The gifts of Scotland to the world are strange indeed, if they come from a people serious to the point of gloom. What are they? Whisky, golf, porridge, haggis, the kilt, the bagpipes, music hall comedians, public-house jokes. A curious list of products for a staid and sober people!
But whisky now belongs not to the Scots but to the world at large. It has therefore to be examined in relation to mankind as a whole, that is to say to people who imperfectly understand its essential nature, who will regard it as a habit, mildly reprehensible or fortified by social sanctions, or as a medicine, who will not see in it an art or a science. The decline of whisky in our times may, therefore, be related to vagaries of the Zeitgeist more accurately than to commercial shortsightedness and the failure of an educated appreciation. This age fears fire and the grand manner, and whisky may have to wait for its apotheosis until there comes to life upon the globe a race of deeper daring which will find in the potent and fiery subtlety of the great spirit the beverage that meets its necessities.
But, in the meantime, what can be done by way of persuasion and exposition to rebuild the ruined altar of whisky, let us do.
The tyranny of the pulpits!
1 This may strike today’s reader as prophetic. While in 1930 MacDonald’s was a lone voice the ‘volumes’ that he anticipates have indeed been written, and continue to flow from the presses in ever increasing quantities. Whether any approach the fervour and poetry of this little book I shall leave it to you to determine.
2 The luxury Calais–Mediterranée Express night train was a watchword for fashionable travel between the wars. Known as the Blue Train ( Le Train Bleu) after the colour of the sleeping cars, it features in novels by Agatha Christie and Georges Simenon. Wealthy playboy motorists such as Woolf Barnato and the ‘Bentley Boys’ famously participated in the Blue Train Races of the 1920s and 1930s. The service has now been superseded by the TGV.
3 Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826), a French lawyer, politician, epicure and gourmet whose book The Physiology of Taste (1825) laid the foundations of all subsequent writing on food.
4 MacDonald was, of course, a journalist—a profession widely noted for its abstemious manner and temperate habits. Perhaps he was having fun here at the expense of his colleagues.
5 From the 1880s onwards much whisky advertising adopted strategies similar to those noted here. The infamous Pattison brothers even had a brand known as ‘The Doctor’.
6 The reference is to Robert Burns’ poem The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer (1786).
7 I would hardly bother to observe that this is a piece of tongue-in-cheek fun at the expense of MacDonald’s English friends and colleagues were it not that in August 2006 the then editor of Whisky Magazine ran a furious editorial entirely missing this point. So, for the avoidance of doubt, this and much of the next page and a half is to be read as humorous—though by the time we reach MacDonald’s list of the ‘gifts of Scotland’ a somewhat bitter and sardonic tone has crept in, reflecting his disillusionment with the general state of Scotland.
II
HISTORY
THE ORIGIN of whisky is, as it ought to be, hidden in the clouds of mystery that veil the youth of the human race. Legend has been busy with it and has given it, like the Imperial family of Japan, an ancestor descended from heaven. Yet no Promethean larceny brought us this gentle fire; whisky, or rather the whole art and science of distillation, was the gift of the gods, of one god, Osiris. The higher criticism may hesitate to probe a myth so poetic, may be content to hold its peace and accept the evidence of those X’s on casks which have been adduced as direct links with the Osirian mysteries. It is certain, at any rate, that distilling is venerable enough to have acquired a sacred character. Whether it was born in the Nile Valley or elsewhere is a question of no consequence. The Chinese knew it before the Christian era; arrack has been distilled from rice and sugar since 800 B.C.; distilling was probably known in India before the building of the great Pyramid; Captain Cook found stills in use among the Pacific islanders.
It has been held that those comparatively modern peoples whom we used to call the ancients knew nothing of distilling, but this view overlooks a passage in the Meteorology of Aristotle in which the father of scientific method notes that ‘sea water can be rendered potable by distillation; wine and other liquids can be submitted to the same process.’ This seems at least to give brandy, and possibly whisky also, a place in the sun of Greek knowledge. But if lovers of whisky think to find a direct reference to their beverage in the fifth century Zosimus of Panopolis and his mention of the distillation of a panacea or divine water, they will make a mistake. Zosimus was not thinking of whisky. They may comfort themselves with the reflection that distillation from grain has normally preceded distillation from wine, as one might expect, the necessity of those who have no wine to drink being more insistent. The chances are, then, that whisky has a longer pedigree than brandy.
There is, in any case, a clearer reference to the brewing and distilling of grain liquors in the ancient world which opens the exciting prospect that Dionysos was the god of whisky before he was the god of wine. During his wars against the northern barbarians the emperor Julian the Apostate encountered and apparently tasted (and certainly disliked) a beverage made from barley. The occasion was celebrated in an epigram to this new or (as seems likelier) very old aspect of Dionysos1 which is found in the Palatine Anthology (ix, 368) and has been translated as follows in Miss Jane Harrison’s Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion:
TO WINE MADE OF BARLEY
Who and whence art thou, Dionyse? now, by the Bacchus true
Whom well I know, the son of Zeus, say: ‘Who and what are you?’
He smells of nectar like a god, you smell of goats and spelt,
For lack of grapes from ears of grain your countryman, the Celt,
Made you. Your name’s Demetrios, but never Dionyse,
Bromos, Oat-born, not Bromios, Fire-born from out the skies.
It used to be thought that the early Thracian god, Dionysos Bromios, was connected with the loud peal of thunder, but as Julian points out, he was more probably associated with a grain-made intoxicant of the northern tribesmen. If the deduction is correct, it would explain the name Demetrios sometimes applied to the god, for Demetrios means ‘son of Demeter’, the Corn-mother.
By what means the knowledge of distilling arrived at the twin nurseries of whisky from the East we know not. It is not absurd to conjecture that those Mediterranean trader-seamen who are known to the anthropologists under such a variety of names brought it with them when they came in search of tin and gold and the pearls of our rivers. It is—to shun the temptation of filling in the gaps of history—at least certain that distilling was known to the Celtic peoples at an early date. Taliesin, the Welsh bard of the sixth century, mentions the process in his Mead Song and hints at a widespread knowledge of it: ‘Mead distilled I praise, its eulogy is everywhere.’
The scene shifts to Spain of the Moors and the twelfth century.2 Abucasis has been named the first philosopher of the West who applied distilling to spirits. In the following century Arnoldus de Villa Nova, chemist and physician, disciple of the learned Arabs, describes distilled spirit and calls it the ‘water of life’. Raymond Lully, chemist and philosopher of Majorca, praises the ‘admirable essence’, describing it enthusiastically as ‘an emanation of the divinity—an element newly revealed to man, but hid from antiquity, because the human race was then too young to need this beverage, destined to revive the energies of modern decrepitude’. The very accents of whisky advertising in our own days are caught here; Lully was born six centuries too soon. But it turns out that Lully is not praising whisky. Let him describe the making of the elixir: ‘Limpid and well-flavoured red or white wine is to be digested during twenty days in a close vessel by the heat of fermenting horse-dung, and to be then distilled in a sand-bath with a very gentle fire. The true water of life will come over in precious drops, which, being rectified by thre
e or four successive distillations, will afford the wonderful quintessence of wine.’
Whatever the Arabs may have known, then, it is not proved that they anticipated the Scots and the Irish (or their Celtic ancestors) in the discovery of whisky. The whole problem is made more difficult by the fact that the early term for distilled spirit is sometimes used in Scottish and continental manuscripts for any kind of distilled spirit; sometimes there is no doubt whatever that whisky is ‘the water of life’ referred to and sometimes it is equally clear that brandy is indicated. There is a school which insists that aqua vitae is a corruption of acquae vite, ‘water of the wine’. If this is indeed so, then it seems probable that in the earlier writers aqua vitae denotes a kind of brandy. But, on the other hand, the word ‘whisky’ is derived from the Gaelic ‘uis gebeatha’, which is ‘the water of life’, a direct translation of the Latin aqua vitae.
Daring indeed is the man who will presume to take sides in a question of precedence between the Irish and the Scots. He is as likely to be damned for his interference by the one party as to be denounced for his partiality by the other. When therefore one records that whisky, authentic and indubitable, first enters history as a beverage in use among the Irish one hastens to add that this proves nothing against the Scots. The mere fact of the priority of written evidence may mean anything or nothing, and, in this case, the Scots have the powerful retort to throw at their rivals that the precedence is due only to the fact that the Irish were conquered earlier than the Scots and not less effectively. Soon after the invasion of Ireland in 1170 the English found the Irish making and drinking what they called aqua vitae but which is undoubtedly whisky. Probably it had been in use for centuries before in Scotland as well as in Ireland, for it is hard to believe that two peoples who had so much to do with one another in the way of fighting, trading, thieving, and combining to fight common enemies did not share with one another their most prized possession.
At any rate in Skene’s Four Ancient Books of Wales it is stated that by the sixth century the Gaels were known as skilled distillers. The Red Book of Ossory, an Irish manuscript of the fifteenth century, contains a detailed Latin description of the method of distilling aqua vitae and its employments as a medicine, but as this spirit was made from wine at least a year old distilled ten times, we deduce that the Hibernian talent for distillation was not confined to barley malt. Stanihurst, writing in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, has a passage closely parallel to that of the Irish scribe: ‘One Theoricus’, he says, ‘wrote a proper treatise of aqua vitae, wherein he praiseth it unto the ninth degree. He distinguisheth three sorts, simplex, composita, perfectissima. … Ulstadius also ascribeth thereto a singular praise, and would have it burn being kindled, which he taketh to be a token to know the goodness thereof. And trulie it is a sovereigne liquor if it be orderlie taken.’3 In an early Latin Life of St Brigida we learn that the celebrated Celtic saint, whose name is still remembered in numberless wells in Scotland (and was there not a Bridewell in London?), re performed the miracle of Cana, the water being transformed into a liquid more acceptable than wine to a whisky-drinking people:
‘Christi autem ancilla videns quia tunc illico non poterat invenire cerevisiam, aquam ad balneum portatam benedixerit et in optimam cerevisiam conversa est a Deo et abundanter sitientibus propinata est.’
By the fifteenth century the manufacture and use of whisky was well established in the Scottish Highlands and its fame had already penetrated to the Lowlands and the court of the illustrious king James IV. The Scottish Exchequer Roll of 1494–1495 informs us that eight bolls of malt were delivered to one Friar John Car4 to make aqua vitae .5 In 1497 a gift of whisky was brought to the king at Dundee by a barber who got 9s. for his courtesy. Exactly a century later Fynes Moryson, the traveller, reported that there was a distinction between Scotch and Irish whisky, the distinction being, he thought, in Ireland’s favour. But in fairness to Scotland, it may be doubted if Moryson had tasted the best of the Scotch spirit. The Highlanders were notoriously reluctant to part with their finer whiskies. At this time there were three kinds of whisky known in the Isles, graded by their quality and by the elaborateness of the distilling process: usquebaugh, trestarig, and usquebaugh-baul. But these were mysteries still guarded by the Grampians and the Western Seas.
Not that whisky was completely unknown in England. In Henry VIII’s reign Irish immigrants opened distilleries there and about the same time the South acquired a liking for the Scottish variety of the spirit. Shakespeare may have been referring to some inferior imported whisky in As You Like It:
For in my youth I never did apply
Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood.
If this be so, the dramatist was only repeating by insinuation counsel which was incorporated into actual law in the Hebrides in 1609. Nine years later, Taylor, the water poet, in describing a famous hunt in Mar, speaks of ‘the most potent aqua vitae’.
Temperance legislation, which has pursued whisky and whisky’s less intelligent admirers through the centuries, is first encountered in the fifth of the Statutes of Icolmkill6 agreed to by the Island chiefs. This statute pointed out that one cause of the poverty of the Isles was the immoderate consumption of aqua vitae. It restricted its manufacture for sale and imposed severe penalties on law breakers. But it permitted every man to distil as much as he liked for his own use. Several years later the Scots Parliament passed an ‘Act that nane send wynes to the Ilis’, for the purpose of mitigating the deplorable events which are likely to occur when the grape is added to the malt of grain. There is evidence, too, for the belief that the Islesmen were not alone in discovering their whisky was intoxicating as well as delightful. The first specific mention of a man getting drunk on whisky occurred when Lord Darnley, the deplorable second husband of Mary Stuart, made one of his French friends drunk on aqua composita, a kind of whisky.
During the first half of the seventeenth century whisky’s popularity grew in the Scottish Lowlands, especially in the west, which was in closer contact with the Highland distilleries. All along the Highland Line, where Saxon and Gael met, distilleries were springing up, making the spirit which was sold in Glasgow taverns. During the Restoration period, when deep drinking was as popular a form of reaction against an overdose of Puritanism in Scotland, as were wenching and play-going in England, whisky’s fame spread. In the Mercurius Caledonius of 1661 there is an account of a race run by twelve browster wives, at the instigation of some young Edinburgh blades, from Portobello to the top of Arthur’s Seat. The reward for the dame who finished first in this more than athletic test was a hundredweight of cheese and a budgell of Dunkeld aqua vitae. By this time whisky was being made in Morayshire, where there was a local variety known as ‘burnt aqua vitae’, and in Glasgow, as well as in Dunkeld and other strictly Highland areas. But the distilleries were small and they catered chiefly for local needs. Probably the finest whiskies were distilled by Highland chiefs for the use of their own households; the classic brands were still unknown.
As early as 1505 the Royal College of Surgeons at Edinburgh were given the monopoly of distilling and selling aqua vitae within the City bounds. If they had preserved this right, there would have been small need for the Edinburgh medical faculty to collect fees from their patients and perhaps the prestige of the Edinburgh medical school would never have been acquired. The first news we get of a really famous whisky is in 1690 when the ‘ancient brewery of aquavity’ at Ferintosh, in the possession of the Whig Forbes of Culloden, was sacked by marauding Jacobite Highlanders and ‘all the whiskie pits … destroyed’. In recompense Forbes, or Culloden as we should style him in the good Scottish territorial fashion, was given a ‘tack’ or rent of the excise of the land. In effect, he was allowed to distil his whisky, already noted for its quality, without paying the excise on the malt. In a year or two it was said that as much whisky was distilled at Ferintosh as in all the rest of Scotland, and Culloden was making so much money that the Master of Tarbet complained to the Scots P
arliament. But it was only in 1784 that the government compounded with Culloden for the exemption at a cost of £21,000. By that time ‘Ferintosh’ was almost as frequently used to describe the spirit as ‘whisky’ itself, and Burns somewhat prematurely mourned the passing of its ancient glories in his Scotch Drink:
Thee Ferintosh! O sadly lost!
Scotland laments frae coast to coast!
Now colic-grips an’ barkin’ hoast,
May kill us a’;
For loyal Forbes’ chartered boast
Is ta’en awa!7
An exciseman, writing in 1736 of the manners of the Highlanders, pays a tribute to the virtues of whisky: ‘The ruddy complexion, nimbleness and strength of those people is not owing to water-drinking but to the aqua vitae, a malt spirit which is commonly used in that country, which serves both for victual and drink.’8 Whisky found an honoured place in the commissariat of the Jacobite armies. It gave spirit and endurance to Montrose’s men on those marvellous marches with which they confounded the hosts of the Covenant; it comforted the kilted soldiery on the mad memorable raid on Derby in 1745 and ministered to the Prince himself when he was a hunted man. He had already tasted it in Culloden House on the eve of the fatal battle. It is reported that on one occasion he and two others finished the bottle at a sitting, the Prince consuming more than half the contents. When the ‘Highland Host’ came to Ayrshire to plague the stubborn West country Whigs, William Cleland9 said that each man of theirs thought his flask of whisky as essential a part of his military equipment as his claymore:
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