Whisky

by Aeneas MacDonald

  While this might seem today an outlandish conception, vigorously refuted both by the growing legions of female malt drinkers and the enthusiasm with which ever increasing levels of phenol are demanded in the newly fashionable malts of Islay, the thought must inevitably occur that perhaps our whisky has changed. Perhaps we are mere boys compared to MacDonald’s heroic topers and—worrying thought—perhaps the price of whisky’s world domination is that it has been rendered bland. These are deep matters to ponder, demanding the most pungent of drams to stimulate speculation.

  However, while we may look with nostalgia on these long-lost peat-soaked monsters, elsewhere we find mention of some 128 blends comprising a mixture of Scotch and Irish spirit. This is a passing that cannot be lamented and, indeed, the ever reliable MacDonald trenchantly casts these headlong with two words—they are, he tells us, the ‘crowning horror’ of blending.

  Clearly no apologist for the blender, in this as so much else, he anticipates our zeitgeist. MacDonald is a single-whisky man and a defender of the drinker against the conspiracy of silence that he describes as existing amongst blenders ‘to prevent the consumer from knowing what he is drinking’. Well spoken, indeed.

  His cry for clear labelling and precise descriptions is a modern one, and the industry could do worse than consider his plea that each label on a bottle ought to contain ‘the names of the malt whiskies … in the blend, and the exact percentage of grain spirit … it should state the number of years and months that the blend and each of its constituents has matured in cask’.

  Is this so unreasonable? As he notes: ‘sound whiskies would only gain by it.’

  A modest enough proposal, yet, I have no difficulty in prophesying, one that will be ignored before it is stoutly resisted ‘by a body of men so assured of their commercial acumen as those who comprise the whisky trade’!

  ‘Transparency’ is today’s watchword, and the current campaign by one smaller producer for openness on labelling is one that MacDonald would sympathise with and support with energy and feeling.

  But strict E.U. regulations govern the marketing and promotion of spirits, effectively preventing the distiller from telling the consumer exactly what is in each bottle. As Compass Box Whisky say on their website:

  It turns out that Scotch whisky is one of the few products where it is prohibited by law to be fully open with consumers. This is an issue that affects every corner of the Scotch world (from Single Malt distillers to blenders) and limits the ability of the producer to share pertinent information with their customers.

  We believe the current regulations should change. That Scotch whisky producers should have the freedom to offer their customers complete, unbiased and clear information on the age of every component used in their whiskies. That those customers have the right to know exactly what it is they’re drinking.

  Does this seem familiar? Read MacDonald on Judging, Purchase, and Care (Chapter V) and you will find exactly this argument: in effect nothing has changed since he wrote. Consumers are still pleading for the information he requested nearly ninety years ago, but at last some enlightened producers have lent their weight to the cause. Let us trust it will not be another ninety years before we are trusted with this simple information.

  All this is excellent stuff and confirmation, if any is needed, that MacDonald remains pertinent today. Indeed, he also anticipates the fashion for cocktails, while disparaging the then fashionable mix of whisky and soda; his recommendations on blending your own whisky remain sound, and his championing of the drinker against the complacency of an industry then in frightening decline is both robust and relevant.

  So, today the ‘Sixteen Men of Tain’ assume a symbolic importance out of all proportion to their numbers. But distilling did not go entirely unnoticed in Thomson’s two trenchant pleas for Scotland. In Caledonia he observes that ‘the whisky industry is in even worse plight, as a result of high taxation and American prohibition. In one important centre only one distillery out of seven is working.’

  And in The Re-Discovery of Scotland his argument is backed up by cold statistics, chilling even today: ‘In 1925, there were 124 distilleries working in Scotland; in 1926 there were 113. The export of whisky in 1926 was 800,000 proof gallons less than in 1925, and 1,856,000 less than in 1924.’

  Enough. Today whisky is in robust health. ‘Single whiskies’, or malts as we now style them, take an ever larger share of the market. Established distilleries are expanding, and independent distillers are once again opening their doors as a burgeoning ‘craft’ sector innovates and explores ever more arcane aspects of our national drink. Aeneas MacDonald may rest easy.

  To the extent that pioneers such as George Malcolm Thomson built the foundations of this present success we are ever in his debt. He lit a torch that has burned brightly ever since and still illuminates our faltering steps. His is truly a great, potent and princely voice that will not be stilled.

  To think that he was frightened of his own mother!

  Ian Buxton

  August 2016

  I

  THE NATURE OF WHISKY

  OF THE history, geography, literature, philosophy, morals, use and abuse, praise and scorn of whisky volumes might be written.1 They will not be written by me. Yet it is opportune that a voice be raised in defence of this great, potent, and princely drink where so many speak to slight and defame, and where so many glasses are emptied foolishly and irreverently in ignorance of the true qualities of the liquid and in contempt of its proper employment. For, if one might, for a trope’s sake, alter the sex of this most male of beverages, one would say that there be many who take with them to the stews beauty and virtue which should command the grateful awe of men. Though, in truth, there is little of the marble idol of divinity about this swift and fiery spirit. It belongs to the alchemist’s den and to the long nights shot with cold, flickering beams; it is compact of Druid spells and Sabbaths (of the witches and the Calvinists); its graces are not shameless, Latin, and abundant, but have a sovereign austerity, whether the desert’s or the north wind’s; there are flavours in it, insinuating and remote, from mountain torrents and the scanty soil on moorland rocks and slanting, rare sun shafts.

  But of those who contemn it a word. We shall describe them and, according to their deserts, either bid them begone or stay and be instructed. For the enemies of whisky fall under several headings.

  There has of late come into being a class of persons who have learnt of wine out of books and not out of bottles. They are as a rule to be surprised drinking cheap champagne in secret but their talk is all of vintages and districts and clos and châteaux.

  These dilettantes of the world of drinking are distinguished by weak stomachs and a plentiful store of snobbery. Wine merchants make of them an easy and legitimate prey. They are apt in quotation and historical anecdote, culling these from the books which honest men have written to advance the arts of civilization and to earn money. They roll great names on their tongues as though they were heralds marshalling the chivalry of France, or toadies numbering the peers they have fawned on.

  In finding those qualities of bouquet and body which their textbooks bid them seek, they are infallible, provided the bottle has been correctly labelled. They will, indeed, discover them before they have tasted the wine.

  One drinks ill at their tables; it was in the house of such an one that an impolite guest remarked to his neighbour, ‘This Barsac goes to my head like wine.’

  These creatures have the insolence to despise whisky. Fresh from their conducted tour of the vineyards, the smellers of corks and gabblers of names sneer when its name is mentioned. It is, they declare, the drink of barbarians, offensive to the palate and nostrils of persons of taste; above all, it is not modish. For all that is southern and Mediterranean is in the mode among us. Civilization is a Latin word and culture comes by the Blue Train.2 Better a rubber beach at Monte Carlo than all the sea-shores of the north. And, of course, we must affect enthusiasm for wine; it is so European,
so picturesque and cultivated. It shows one has a certain background. A cellar is like a pedigree and requires less authentication. Nor is actual experience of bibbing necessary; a good memory and the correct books will suffice. If one is actually forced to drink, one can toy for a time with the glass in one’s palm, discuss the merits of the wine, quote from Brillat-Savarin3 and tell that anecdote about the Duc de Sully, open a learned debate on a possible incompatibility of temperament between the wine and the food with which it is proposed to wed it, and, when all else fails, confess to a delicacy of palate which the grosser forms of indulgence would outrage. By such stratagems are the absurd and unmanly inner weaknesses of the bookish wine snob concealed from the ridicule they deserve.

  But let no man think that I would have the sublime impertinence to dispraise wine or attempt to compare things incomparable, and assuredly I do not criticize honest and discriminating lovers of wine who have learnt by original research and from the contents and not the labels of bottles. There is no quarrel between us. They are not to be found among the white-livered ranks of the traducers of whisky, whose excellences they will proclaim even when in the arms of their mistress.

  I pass on to another type of enemy, the men who drink whisky. With pain and not without a hope that they may yet be saved, let us number their sins. Foremost among these is that they drink not for the pleasure of drinking nor for any merits of flavour or bouquet which the whisky may possess but simply in order to obtain a certain physical effect. They regard whisky not as a beverage but as a drug, not as an end but as a means to an end. It is, indeed a heresy of the darker sort, doubly to be condemned in that it lends a sad, superficial plausibility to the sneers of the precious. Whisky suffers its worst insults at the hands of the swillers, the drinkers-to-get-drunk who have not organs of taste and smell in them but only gauges of alcoholic content, the boozers, the ‘let’s-have-a-spot’ and ‘make-it-a-quick-one’ gentry, and all the rest who dwell in a darkness where there are no whiskies but only whisky—and, of course, soda.

  Yet it may be unjust to lay on the souls of such false friends the burden of whisky’s present lamentable plight when it has become less a delight to the mouths of men than an item in a pharmacopoeia, and is drunk for all sorts of illegitimate reasons, as by journalists4 to quieten conscience, by the timid to avert catarrh, by inferior poets to whip up rhymes, and by commercial travellers to dull the memory of rebuffs. For those whose business it is to encourage the sale of whisky are not without guilt in the matter. They bandy no words about the aesthetic aspect of their wares; their talk is all of moral and physiological advantages: ‘It does you good’; ‘After a hot tiring day’; ‘Now that the cold weather is coming’; ‘The doctor recommends it.’5 This is to be deplored, for it plays directly into the hands of those who look on whisky at its lowest, as a mere brute stimulant, who believe that one bottle of whisky resembles another very much as one packet of Gold Flake cigarettes another packet of Gold Flake cigarettes, and whose nearest approach to discrimination is to say ‘small Scotch (or Irish), please,’ instead of the still more catholic ‘a small whisky’.

  As a result, there has been a tendency to abolish whisky from the table of the connoisseur to the saloon bar and the golf club smoke-room. The notion that we can possibly develop a palate for whisky is guaranteed to produce a smile of derision in any company except that of a few Scottish lairds, farmers, gamekeepers, and bailies, relics of a vanished age of gold when the vintages of the north had their students and lovers.

  It may indeed be that the decline of whisky as a civilized pleasure is linked with the decay of taste in Scotland. For it was from Scotland that first England and then the world at large acquired the beverage, though the Scots must share with the Irish the honour of being its first manufacturers. While a high standard of culture was still to be found in a Caledonia less stern and wild than to-day and whisky still held its place in the cellars of the gentry and of men of letters, who selected it with as much care and knowledge as they gave to the stocking of their cellars with claret, whisky retained its place as one of the higher delights of mankind. But when Scots opinion was no longer to be trusted, the standards of the whole world suffered an instant decline, similar to that which would befall Burgundy if the solid bourgeoisie of France and Belgium were to perish suddenly and no one was left to drink the wine but the English and the Americans.

  MacDonald rightly ‘deplored’ the use of quasi-medical claims. Dewar’s advertised like so many others at the time but today no distiller would consider this acceptable, even if it were not explicitly banned

  And at last a day dawned when it became possible for the average Englishman to be ignorant of the very names of all but four or five blends of whisky (all of which stared at him in enormous letters from hundreds of hoardings) and for the average English public-house to stock no more than three or four proprietary brands. It is small wonder if, in the face of an indifference and promiscuity so widespread, the distilling firms relaxed their standards: no restaurant would trouble to lay in Cabinett-wein if its clients asked only for hock and would pay only one price whatever was brought to the table. Yet, at the same time, one cannot quite exculpate the whisky-makers from the guilt of having chosen the easier and more profitable path at the expense of the prestige of their own commodity. It was their duty to guard it jealously, for it cannot be maintained seriously that those who make the food and the drink of man are in the same category as mere commercial manufacturers. Theirs is a sacred, almost a priestly responsibility, which they cannot barter away for turnovers and dividends without betraying their trust as custodians of civilization. Flour and beef, wine, brandy, and whisky are not in the same category as Ford cars or safety pins. Or ought not to be.

  It may be admitted, too, that there is some excuse for those who fall into the error of the whisky-swillers, who drink it because it has an infallible result, a loosening of the tongue, a dulling of the memory, a heightening of the temperature, or what not. For whisky—even inferior whisky—has a potency and a directness in the encounter which proclaims its sublime rank. It does not linger to toy with the senses, it does not seep through the body to the brain; it communicates through no intermediary with the core of a man, with the roots of his consciousness; it speaks from deep to deep. This quality of spiritual instancy derives from the physical nature of the liquid. Whisky is a re-incarnation; it is made by a sublimation of coarse and heavy barley malt; the spirit leaves that earthly body, disappears, and by a lovely metempsychosis returns to the world in the form of a liquid exquisitely pure and impersonal. And thence whisky acquires that lightness and power which is so dangerous to the unwary, so delightful to those who use it with reverence and propriety.

  In the eyes of the uninstructed, whisky is a mere mitigator of the rigours of northern climates and northern theologies. This is an inaccurate or, at least, an incomplete view. The precise effects of whisky on the human organism, though they differ widely from those of wine, are not less complex. It is less adept in bathing with a rosy hue men and the works of this world; it is not a protector of comfortable illusions. We do not find whisky drinkers discovering causes to love mankind which are not apparent to them when they cease to be under the influence of the spirit. They do not indulge in unreasonably optimistic visions of the beauty and perfection of things, nor do they sentimentalize over the supposed gaiety of a departed age. They do not bang mugs on the table and roar about the jolly Middle Ages; they are not impressed by the well-padded spiritual comforts of Catholicism. Some might say that whisky is a Protestant drink, but it is rather a rationalistic, metaphysical and dialectical drink. It stimulates speculation and nourishes lucidity. One may sing on it but one is at least as likely to argue. Split hairs and schisms flourish in its depths; hierarchies and authority go down before the sovereignty of a heightened and irresistible intuition. It is the mother’s milk of destructive criticism and the begetter of great abstractions; it is disposed to find a meaning—or at least a debate—in art and lette
rs, rather than to enjoy or to appreciate; it is the champion of the deductive method and the sworn foe of pragmatism; it is Socratic, drives to logical conclusions, has a horror of established and useful falsehoods, is discourteous to irrelevances, possesses an acuteness of vision which marshals the complexities and the hesitations of life into two opposing hosts, divides the greys of the world rigidly into black and white. Foolishly regarded as the friend of democracy, it is as much the scorner of democratic fictions as of servility, snobbery, plutocratic stupidity and aristocratic arrogance. It is the banner of the free human spirit which refuses to be chained to the political expedients it is compelled to devise. ‘Whisky and freedom gang thegither,’6 but the freedom is not a social myth or a national egotism but rather the profounder autonomy of the individual soul.

  The English,7 who, by definition, will believe anything that the Scots tell them, took whisky from their northern neighbours. It is doubtful, all the same, if they have ever taken to it. The ale-sodden Saxon has a temperamental inability to comprehend the true inner nature of whisky, yet there is no doubt that it has given him, more or less against his will, a harshness and an edge alien to his original nature. It has given him an Empire and the hobnailed livers of his proconsuls. Sometimes he may have wondered suspiciously what it really was, this warlock liquor that came to him out of the mists. How could the Scots, a disagreeable people cringing under the tyranny of the pulpits, ever have come to think of this liberating and audacious drink? The Scots have perhaps been misunderstood by the rest of mankind. They are, for example, the most anti-clerical people in the world. For what is the Presbyterian system but a drastic putting of the clergy in its place by the laity, a usurpation of church government by the unordained? They have a deep but erratic strain of frivolity; they have never taken themselves seriously as a nation; their patriotism is of an impatient and sporadic character. No one has ever doubted their courage but none of the captains who led them to battle could ever be sure whether they would run away at first sight of the enemy or remain and fight to the death. They were poor material for military adventurers to work with and they could never conceivably have had the lack of humour which was required to build the British Empire. The statute books of their old parliaments are full of laws against golf and football, for the Scots preferred these deplorably unwarlike sports to the practice of archery which would have fitted them for battle.