Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram

by Iain Banks

  Heading across the Forth Road Bridge, I take the main road into Edinburgh rather than the signposted route to the city bypass. This avoids the ludicrous A8000, a stretch of ordinary two-way road between the motorway and the bridge that should have been upgraded at least to dual-carriageway standard 40 years ago when the bridge was built. A bit of jiggery-pokery on some quiet wee roads and I end up on the bypass later anyway. You have more choices on a bike, because even if you do end up in a traffic jam, you can thread your way through towards the front by taking the narrow channel between two lanes of cars, or just overtake a single lane. Routes that you might avoid in a car because you know there’s going to be stationary traffic ahead you’ll happily tackle in a bike because the jam will only slow you down a bit.

  It’s a hot old day, and so there are a few Random Indicator Events. These are when people leave their indicator lights flashing long after the manoeuvre they were warning people of has been completed, so that you find cars and vans sitting in any given lane with either set of indicators blinking merrily away. You see a lot more of this sort of thing in hot weather because that’s when people are more liable to have their windows open and so can’t hear the indicator clicking above the noise of the wind, engine and tyre roar. And of course hot weather is usually bright weather, so noticing the tell-tale on the dash is harder in the glare, too.

  Approaching a vehicle sitting in the nearside lane which is indicating it’s about to pull out in front of you when there seems no need for it to do so is slightly worrying when you’re in a car – is this bozo going to suddenly put themself in my way, or is this just a seasonal Random Indicator Event? – but when you’re on a bike it’s much more anxiety-promoting. You’re not worrying about your bodywork, you’re worrying about your body. Then you have to decide whether to flash your lights at them, or honk the horn as you pass and use your own indicators to suggest they might like to check the state of their stalks.

  A roundabout on a bypass. Big queues ahead. Who does the road planning around here? I head gingerly down the gap between the two lines of traffic. This will never feel entirely natural to me. In fact it feels a bit like cheating, but on the other hand when I’m in my car and a biker threads their way down the central channel, I don’t mind; it doesn’t lengthen the amount of time I’ll have to spend in the jam, after all, so why should I resent it? However I do feel vaguely embarrassed to be doing this. Just all those years of being a car driver, I suppose. The only thing more embarrassing than heading down the central channel is not doing it, queuing up behind the stationary traffic, and then having a fellow biker pass you and disappear towards the front of the jam while you sit there like a prune.

  Through Dalkeith; the place specialises in traffic jams and today there are roadworks as well. Sitting in the bright sunlight in my black leathers, I start to get quite hot. Then finally it’s open-road stuff again, taking some wee daft roads to Glenkinchie. The route includes a ford, which is something you don’t see every day, certainly in Scotland. In fact I can only think of one other ford in Scotland on a public road, on a wee road near the Carron valley reservoir. This ford has a steep exit over badly pitted tarmac, and when the VFR splashes through the water I feel the back wheel slip momentarily as I get up a bit of speed to carry us over the cratered surface, but we get out without any further nonsense. I always seem to end up doing stuff like this on inappropriate bikes.

  The first bike I had after I passed my test was a CB 500, which – I read in the bike mags – was an all-rounder. Somewhat idiotically, I took this to mean you could use it like a trail bike and kept taking it up farm tracks and down muddy paths, over rocks and through streams and stuff, and so fell off a lot, tumbling over the handlebars on at least one occasion, though at such low speeds all that ever got hurt were the bike’s extremities. Inappropriate bike, see? Should have done all that sort of stuff on a trailie.

  On the other hand, the old 500 proved perfectly fine for going through disused railway tunnels. There’s an old railway line which passes by Glenfarg on the way to Perth; you used to be able to get up onto the route of the line from a minor road nearby, drive along the track bed – the rails were obviously lifted long ago – then drive into this tunnel. It was a good long tunnel, too, and curved, so that when you were in the middle you couldn’t see any daylight from either end. The bike’s headlight showed up very little because everything it pointed at was dark earth or soot stained bricks and rock. There was a bridge across the main road at the far end of the tunnel, and I could probably have followed the route of the old track to a way back onto the road, but I turned and went back the way I’d come because it had been such brilliant, eerie fun. The access point is fenced off now, so that’s that. Besides, I wouldn’t even try that sort of thing on the VFR; too much of a road bike.

  And so to Glenkinchie, a neat little distillery in a sleepy but well-turned-out-looking wee village. Pencaitland is south and east of Edinburgh, set in gently rolling wooded countryside, one more nexus in a web of GWRs. The distillery has a daintily clipped-looking bowling green which you pass on your way to the Visitor Centre, and there’s a general air of civilised peace and quiet about the place. There’s a good exhibition in the Visitor Centre, including a huge and intricate model distillery which was housed in the Science Museum in London for a couple of decades. Two big stills dominate the business end and one of the warehouses is a four-storey affair, stepped back into the surrounding valley’s steep side so that the ground and top levels both have entrances at ground level.

  Another well-promoted whisky, as the Lowland representative of the UDV/Diageo Classic Malts collection, Glenkinchie is full of heathery, flowery scents, with a long finish. In its own quiet way there’s quite a lot going on in here, and to be honest it’s beyond my uneducated palate to sort it all out, but there’s a definite impression of complexity. The obvious solution is to have more and work out what it is that’s going on, but that never quite seems to resolve things. Still fun trying though.

  Last bike-related plus of the day is that there’s no toll charge for motorbikes on the Forth Road Bridge. You have to slow down to a trundle until the toll operator registers your passing, but that’s all. Look, it’s only 80 pence for a car – and even that’s northbound only, so effectively 40 pence each way – but you’re still getting something for free that car drivers have to pay for, so it just feels good, okay?

  The M5. North to look for Speyside distillery again on the way to Dufftown and then Glen Garioch at Old Meldrum. In quest terms, this is a culminant trip, a raid into the distant hills and forests to a place of richness, a descending upon, to lift the treasure. I’m fairly brimming with anticipation, though I’m just a tiny bit nervous too, in case the cupboard is bare (of course, I could just have rung up and checked, but somehow that seemed like cheating).

  Near Kingussie I finally find the way to the Speyside distillery, but it’s up a steep, rough track with formidable-looking stones and rocks where decent law-abiding tarmac ought to be. If I’d brought the Defender I’d be up there without a second thought, but in the M5, with its foot-wide low profiles, it’s just asking for trouble. I continue towards Dufftown instead.

  Another hot day on Speyside, but this time it’s not unseasonable; it’s early August and the whole of the British Isles is having a proper summer heatwave. Records are being broken, tarmac is melting, rail tracks are buckling. I haul into the car park at Glenfiddich and buy so much whisky I’m invited to come to the rear door of the shop to load up from a pallet. This is the Gran Reserva I’ve decided is pretty much the bee’s knees. How good to make its acquaintance again.

  Then I head east, for Old Meldrum, road-bagging as I go. This means spending at least some time on the A96, the much-used and much-abused main road between Aberdeen and Inverness.

  There is an alternative way; the rail way, and that Aberdeen–Inverness line is also quite a good route for distillery-bagging, swinging through so much of Speyside. A book called The Iron Road To Whisky
Country makes it sound like the only way to travel, though if you want to get round lots of distilleries, a car still seems the obvious choice. Especially if somebody else can do the driving.

  Old Meldrum (innocent of the gratuitous ‘Old’ charge – it’s just the name of the town) is a pleasant little place on a low hilltop, deep in the fine farming land of Formartine. Formartine. Now there’s a word, a place I’d never heard of. It’s symptomatic of my relative ignorance of this whole corner of the country that the name of this regionette is completely new to me. It’s not an old county name, at least not one that I’d ever heard of, and yet there it is, on a couple of Ordnance Survey maps, and easily Googled – there’s a Formartine football team – so obviously the right name for the district but just one I’d never heard of. Whatever; Old Meldrum is home to what is now the most easterly distillery in Scotland, given that the old distillery at Glenugie near Peterhead has closed.

  Glen Garioch, it turns out, is a real contender for undiscovered gem; a little-known belter. It has had its share of ups and downs, closures and changes over the years, and the expressions reflect some of that variability; not so much in outright quality but in the differing spectra of tastes they present. The peatiness has come and gone over the years for a start, but it may be making a comeback, depending where Morrison Bowmore/Suntory want to go with this particular distillery’s expressions. In the relatively recent past, certainly the bottles-still-available past, Glen Garioch has presented, at fifteen and 21 years old, as one of the last of the old-school Highland whiskies, full of peat and smokiness. This is balanced by lots of fruit and herbs and a degree of sweetness with a long, rich finish. More recent expressions may not be so olde-worlde characterful – much less peat for one thing – but the spirit being laid down over the last few years appears to be returning to its roots, which in Glen Garioch’s case you would swear you can smell. Entirely worth seeking out.

  To Oban by train. Ann and I take the Fife Loop from North Queensferry to Waverley, the Embra–Glasgow shuttle service to Queen Street, then the combined Fort William/Oban West Highland train, which splits at Crianlarich.

  I’ve always liked trains. When I was a child I loved going down to the station at North Queensferry and climbing the steps of the footbridge to wait for a train to pass underneath. This was the early sixties, so most of the trains were hauled by steam engines. The steam and smoke exploded out around you as the engine’s funnel slid beneath the metal plates protecting the bridge’s wooden structure. For a few moments you were completely enveloped in a oil-scented white fog of warm steam and coal smoke, just lost to the world, ears ringing. I think I fell in love with that feeling of wild abandonment, that noise, that smell, that sense of power and raw, released energy – those of you who’ve read my book The Bridge might recognise this description. When they started using diesel multiple units for the Fife Loop, our school playground would stop as we all stood and stared, fascinated, at this strange engine-less group of carriages coming trundling across the Bridge.

  The first part of the journey to Oban is unremarkable, leaving Queen Street and looping round from north to west, through the undelightful schemes before coming back down towards the Clyde after Dalmuir and Kilpatrick (I get a good look at that Art Deco-ish sports pavilion I spotted while I was trying to find a way to Auchentoshan distillery). The line heads under the Erskine Bridge – as elegant and minimalist as the Forth Road Bridge is dramatic and muscular – and then along the shore towards Dumbarton, where those red summits of the Inverleven distillery rise like bricky echoes of Dumbarton Rock, then heads along the coast again, with Port Glasgow, Greenock and Gourock present across the river and the hills and mountains of Argyll visible in the haze down river. The line starts to rise after the outskirts of Helensburgh, then clatters along the hillside. Out of the town we head towards the sheer bloody disfiguring awfulness that is Faslane, the greatest physical manifestation on British soil of our Not Even Remotely Independent Deterrent; our US-owned, Brit-managed McNuke franchise.

  Last rant before the end.

  I have been in Faslane. Ann and I stopped off at the base once to see my cousin Katrine when she was Press Relations Officer there – she’s a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy, and, as I write this she is, thankfully, just back unharmed from the Gulf (another whisky connection; Katrine’s father, my uncle Peter, ex Fleet Air Arm, used to fly the private plane for the Distillers Company). Faslane is home port to the giant submarines which carry the US/UK Poseidon missiles with their Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicle warheads (how nice to find something that claims to be Independent that actually is).

  It’s a big place full of impressive buildings. There’s one colossal shed that can house an entire mega-sub, and then raise the whole 30,000-tonne bulk of the thing right out of the water. So, massive, Thunderbirds-worthy machinery, entirely worth the ten billion of hard-earned taxeroos that went into the whole system. The base is full of helpful people, too; we’d limped in with a flat tyre on the Drambuie 911 after some arguably over-optimistic road-bagging on some very small and badly maintained roads in the hills not far away, and the guys from the base Engineering section helped me change the wheel (for one of those horrible space saver tyres – we had to crawl back to Fife at 50. I almost fell asleep).

  Meanwhile the guys in the Officers’ Mess were, Ann reported, to a man unfailingly courteous, pleasant and witty. She loved the way they called Katrine ‘Ma’am’, too.

  Tyre changed, we had lunch with the base commander, another deeply professional and quietly impressive guy, with a good line in deprecating, humanisingly funny stories about the base, like how the government gave him more money per head to feed the guard dogs than the men, and how some bored MoD police, sent out to a distant part of the site to make sure traffic was sticking to the base speed limit, had turned their radar gun on a guy out running, and put him on a charge for exceeding said speed limit (if I recall correctly, he was let off and they were reprimanded for wasting a superior’s time).

  We had a good lunch in stimulating company and as we left to make our slow way home, past the peace people’s caravans outside the gates, I remember thinking that, given the fact that we had these weapons of mass destruction, and the whole Poseidon missile and sub system to house, deploy and launch them, the men and women we’d met on the base were exactly the sort of responsible, sensible, well-trained, eminently sane and thoroughly capable people I’d want to be in charge of them.

  The point – for crying out bleedin loud – is that we shouldn’t have the damn things in the first place. They’re a moral obscenity, and it’s only one of their less poisonous consequences that all these smart, capable people devote their undoubted talent, sometimes their entire careers, to maintaining such horrors in preparation for a day they too hope will never come. I have enormous respect for these people, but, frankly, when I hear some bunch of bag-arsed feminist nutters have thrown a load of equipment off a Navy barge, or taken hammers to the nose cones of fighter bombers on an airbase, they’re the ones I truly admire.

  I suppose my dad would say they were pissing into the wind, too. But that’s not the point.

  The ugliness that is the whole McNuke Statelet takes a long time to go; there are further jetties up Loch Long, fuel tanks for conventional ships dotting the hillsides below the rising track and then the entrances to the deep ammo stores disfiguring Gleann Culanach. The views of Loch Long do a lot to ameliorate the grisly presence of this awfulness.

  I travelled this way once just before New Year, maybe twenty years ago, with Jim and various other members of the Greenock card school, on our way for Hogmanay at Les’s. There had been a lot of snow over the previous few days, but on the evening we travelled it became a still, clear night with a full moon. Through opened windows we looked from the gently rocking train down to the ink-black loch under the pitch star-pitted sky, with the mountains on the far side of the loch shining pale blue-white under the moon and the trees all dark but dusted with the snow. The o
ld train’s engine became almost silent for a while, sound soaked up by the trees round a bend ahead as we coasted down towards the head of the loch, just the clicking of the carriage wheels left. A few tiny navigation lights winked, lost in the emptiness and the silence.

  Another time, again in winter but on this occasion in the bright milk light of day, the train was crossing the waste that is Rannoch Moor, where the whole line floats on sunken, bundled branches, when it startled a whole hundred-or-more herd of deer. They went leaping away across the page-white snow, dark bodies like liquid shadows, as though made from some quickened negative of mercury.

  Then there was the time Jim and I sat across the table from each other on the same journey, completely stoned, and had an Extreme Close-Range Water Pistol Fight.

  Ah well. Boys and toys.

  It’s a hottish journey in the train, even with all the windows open (no AC for the West Highland Line, though on the few occasions when you’d welcome it, you’d really welcome it). The views are worth it though.

  Oban. We stay at the Caledonian Hotel, as it’s close to the station. Once dowdy, the place has become positively funky. Our room has a view over the harbour even better than the one at Kirkwall, and a big free-standing bath in the generously sized bathroom, with a separate shower big enough to bend over in for soap retrieval purposes without the risk of impaling oneself on the plumbing. Lots of stripes and bright colours. And themed, too, in a nautical and sailorish sort of way. There are some nice little flourishes; our room on the third floor has a wee turret with a single curved window, and the curtains hang from the rail via boating shackles rather than ordinary curtain rings.