you can feel the heat increase with pretty much every step you take up from the room’s floor to the walkway set around the stills’ centres. I remember walking uphill in the largest of the big quilted-looking biomes at the Eden Project in Cornwall the summer before, and experiencing the same feeling there, each pace underneath the giant bubble-wrap semispheres seeming to make the air hotter and more humid. It doesn’t feel too claustrophobic in the still house because there’s a big new window looking out onto the road outside, but the heat is such that you can see people start to wilt almost as soon as we walk in.

  The distillery sits in a relatively cramped site jammed against the bottom of a cliff, across the main road from its old warehouses, which have been turned into rather attractive council flats. The main road down into the bay-front centre of town runs past them, but the traffic noise must be partially masked by the susurrus of sound coming from the distillery’s water supply, the Tobermory River, which tumbles down the steep stepped channel between the flats and the road. These days the spirit is taken to be matured in that big old converted mill by the Teith at Deanston, near Doune. Usually reliable sources indicate that this has, as you might expect, changed the character of the whisky so that it’s less island-like in flavour, missing some of the seaweedy notes it used to display and tasting a little more like a Lowland malt.

  The water is so naturally heavily peated there’s no need to add peat to the malt for a hint of the flavour to come through in the finished dram, though phenolised malt is used for the Ledaig expression. Ledaig means ‘safe haven’ in Gaelic and was the old name for Tobermory, which – just as Oban is protected from on-shore winds by the island of Kerrera – is sheltered by Calve Island. The washbacks, housed in a Velux-windowed building set hard against a precipitous tree-lined slope, are made of Douglas fir, replacing the more usual Oregon pine.

  The stills each have an odd-looking Lyne arm which looks like a drawn-out S lying on its side. Incredibly, Tobermory risks setting the entire atmosphere of Earth on fire and sending the planet spinning into the Sun by letting people take flash photos in the still house. Obviously these people don’t know the primal forces they’re meddling with. However it’s not my job to set the poor fools straight so I keep shtum and click and flash away with me Minolta.

  The 15-year-old Ledaig I buy at the distillery is a nicely rounded dram of some peatiness and smoke, halfway between a typical Island Whisky and a Lowlander; a peninsular whisky, perhaps. There’s a kind of high, keen edge to it that then fills out into a kind of spicy chocolate flavour. Tobermory itself, usually bottled at ten years old, is a lighter whisky which still seems to have that touch
of peat and sea about it, and focuses the spiciness of Ledaig down to a sort of nutty pepperiness.

  I don’t grudge the people in the flats opposite the distillery their homes, but you do wonder what the expressions of the last couple of decades would have tasted like had they been matured within sniffing distance of the sea.

  The last thing we do before leaving for the ferry is buy some Mull Cheddar, one of the best, tangiest, most fiercely flavoured cheeses you can buy.

  A couple of weeks later on a hot, bright sunny day Ann and I take the wee car through Glen Devon to Crieff and Gilmerton and back round to the Famous Grouse Experience at Glenturret. We go via the small, very peaceful little chapel at Tullibardine, an old family chapel no longer in use but sitting very prettily in a stand of beautifully shaped Scots pines, and wonderfully cool inside on such a hot day.

  The route has also taken us past Gleneagles, the stupendously grand but surprisingly welcoming überhotel where, in the big art deco bar to the right as you enter through the main doors, there is a very thick brown book detailing lots of whiskies. Lots of old, rare whiskies. Lots of old, rare, very expensive whiskies. Lots of old, rare whiskies which are so expensive the prices make you blink and look again, because you could buy an entire case of quite decent whisky for the price being asked here for a glass. It is a decent glass, in the sense that the standard measure is a small double – 50ml – but even so.