Islay. It’s a place I used to visit to pick up odd bottles and to explore, to lose myself for a few days. And in fact Islay has always drawn me to her. I used to go there in the early summer, when the winds abated a little, to walk about like a penitent with my umbrella and my Whisky Bible, alone and subtly distraught, abstemious on many fronts but thirsty for a new Scotch I didn’t yet know. I took buses in storms of salted rain to distilleries as white and pure and remote as monasteries. It was like Greece in winter.
As with wine, a drink cannot be understood without seeing where it comes from: here, a speck of peat in the Atlantic a forty-minute plane ride from Glasgow. A place as remote from Bangkok or Tokyo as you could imagine. Yet the threads of a thousand and one drinkers bind these places together. In Japan, Islay is more known than Budapest, Kiev, or Glasgow.
Islay is a landing strip in the ocean. It is only thirty miles by thirty, with a population of three thousand and an airport that looks like a gardening shed. Does the rain seep into Islay’s whisky, too? When does it not rain on desolately weird Islay? So it seems, as you make your way past Morag’s Caf, an airport lounge glittering with display bottles of local single malts. You step out of the airport into Wuthering Heights.
The bartenders, sent all the way from Tokyo to learn about Islay malts, wear a look of dismay as they clutch their Burberry raincoats and venture outside into those unforgiving gales. Everything is slanted, horizontal, wind-bent. “A bonny day!” the craggy locals cry at them. Across from Islay lies the island of Jura, inhabited mostly by deer, and from here comes the humble but supple Jura malt.
I drink Jura in New York at the Bridge Café on Water Street; it’s the oldest bar in the city and a temple to the single malt, stocked in ten- and fifteen-year editions. To sit on Water Street, in a designer mall where history has been rekitted for urban tourists, and sip Jura fifteen-year single malt is to be saved for half an hour. There are Scotches like this, delicate and brooding at the same time; Dalwhinnie and old Port Ellen, which Diageo now puts into its Johnnie Walker Blue Label, or Talisker’s Anniversary Edition. I used to go to the Scotch tastings held by master distiller Evan Cattanach of the Classic Malts Collection. They were held in the Chairman’s Office room inside the Palace Hotel on Madison and East 50th Street, that bustling grand dame hotel that no one seems to go to for a drink. Scotch dinners at which rare malts were served with seven courses, Evan dressed in a kilt and courting the ladies and digging into his reserves to make us taste twenty-five-year Brora, the loveliest of all single malts made by a distillery on the wild east coast that no longer exists. Here was the place to take old Islay malts, served at the end of the meal, the quarter-century editions of Lagavulin and Laphroaig and the occasional Caol Ila and Ardbeg. During Prohibition, Islay malts were the only liquor you could legally buy in the United States. Their iodine content was so high, they could be sold as medicine in pharmacies.
On the Islay municipal bus that runs between Bowmore and Ardbeg, you pass along the southern coast road through peat heaths, crofts of twisted trees. The two distilleries sitting side by side like the seafront castles of rival clans—Laphroaig and Lagavulin—have their whitewashed walls built right on the water. The black letters of their names are written across them, making for photo ops that the Japanese have captured a million times.
On the headland by Laphroaig stands the actual ruined castle of the Lords of the Isles; I was shown around Laphroaig—which means “beautiful hollow by the broad bay” in Gaelic—by its master distiller, John Campbell. We went up to the cement-floored malting room, where Laphroaig’s barley is rolled out and dried. Malting is the process of flushing barley three times with water to make it germinate over a period of fifty-two hours. The husks are then dried three times as well. Laphroaig is one of only five distilleries in Scotland that “floor malts” by hand—that is, they expose the grain to natural air by opening and closing windows. Enzymes pour through the tiny acrospire at the barley husk’s core, and at its tip an embryo begins to emerge. Campbell split one and showed it to me, adding that this means the barley is getting ready to produce sugars. But before this germination actually occurs, there’s an intermediate step: the husks are shoveled into a kiln room for the process known as peating. A peat fire belches a perfumed smoke into the kiln for fifteen hours and saturates the dried-out barley with its aromas.
Laphroaig peats intensely. Most Scotches are said by connoisseurs to boast half a dozen smoke flavors, while Laphroaig yields at least fourteen. Laphroaig’s seaweedy taste comes solely from the peat. But this makes sense: Islay’s peat is formed from iodine-rich seaweed, while Highland peat comes from wood.
Whisky’s amber color, however, comes from cask wood and nothing else: usually either old recycled Bourbon barrels or sherry vats from Spain. The former produce a lighter potion, the latter a richer, darker Scotch. Ian Hunter, the legendary owner of Laphroaig until 1952, scoured the West Indies for rum vats that would give soft aromatics of banana and coconut, and I have often noticed in older Laphroaigs—a sixteen-year-old, for example, has a subtle taste of orange rind and lemon—a whiff of subtropical sun. Mysteries of the “water of life,” then, whose background odors are not entirely of the North. The Islay malt, lightly diluted by a single cube of ice (which is too much), is southern and Mediterranean as well. It has a dry heat in it. It is a whisky di meditazione that puts the drinker in a perilous relation with his own morbidity.
The Irish, I am bound to admit, have a particular penchant for this relation between intoxication and morbidity. “I have absolutely no pleasure,” Edgar Allan Poe once wrote, “in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
Poe may not have been Irish and he may not have been talking about whisky, but this is also the hard drinker’s paradox. The pleasure of what he drinks is not exactly why he drinks, and the pleasure of Scotch is not entirely gustatory. It is a difficult, thorny drink, and it is hard to see how the Plains Indians of the nineteenth century became so addicted to it without the psychological dimension described by Poe. It sucked them, and us, into its moods and not just into taste sensations. It destabilized them into madness, into altered states of melancholic strangeness, and ultimately of course it destroyed them.
The writer Niels Winther Braroe wrote in Indian and White, a 1975 book on Indian-white relations, that “drinking is one of the faults that Whites most frequently single out in censuring Indians, and every Indian is aware of this. Indeed, it is expressed to them by Whites in numerous contexts—sometimes contemptuously and sometimes sympathetically, in subtle and not so subtle ways.” The Indian reservation habit of “going on a toot” (that is, a bender) is part of non-Indian lore. Like the Irishman, the Indian is a congenital drunk.
An article in Time from March 1932, from the town of Globe, Arizona: the murder trial of twenty-one-year-old Apache Seymour, sentenced to life in prison for the rape and murder of Columbia ethnology student Henrietta Schmerler, a protégée of Ruth Benedict, on the White River Reservation. Seymour had been drinking tulapai, identified quaintly in the article as “aboriginal moonshine.” The white girl stopped him on his horse, he said, invited him inside her house, gave him another drink, and began to kiss him; they got on a horse together, and there was a struggle, a fatal misunderstanding, a sexual dance gone wrong, a killing with a rock. The defense attorney said to the jury, “I propose to remind this court what is known to everyone here—that tulapai to an Apache is murder.”
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Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the Plains Indians had no experience with mind-altering intoxicants of any kind. In this they were unlike the nations of the Southwest, like the Apache, who made an alcoholic drink similar to the mescal-like sotol out of a plant called Dasylirion wheeleri, or the Tohono O’odham
of southern Arizona, who made a fermented saguaro cactus drink called tiswin that was used ritually. Intoxicants were part of the initiation rituals of young girls among the Apache.
But in the north it was different. Alcohol appeared on the Great Plains only between 1790 and 1830, with the arrival of European traders on the Missouri River. The Plains Sioux were anciently dry. Distillations, like the horse, transformed them.
The brandy of the French and the rum of the British had always been the handmaidens of the fur trade, and as the taste for alcohol evolved among the indigenous nations, so did their inclination to trade their precious furs for drink—a substance that yielded no economic benefit to them whatsoever. Fur, rum, and brandy—and then whisky—were the mediums through which Amerindians and Europeans conducted their calamitous exchanges, and in a study of the effect of alcohol on the Lakota, the activist Beatrice Medicine makes the case that alcohol was a conscious weapon of colonization. “Used as a potent item of trade,” she writes, “alcohol was effective in gaining furs, food, women and land for European interests.”
Congress nevertheless restricted the sale of alcohol to Indians in a law of 1802. After the War of 1812, however, John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company arrived in Sioux lands, and the fur-alcohol symbiosis unleashed an epidemic of alcoholism. The company kept its own liquor stock for Indian trade, the whisky often adulterated with laudanum, a tincture of opium. The laudanum supposedly sedated the Indians and made them less inclined to murder one another while drunk. The whisky was often offered free to the Sioux hands, to lure them away from rival fur companies, though by the 1840s the trade had waned. Whisky had become expensive for Indians, and the government’s ban had begun to come into effect. On the east banks of the Missouri, however, so-called whisky ranches carried on the barter trade: booze for furs and clothes. Many Lakota stripped their families to the bone for a bottle of “tarantula juice.” The illegal whisky trade flourished. The distillate of a small Celtic corner of the British Isles became the destroyer of entire nations of North America.
The reservations, though, became dry. The Pine Ridge Reservation of the Oglala Lakota has been dry since it was created in the 1880s. Its thirty thousand inhabitants have among the highest rates of alcoholism in the world, but they have to drive two miles south of Pine Ridge to the tiny village of White Clay to buy their liquor. White Clay is little more than a stretch of road with a few shacks on either side of it. It has a population of eleven and four liquor stores selling four and a half million cans of beer a year. It lies in what was once known as the White Clay Extension, a kind of buffer zone set up by President Chester A. Arthur in 1882 to protect the Oglala from illegal whisky traders. Until the two bars in White Clay were permitted on-sale consumption of alcohol in the 1950s, White Clay was a bootlegger town servicing the Oglala addiction. Today it does the same, but with beer. The town becomes a camping ground of Oglala drunks, who often walk out of the reservation to get their fix and then collapse in abandoned garages or on mattresses by the side of the road. Driving down from Pine Ridge, one often passes these itinerant drinkers heading to White Clay for a toot. The town itself produces a unique garbage of discarded cans and bottles, which pile up in the long grass. Having bought their drink, the Oglala have no place to consume it since under tribal law drinking is forbidden on the reservation. Caught between realms of wet and dry, they down it on the spot, under starry skies.
White Clay has often been called a “death trap,” a place of sudden, moody violence where scores are settled within the parameters of intoxication. It was originally a whisky town, and across the West whisky created many such places. The Indians, formed by millennia of total sobriety, were sucked into the vortex of alcohol without warning, disoriented and amazed, seduced and beggared.
The British journalist Andrew Marr, however, makes a slightly different argument in his magisterial survey of the social history of American drink. Marr reasons that the westward expansion of the European settlers broke down their social structures. The frontier, ever unstable and mobile, was a place where disproportionately large numbers of single men found themselves in limbo. Deprived of more reasonable pleasures and comforts—namely, family, women, and children—they took to their bottles. The settlers of the frontier were often Scots-Irish, and they brought with them into this savage no-man’s-land their preferred opiate, whisky. But in a frontier economy where money was scarce, they began to use whisky as a bartering item. It became, in effect, a kind of currency. Its introduction to the Indians was neither sinisterly planned nor deliberately “colonial.” It was merely an extension of what the whites were doing among themselves.
Whisky, then, was the cutting edge of the white conquest of the Indian lands, but it was not a consciously used tool any more than smallpox was—despite claims to the contrary from certain activists. Whisky was merely the essential element of this male Scots-Irish culture that was expanding westward with very little plan or moral compass. What it unleashed, on both whites and Indians, was unconscious and unpredictable. Drinking on the frontier became its own solace, its own object. It was wild and absurdly extreme on both sides. The popular depiction of swing-door saloons in the West is accurate. There are countless accounts of men drinking for four or five days straight, drinking themselves into oblivion. Whisky was the ideal drug for this desire to self-forget. It was strong, it didn’t go bad, and it turned you relatively quickly into a stranger, a madman. It was the first alcohol that North America embraced from coast to coast, the “firewater” that defined its fears and pleasures. The temperance and prohibition movements of later decades were a reaction against the excesses of antisocial whisky drinking.
Prohibition itself, one could argue, was an attempt to repress the lawless psychological states of the frontier, to tame and domesticate and feminize. It made all these problems worse, of course, but its arguments are not entirely different from those of Islam. What the philosopher John Gray has called “the American war on pleasure” has its roots not just in an ancestral Puritanism but in this secret denial of the inebriated frontier.
But whisky on the private level—in the mind of the nostalgic—does not arouse historical meditations. The scourge of the West is also the golden libation of childhood Christmas, the toddy, the warmer of nights and of long afternoons of sickness, more mysterious to a child, I daresay, than any other drink because it is so repellent and visually attractive at the same time. It is dropped into hot milk—a smoky aftertaste—and into hot water with lemon, stirred with sugar and sipped with a knowledge that the mind is going to be very slightly altered. Thus perhaps whisky was my first drink after all, the first experiencing of mind alteration, of self-distancing. I cannot say if any of my Dionysian uncles were properly speaking a Scotch expert, but it was surely their drink of drinks, their apex elixir. My mother was never far separated from a glass of Famous Grouse and, at Christmas, a special bottle of Black Grouse blended with Islay malts. Whisky is, after all, the only indigenous connoisseur drink that the English-speaking peoples produce, if we skirt politely around the claims of handmade beer. For the Irish and the Scots, it is “ours.” It is the drug that is close to the bone, our thread back into the past and its magnificent confusions.
On Islay the best whisky bar in Bowmore is that of the Lochside Hotel, with its long windows overlooking Loch Indaal, its Prawn Marie-Rose served with brown bread, its ale and mushroom Lochside beef pie served with drams of Caol Ila, and its air of deliciously inbred desolation. It is better at night, when the corner bar is filled with toasted old locals chewing their cuds and you can’t see the retreated tide. Here is the place to catch up on Jura and older Ardbeg far from the distillery tourists. Here is the place to escape any memory of Bowmore’s curious round church and a thing called the MacTaggart Leisure Centre. The drinking is not boisterous or rapid; it is indeed like chewing. The Japanese come with their raincoats and try to talk—through an English-language glass darkly—with the islanders. It is love of Scotch that draws them close, th
e Japanese afflicted by an affinity of which they are barely conscious. Even they do not seem to know why Japan has become one of the largest whisky producers in the world, and one of the largest consumers of it as well. One of them told me it was “an Asian disease,” this love affair with Celtic distillates. Did I know that the first distillery in Japan, the Yamazaki in the outskirts of Kyoto, was positioned to benefit from the world’s most beautifully clear water, the same water favored by famed tea master Sen no Rikyu? It is now owned by Suntory. Yes, I was assured, everywhere great whisky is defined by its water! And everywhere the effects of its intoxication were curiously different. The water was different, and so were the drinkers. The Japanese tasters were beady-eyed and loquacious, their lips wet and their heads drooping forward slightly. A slow-motion ecstasy. In myself, Scotch produces a glassy brightness as well, but it is purely internal. The mind goes hard and clear and begins to swim forward with long strokes. Words run ahead of the body. Language flows and ebbs and explodes. The Irish.
• • •
In the East, whisky also possesses a magic charisma. The Emporium mall at Asoke in Bangkok, as I remember, contained on its first floor a glass shrine to Alexander Walker’s leather-bound recipe book and an original bottle from the nineteenth century displayed like a relic in a Buddhist shrine. It was exhibited as a talisman, a holy object. The Johnnie Walker myth has grown inexorably in recent years: 130 million bottles a year, sold in virtually every country on earth; that square bottle with its label angled at twenty-four degrees is as instantly recognizable as a Gucci bag or a Subway lunch. The color-coded labels are fetishized from Beirut to Singapore. They are ubiquitous.
Beirut again. One night I was taken to a dinner party at the fifth-floor penthouse of a Sunni construction millionaire. An opulent pad in the Beirut style, fruit bowls and oils and tasseled sofas into which you can sink as if they were deathbeds. The style of Europe, of Paris banlieues. Of villas in Saint-Germainen-Laye and Enghien-les-Bains, of houses on the outskirts of Milan, where the industrial classes get to unpack their lugubrious tastes and their dire sense of material joy. It is quite enjoyable. You have the feeling that no one is going to object to you whipping out a cigar at meal’s end. The host was a man of about sixty, and he had a beautiful, sophisticated wife twenty years his junior. They cracked jokes and laughed a lot. They were rich, and they buzzed around the world. It was Thanksgiving, in fact, and they had roasted an enormous turkey with stuffing. Cranberry jelly, gravy, roasted potatoes. The mood was one of wisecracking ease, helped along by a sideboard of alcoholic drinks of which the hosts, being Muslim, did not partake. They were for us, the guests, and the gin and tonics and Kirs were mixed and offered with a charming and unselfconscious civility.
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