Whisky Burn Sample by Wittenborg University of Applied Sciences

Chapter

A fish doesn’t drink water all the time, but you take a fish out of water, and where is the poor animal? Lost. It’s the same with the people here. They don’t want to drink whisky all the time, but they want to feel it’s there. Compton Mackenzie

Whisky Galore

Islay and Jura

By morning the winds have more or less blown themselves out, but the showers remain to make folding up the tent a rather soggy affair. I am not particularly looking forward to climbing into it again tonight, hoping instead for a bit of surprise sunshine to dry it out later in the day. The island I am heading for, though, is not exactly famed for prolonged droughts. The ferry from West Loch Tarbert to Port Askaig on Islay is rather more frequented than the one over from Arran was. I am glad I booked because there is not much room, though I suppose they could always find some corner of the car deck to fit a little Vespa in. Port Ellen on the south of Islay is the biggest harbour, but that is being renovated this summer and so all ferry services have been diverted to the northern harbour.

I go into the ship’s café for a full Scots breakfast. I have had full English and full Irish breakfasts, and now I only need a full Welsh to get the whole picture, but to be honest I still cannot tell the difference. You get bacon, sausage, black and white pudding, baked beans, fried or scrambled eggs, weirdly smooth mushrooms, fried tomato and toast. Such a breakfast goes down well on a fairly calm sea as today, but I wouldn’t like to be mopping up here after a heavy swell. In the café I find the young couple I met in the tasting room of the Springbank shop. She is very patient and doesn’t seem to mind driving him round on a honeymoon tour of distilleries. Since he said he likes the smokier whiskies, I mention that they are heading to the right place. There are currently eight working distilleries on Islay: Caol Ila, Bunnahabhain, Bowmore,

Kilchoman, Bruichladdich, Laphroaig, Lagavulin and Ardbeg. On the island to the right, as we sail up the narrow stretch of water known as the Sound of Islay, is one other distillery, Isle of Jura.

As Islay comes into view, the passengers look out through the condensed windowpanes at the most famous whisky island of them all with a certain amount of awe. We sail along the high cliffs of Islay’s eastern shore that must have been useful for smugglers on lookout duty in the old days. The boats of the excise men would have been spotted long before they reached land. At one point a white, oddly modern building appears in a sheltered cove about a mile to the north of Port Askaig. That is the distillery of Caol Ila.

Up on a hill above Caol Ila is Loch Finlaggan, where the fabled Lords of the Isles held their parliament in the 14th century. Some remains of buildings survive and there are carved stones of the epoch in the vicinity to remember that bygone age. It was from there that the Lords held sway over a great maritime domain centred on the Hebrides and Kintyre, making them the largest landowners in the British isles after the kings of England and Scotland. To look at it today, it seems hard to imagine the centre of commerce and power that this place used to be.

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But Islay thrives once again as home to some of the greatest whiskies in the world. The name, more correctly pronounced eyeluh, is said to come from the name of a Viking princess, Ella. Islay extends for about 25 by 25 miles, and is Scotland’s fifth largest island. It has 130 miles of coast, and Loch Indaal, formed by erosion of a geological fault, separates the two parts of the island into a sort of horseshoe. A third of the 3,500 population is Scottish Gaelic speaking, and a native is known as an Ìleach, plural Ìlich. The climate tends to be more clement than in mainland Scotland, perhaps because it catches the best of the Gulf Stream, but it also catches the best of the rain that comes hand in hand with that and Islay boasts one of the highest rainfalls per annum in the UK. Still, that needn’t put off visitors because they turn a lot of it into whisky. Islay bird life alone is worth coming to see with its golden eagles, corncrakes, choughs, etc. Due to the arrival of steam puffers, many Islay distilleries were established in the second half of the nineteenth century when there were over twenty distilleries here, not to mention c.850 illegal stills. The

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peat on Islay is said to be of a particularly good sort for making flavoursome malt. All the distilleries use barley malted with Islay turf, though the barley itself is mostly imported from the mainland. The water is also believed to be special and at least one distillery, before they set up an on-site bottling plant, used to ship their own Islay water over to the mainland for diluting down to bottle strength. At Port Askaig I ride the huge s-bend up the cliff and soon afterwards see the turn off for Caol Ila. It is Sunday, so most distilleries are closed for business, and Caol Ila is out of bounds anyway these days because the distillery is shut for construction work, as I was pre-informed.

CAOL ILA

Dear Ben, I am sorry there is no access to the distillery at all it is too dangerous at the moment. There is nobody available on that day to speak to. The shop is open at Lagavulin on Sunday where our guides would be able to answer any questions about Caol Ila for you. Kind regards, Jennifer.

So I am a bit out of luck with my first distillery on Islay. The name, pronounced kull-illa, means ‘Sound of Islay’, over which the distillery looks. Caol Ila was founded in 1846, and when Alfred Barnard visited in the 1880s to research his whisky book, he commented that it was set in the ‘wildest and most picturesque locality we have seen’. Though the distillery has changed almost beyond recognition since then, the locality doesn’t seem to have altered much. It is reached by a steep track that winds down the cliff past a line of presumably old workers’ houses to the water’s edge. Here the steam puffers once docked to deliver barley and to take Caol Ila’s prized whisky away to its awaiting markets.

Though hardly renowned for its architectural beauty, the stillhouse is well known for the view that the workers have through the large windows. On a good day they can look up from their work and gaze across the Sound to where dolphins leap and seals frolic, and see the twin 750-metre quartzite hills known as the Paps of Jura. I had intended to sit outside the stillhouse of Caol Ila and paint the legendary Paps, but they are today discretely covered in a brassiere of mist right down to their bases. Though apparently uninterested in preserving the old look of the distillery buildings, besides one large white warehouse along the water’s edge, the owners did faithfully reproduce the original stills to the same design as the old ones. The number was increased in the 1970s from two stills to six in order to keep up with demand, while endeavouring to preserve the flavour and character of the whisky. Caol Ila is, nowadays,

Islay’s largest distillery capacity-wise. The distillery gates are closed but you can get a good view from the little jetty further down the shore. Next to the jetty sits what must be one of the most picturesque little cottages in Scotland with a green corrugated iron roof and whitewashed walls around a beautifully kept rose garden. This may have been used as the pierman’s house or even the excise officer’s residence in the past. At the moment, it is lived in by one of Islay’s oldest inhabitants, Lily Fish, pushing one hundred, who used to sell fish on the island.

From here you can see how the distillery is sheltered in its own little bay formed naturally over the ages from collapsing rock. The location of Scotch distilleries is by no means a haphazard affair. Clean running water was always a factor, roads were important or in this case the sea, a cheap supply of fuel was handy, and in some cases privacy was essential. Where (or even if) the whisky matured was not of major concern in those early years, though now it is a factor of much interest and debate. They must get a few salty waves on the warehouse windows during the winter here, the ones that Lily’s cottage doesn’t get first. Now owned by the international drinks company Diageo plc, Caol Ila has been for most of its existence one of the great unsung Islay heroes, and perhaps for this reason it still comes without the bewildering range of expressions that some distilleries confront you with. The principle malts are the 12 and 18 year olds, with cask strength releases available. No chance of getting a sample of any of these today, though. I’ll try a pub later on.

Chapter 2 - Islay and Jura

I have decided to spend the night at the campsite on the neighbouring Isle of Jura to be there when the distillery opens tomorrow, then back to Islay again for a couple of days. There is still plenty of time before the last ferry leaves for Jura to fit in the tour at Bowmore distillery, which lies at the centre of the island and is open for visits on Sunday afternoons.

So it is then a showery ride along the A846 through a surprisingly varied landscape of windblown bog and leafy woodland, past only one or two hamlets along the way. At one point, I pass and splash the two fly campers I met on the ferry from Arran to Kintyre. They wave in drenched but smiling recognition. In a moment of hubris, I feel like a superior being on these two wheels, but that could change at any moment. I am cautiously reminded of a part in The Motorcycle Diaries where Che Guevara writes of how one day, while riding across South America, he and his travelling companion suddenly became just a couple of tramps on foot after their Norton broke down for good, whereas up until then they had been the ‘kings of the road’.

The village of Bowmore is the largest on Islay with a population of around a thousand. It consists of a few spacious streets laid out on a grid pattern. Bowmore was a planned settlement designed by the Laird of Islay, Daniel Campbell the younger, who expanded the existing village in order to make it the island’s capital. Soon afterwards, the distillery of Bowmore was established by David Simpson, a local merchant and postmaster, in 1779.

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A white circular parish church was built at the top of the steeply sloping main street and the white distillery was built at the bottom. Tradition has it that the church was constructed on a circular plan so that the Devil should have no corner to sit in. The distillery, however, seems to have been built with many such angles and niches to accommodate his evil lordship.

I wander up the street to the church, sheltering from the wind and rain for a few minutes. It is a perfectly shaped church and must have quite an acoustic effect when the hymns are sung. It is a pleasant and peaceful space to sit in today listening to the gale whirling around the walls outside and the rain pattering against the windows. Back down the hill is Islay High School. Three replica pagodas sit proudly on the roofs, one housing the school bell. The pupils at the school must surely feel ‘instilled’ with the ethos of the whisky business, which, besides tourism and farming, may offer one of the best chances of work on the island. Right next door to the school is Bowmore distillery. The next tour is at 14:00, so I have about an hour to wait. The rain is still coming down, and there is not a great deal to do on a wet weekend in Bowmore when the distillery is shut. An old distillery warehouse is now the public swimming pool, famously heated by the distillery with waste heat from their heat exchangers when they are in production. I park up right under the porch at the entrance where the rain doesn’t reach the saddle, and wonder if I might even be able to spread the tent out to dry somewhere. Then I see with wide eyes that they have a mini laundrette in a little

room to the right of the entrance. And there’s a coin-operated dryer, too! Yes, I know that you’re not supposed to dry only, but actually there is no sign to that effect. And, yes, I know you are supposed to wash things before you put them in the dryer, but after all the rain of last night the tent can’t be all that dirty. So in goes the tent and sleeping bag, and a cosy heat comes out of the dryer as the zips clank merrily in the drum. Since I am here, I may as well have a swim while I am waiting, and so I go through to the pool. At the entrance desk the attendant asks me if I have swimming trunks.

‘Yes, why?’ Perhaps she suspects I’m just a tramp looking for a wash. Admittedly, in some lights, I may look like one. She unnecessarily reminds me that before going in the pool I am obliged to take a shower. I wasn’t really expecting it, but after hearing that this is an old Bowmore warehouse, it comes as a slight disappointment that the water in the pool doesn’t smell of whisky at all. Not in the slightest. There are only half a dozen swimmers in there, but my friend the attendant walks around keeping close watch on what’s going on, perhaps looking to see if I am going to get out a bar of soap or something. That is good because it keeps her out of the laundrette room. I wonder if the dryers are also powered by the distillery heat too, but don’t have the courage to ask.

At 14:00, freshly washed, swum, washed again and dried, with a wonderfully unwet tent, I join the distillery tour along with a group of Spanish and French visitors, who have also found something to do on a wet weekend in Bowmore.

BOWMORE

Dear Ben, Thank you very much for getting in touch with us here at Bowmore. Our silent season has been planned for the months of July and August and we will be having maintenance work carried out during that time. At Bowmore we like to offer alternatives to tours during the silent season as we cannot always get round the site due to health and safety restrictions. However, if it is safe to do so we will certainly show you around; please call the visitor centre closer to the time of your visit and we will let you know how the situation is. If I can help you with anything else just let me know! Kind regards, Lynda

Chapter 2 - Islay and Jura

Photo: Bowmore distillery Photo: Bowmore distillery

Bowmore, pronounce beaumore with the accent on the second syllable, lays claim to being the oldest of Islay’s distilleries and one of the oldest in Scotland, so you’d think they must have got it right by now. Originally owned by Mr Simpson, Bowmore passed into the hands of several different owners until it was taken over in 1994 by Suntory, the Japanese drinks company, who also own Auchentoshan in the Lowlands and Glen Garioch in Aberdeenshire. None of the three production workers is on duty, because it is both a Sunday and the silent season. Traditionally, the summer was the time when most distilleries closed down for maintenance, as the higher ambient water temperature was not ideal for cooling or mashing. Nowadays, perhaps with improved methods or even the demands of summer tourism, many distilleries opt for a close season in the quieter months of the spring or autumn. Not so at Bowmore.

Our tour guide is visibly disappointed, and she tells us as much, because there is no production work going on for us to see, smell or hear. She ‘hates’ doing tours in the silent season, it’s ‘horrible’ she says. ‘There is so much less going on. It is just not the same’. ‘Can we have a discount then?’ I ask, to no reply. I immediately wish I hadn’t said that because our guide reminds me of

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some of the stricter teachers I had at primary school, the type that didn’t suffer fools gladly and always seemed to be looking at me when they said that. The point she is making, however, is worth bearing in mind. If you are picking a distillery tour, contact them first and ask if they are producing. A distillery in production gives you a real sense of something happening. As a purely factual reconnaissance trip, a silent distillery is fine, though, and you do see some things that you would not normally get access to.

to understand much of what is going on here, but look generally pleased that they have found something dry to do today. They may wonder what it all sounds and smells like during actual production, but they are patient and well behaved and don’t ask difficult questions like I do.

After the myth and romance promotional video, our guide rather perfunctorily shows us the motionless malt mill, the barren stone floor maltings (producing a fairly significant 25-30% of their malt), the kiln that uses their own local ‘sandy’ peat, the mash tun (‘That’s it over there, yes, nice copper top, isn’t it? No, nothing to see in it, don’t bother looking’), their unusual circular wooden grist bin hanging above the mash tun, six wooden washbacks that are full of water to keep them moist and some stills through the next door.

The malt house at Bowmore is significant because, although it only supplies at best a third of their present malt needs, the company is admirably preserving this tradition that was a major part of the industry up until the 1960s. Like at Springbank, traditional methods are still employed and the malt is turned by hand. Visitors can have a go at this themselves when the floors are spread with drying grains, though not when the smoke is being wafted over. They usually go in for a 26-ppm peating of their malt, and the Islay maltings at Port Ellen provides the rest for production.

There is some lively debate in the whisky world as to whether wooden washbacks are better than steel ones, and here a clue can be found as to what some experts think. Our guide tells us that at Bowmore steel washbacks replaced the old wooden ones for a time, but owing to what was deemed to be a marked change in the taste of the new make spirit, and not for the better, they were changed back to wood again.

It is a little difficult for the group to imagine exactly what goes on here on the malt floors, but our guide says that if we come back another time when they are in production, it will be a much better experience, even though we won’t get near the malt kiln for the heat and smoke. We all say that we will look forward to that, and we promise to come back some day.

The Spaniards look into the dormant vessels and the French visitors nod and agree with each other about something. Perhaps they find it difficult

Photo: Bowmore distillery

Chapter 2 - Islay and Jura

Everyone’s interest is stirred in the stillroom because that is really the only bit most of us previously knew about and recognize, and the stillroom at Bowmore certainly is impressive. Four stills sit in lazy idleness: chubby wash stills for the first distillation and more slender spirit stills for the second, each connected by lyne arms to column condensers. The onion-shaped wash stills are 30,000 litres capacity, and the spirit stills are about half that size. The lyne arms of the spirit stills slope gently upwards to their condensers, while the wash stills have short and horizontal routes to theirs. The lyne arm of just one spirit still for some reason disappears through the sloping roof to a condenser outside. Our guide does not know if this was intentional or not. It could be that when the stills were increased in number from two to four in the mid-1960s, the existing building didn’t have enough room for all the new condensers, so instead of enlarging the stillhouse they cut a hole in the roof. In addition, an external condenser ought to be more efficient most months of the year. Bowmore spirit is matured in a combination of 86% ex-bourbon and 14% sherrywood casks. We are taken to see a dunnage warehouse along the seafront. 21,000 casks gently mature in the warehouses here, while

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I opt for a miniature and leave the others contemplating their range of Bowmores with accompanying nibbles to complement the different tastes: ginger, coconut, dark chocolate and such. Most say they were expecting something smokier from a glass of Bowmore. This may be one of the most famous but it isn’t the smokiest of Islay malts, though they do have one or two more peated expressions available.

the rest is sent to the mainland. As I was told at Isle of Arran, Dunnage is the traditional style of spirit warehouse with earthen floors where casks are closely stacked three high on wooden staves. Apart from being traditional and photogenic, the whisky is said to mature better with less evaporation under these conditions. Dunnage systems are, however, more difficult to maintain and more labour intensive than the metal rack or pallet warehouses that are widespread nowadays.

I mention as I leave that I am heading back to Port Askaig to take the ferry for Jura. Our guide asks me if I am staying at the hotel on Jura. ‘No, I’ll be camping.’ ‘Camping on Jura? Tonight? Oh ...’ ‘Yes, I’m looking forward to it. I mean, a campsite across the road from a distillery, perfect!’ She looks out at the rain-splashed windows and says with her jolly pessimism, that we have all just about got used to, ‘Camping. Tonight? Rather you than me. That’s if you even get there. You’d better ring and check what’s going on, I’m not sure if the ferry will be crossing in that wind.’

Around 2% of whisky a year on average is lost through evaporation, which is traditionally and romantically known as the angels’ share. Now let me work that out: 2% accrued share on a 250-litre cask over, say, twentyfive years adds up to … well, quite a few drams for those heavenly bodies. Bowmore is no longer sold to blenders so the distillery relies on sales of its own single malts to keep going. Principle Bowmore malts for the home market range from the 12 to the 25 year old, with various named expressions such as Darkest, Surf and Enigma, and many other limited releases available, some exclusively for overseas or travel retail. Total production at the moment is around 1.7 million litres of new make spirit at 69% ABV per year.

At the village petrol station I take the opportunity to fill up. It is the old style of pump – on the pavement outside a hardware shop in the village. I walk in and two or three customers are standing at the counter as they might loll around a bar in a public house. I line up but the shopkeeper nods to me to come and pay because it is not a queue. ‘Three litres of diesel then?’ ‘Diesel? What?’ He smiles to his friends. It’s a joke. Ha, ha, yes. Well, even if it was diesel it

Back where we started is the impressive tasting room with large windows overlooking a very blurry Loch Indaal. We squint as our guide tells us that, when it’s not raining (she hates showing people the view when it’s raining), you can usually see Bruichladdich on the west side of the loch and she thoroughly recommends we visit.

Photo: Bowmore distillery

is not such a big deal to empty the tank on a Vespa, just a matter of pulling out a tube. Even I can do that with my admittedly scant knowledge of mechanics. I tell them that I am heading for Jura and they produce much the same sharp intake of breath response as my tour guide did earlier. This is no joke. If the wind is northerly, it can whip up quite a current in the Sound and, even though it is a crossing of a mere five minutes, the ferries don’t always leave. The road back across the island seems relatively sheltered for much of the way, through the wooded parts at least. Then in the more open countryside the wind throws a briny spray into my face that would make it difficult to see without goggles. The Atlantic rain makes landfall here for the first time since about Newfoundland, and seems like it can hardly wait to let go. As I turn down the Monte Carlo-style bends into Port Askaig, I see the Jura ferry just pulling out. So they are going, then. I have missed it by a few minutes. Had I not stopped to fill up with petrol, I would have caught it. Mind you, since the Vespa has no fuel gauge, it is force of habit to stop at almost every petrol station I see, and as far as I know there isn’t one on Jura.

There is another crossing in a couple of hours. I sit on the bike on the pier in the rain and watch the little ferry intrepidly plying its way across the Sound. It is quite a sight. Though the boat travels across in more or less a straight line, the crew have to sail it diagonally to counteract the force of the current. I watch it heave up and down almost perilously with great

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splashes of white from beneath the prow as it crashes down, disappears, then rises up again like a killer whale. At this point, I am genuinely relieved that I did miss that ferry. The poor little Vespa would have been flat out on the deck by now, or else just tossed into the sea.

Since the next and last ferry to Jura this evening leaves in two hours, I do what anyone else would do in this situation and pop into the bar of the harbour hotel to wait it out. In such weather even the featureless waiting room of the ferry terminal looks cosy, so imagine what the hotel feels like. A coal fire is glowing away in the snug. One or two patrons sit sipping pints of ale and hot gravy aromas permeate from the kitchen. I can see no obvious sign saying ‘No vacancies’, not that I was looking for one, but ask, just out of curiosity, you know. The barman checks the register. ‘Yes, there are vacancies.’ ‘I don’t suppose there is a single room, is there?’ ‘Yes, there is a single room.’ ‘Probably out of my price range, though.’ No, it’s just about affordable and suddenly the ideally situated campsite across the road from the distillery on Jura loses all the interest it ever had for me. Without further questions I check in.

Settled in the bar, I try the standard Caol Ila 12 and regret that I could not get into the distillery itself, even if the stillhouse does look like a secondary school gym. This malt is a big seller in Italy, along with Glen Grant, where the younger and lighter whiskies are popular.

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Caol Ila certainly is light, but in an Islay way, which has to be put in context. It is peaty, medicinal, as one would expect, but I find it fairly sherried and sweet, with a slightly bitter vanilla end tone. As a first Islay malt to try, it is a good place to start and gives you a pretty good idea of what this place is all about. Some tasters detect odd things such as paraffin oil and scoured metal, but also honey, bitter lemon, tobacco, spicy olives, smoked ham, anchovies and various maritime flavours like seaweed and damp driftwood.

There is an English couple from Burnley in the bar. I saw them arriving in their white van from my room. He was sent in to enquire about vacancies, while she stayed in the van with her arms folded. I thought perhaps he was getting blamed for something - maybe it was his idea to come camping to Islay, all his fault that the weather was so bad, every hotel full, etc. After a minute, I saw him arriving back and giving the thumbs up through the windscreen. It turns out that they have spent the weekend here but didn’t have the courage to camp in the end. They have been to quite a few distilleries and seem to be sort of whisky tourists, though he says he does not drink Scotch. So I got that wrong, it was she who wanted to come up to Islay, but I suspect it was still his fault about the camping and the weather. ‘Are you a friend of the Classic Malts?’ they ask. ‘We are.’ ‘No, but I’m not a foe of the Classic Malts, either.’ They show me a little book they are getting stamped at each of the Diageo ‘Classic Malts’ distilleries that they visit, complete with free entry.

The Classic Malts was a marketing move in the late 1980s aimed at promoting the representatives of six different whisky regions, those being Dalwhinnie (Central Highland), Talisker (Island), Cragganmore (Speyside), Oban (West Highland), Lagavulin (Islay) and Glenkinchie (Lowland).

Diageo plc is a name you cannot easily ignore in the drinks business. It was formed in 1997 through a merger of Guinness and Grand Metropolitan and is one of the largest companies on the London Stock Exchange. Its vast portfolio of drinks companies includes Guinness, Bushmills, Johnnie Walker, Baileys, Red Stripe, Smirnoff, José Cuervo, Pimms, Gordon’s gin, Captain Morgan rum, Blossom Hill, Piat d’Or and a share in Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy. Much of Diageo’s collection of distilleries was inherited from its former incarnation as the Distillers Company Ltd that was formed in the late 19th century by a group of leading whisky magnates. Outright, they own twenty-eight single malt distilleries in Scotland, about 40% of the industry. Add to this two distilleries owned by LVMH and it all adds up to a fairly substantial slice of the whisky cake. The downside of all this, considering other holding companies like Pernod Ricard, Whyte and Mackay and Inver House, is that the days of the small family-owned distilleries are limited to all but a handful of cases. In fact, only 20% of Scotch whisky is made by companies actually based in Scotland. The upside, I suppose, is that a large proportion of the industry is in safe and, hopefully, sensible hands.

‘When you’ve got all the stamps from all the distilleries, what happens?’ I ask. ‘There’s a free gift they send you. A book.’ ‘What sort of book?’ ‘A book about the Classic Malts.’ They are very enthusiastic and suggest I join. I can do it online, if I like. They don’t only go to Diageo distilleries. Of all the tours they have been on, they liked the Famous Grouse tour at Glenturret most of all. ‘At Glenturret you get to fly the grouse,’ they tell me. ‘How’s that?’ ‘You flap your arms, you know, like wings, and it flies a computer image of the grouse.’ ‘Oh, right. Is it like a flight simulator?’ ‘Kind of. More a grouse simulator.’

Back in my room, my waterproofs are making a damp patch on the carpet by the door where I have hung them up to dry. Out of the window, I watch hyperactive lobster boats bobbing nervously up and down at the pier, with rushing currents and beautiful white crests of waves all across the Sound of Islay. The tide at this point is moving southwards as fast as a river. One lone cormorant or shag sits on the water, diving for fish and reappearing between the waves, twitching his head from side to side as if he were conscious of being watched, before disappearing again beneath the choppy surface. I suppose those birds swallow the fish before they reach the surface, because I have never seen one of them with anything in its beak.

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Outside my window, a drenched swallow flies up to rest on the sheltered lamp underneath the eaves. Because of the sea spray and condensation on the windowpane, I can stand and watch him unawares as he tends to his bedraggled feathers. I marvel at how he decided to come up this far north, to this far western corner of Europe. He could just as easily have stayed in the sunnier climes of Italy or France along his way, and at this time of evening only be concerning himself with which mosquito to pluck out of the balmy air next.

After resting, the swallow flies off and I turn to sampling this evening’s second delicacy, the Bowmore fresh from the temporarily silent, whitewashed, rainwashed, brine-splattered distillery on the seashore. ‘Fresh’ in a way but it must have travelled somewhere else to be bottled and brought back to the distillery again, but we’ll overlook that. Bowmore 12 is peated but considerably less so than Caol Ila, with a floral and distinctly maritime nose, though I am admittedly a stone’s throw away from the sea and that might be influencing things a bit. The surprisingly light and airy taste gives you a salty, iodine, just in from the lobster pots warmth, rounded off with sweeter orangey notes and a salty, spicy finish that has definite hints of that brine that is pattering against the window. Some people taste leather, heather, fresh flowers, tropical fruit, pear drops, turpentine, burnt fir, lavender, shellfish and a hint of chlorine. Bowmore is a prime Scotch whisky that well deserves its widespread fame, and the wide range of expressions can surely offer something to

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everyone. I think the idea is to start at the cheapest bottle and work your way through the catalogue until you either reach something you like or you can’t afford to go on. In the distillery shop at Bowmore, they have printed the words of the late Iain Banks on the wall from his book, Raw Spirit:

If you can’t find a Bowmore to fall in love with, you may have to consider very seriously the possibility that you’re wasting your money drinking whisky at all. I don’t know about true love, but I think that I could consider a bit of mild coquetry with one or two expressions in the Bowmore range.

Contemplating my glass of malt and warming it in the palm of my hand a little bit, I have no doubt that this Bowmore 12 would taste even better shuddering inside a leaky tent in a windswept corner of a field on Jura. It is still a wonderful whisky to drink in a dry hotel room looking at the downpour outside, especially with the sobering thought that, had I arrived at the harbour ten minutes earlier, by now I’d be shuddering inside a leaky tent in a windswept corner of a field on Jura.

After a warm and above all dry night’s sleep, I am up early and sailing across the relatively calm Sound of Islay. This must rank as one of the shortest sea ferry crossings in the UK, but in the rollercoaster swell of yesterday evening it would have seemed a lot longer than five minutes.

The ferryman tells me that the last couple of sailings were really touch and go as to whether they would set off or not, and at one point they had to pull in at a different spot to avoid crashing into the jetty. It is then a hilly ride from the Feolin ferry to Craighouse along the A846, which was built by the great Scottish engineer Thomas Telford, and is known locally as the ‘Long Road’. I’m not sure where the short road is. As far as I can see, this is pretty much the only road on the Jura map.

For the first couple of miles, the Long Road skirts the coast and alongside Jura’s westerly facing beaches that must be great in sunny weather. Then over fairly open farmland, the road turns north to reach the coast again at Craighhouse, the only settlement of any size on the island. Jura is smaller and considerably less inhabited than Islay. George Orwell described it, when he moved here towards the end of his life, as a very ‘un-get-at-able place’, and it still gives much the same impression.

The name Jura comes from the old Norse for ‘deer island’, and the inhabitants are to this day mostly deer, outnumbering the people by about thirty to one. From time to time, I spot them looking quizzically at me from their standpoints in the fields, or dashing into copses as I pass by - the deer, I mean, not the people. I know I am approaching distillery country because before the village of Craighouse a large black warehouse comes into view, plainly a whisky warehouse due to the telltale soot-black colour scheme, the ... what was the name of that fungus? The …

Jura was inhabited as early as 8,000 years ago, archaeological excavations have found, and was for a time under Viking control. In the cemetery at Kilearnadil, tombs of Knights Templars can be found and the island is rich in legend, myth and superstition. On the subject of cemeteries, the grave of a highwaywoman can also be seen at Kaimh-Sgeir, south of Feolin. The Long Road was presumably her main stomping ground. Apparently, she used to attack the mail coaches coming from Islay, but was bumped off by another local in return for a farm by way of reward.

Jura is well known among sea farers for the natural phenomenon to the north of the island known as the Corryvreckan Whirlpool, a huge maelstrom caused by high tides and narrow channels, best seen during a spring tide. George Orwell treated his nieces and nephews to a boat ride while they were visiting him here, and he decided that the Corryvreckan Strait would be a good stretch to head for. He wrecked the boat in the whirlpool, almost drowning himself and his nieces and nephews. They managed to swim to the shore of neighbouring Scarba and were rescued by a passing lobster fisherman later in the day. Orwell lived to write his prophetic, anti-totalitarian, ‘Orwellian’ classic 1984 here at his house in the north of the island, finishing it in 1984 and then, perhaps after a glass of two of the local stuff, muddling the numbers up. Arriving in Craighouse the distillery stands on the left and the hotel on the right, with its open field leading down to the sea. That field is the campsite but there are no tents to be seen. I suspect all the campers had the same idea as me yesterday evening as they ventured into the bar

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ISLE OF JURA

Hi Ben, I’ll put you in the diary for 9-30am on the 18th and we’ll just have to play it by ear and see who’s available to speak to you. Regards, Sue of the hotel. It looks like a great place to camp in fine weather, with a beautiful view across the sea to the small isles, the hotel facilities behind you and the distillery across the road.

Isle of Jura distillery presides over the little sheltered harbour, and its white buildings give a certain purpose and elegance to the village. Nothing much seems to be going on, but I do catch sight of one or two production workers walking across from one whitewashed building to another, disappearing through the large doors. The shop and visitors’ centre seems to be the most modern part of the distillery. The turreted building to the right was once the Customs and Excise officer’s quarters above what seems to have been the cooperage. This unmistakable façade is visible in the illustration of Jura in Barnard’s 1887 book, and perhaps prompted him to write that it was ‘among the handsomest we have seen, and from the bay looks more like a castle than a Distillery.’

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I knock and Sue, the lead tour guide, appears at the door. She is from the north of England, but has lived on Jura for quite a while. For a moment we chat at the entrance, and I feel a bit like a salesman with a foot in the door. I detect a certain amount of reticence at first as she plays it by ear. I begin to ask a few general and some technical questions, and she starts to relax as she realises that I really am interested in how big the mash tun is and what is their output per annum. Founded in 1810, Isle of Jura, with a ‘J’ as in jury, operated successfully until the beginning of the 20th century, when it ceased production and had the roofs taken off to avoid paying taxes. The plant remained roofless and untaxed until the 1960s, when it was reopened under an employment initiative led by two local estate owners, one of whom had been George Orwell’s landlord. They put in new machinery and taller stills than before, aiming to produce a lighter malt than Jura had been traditionally known for.

Isle of Jura is now owned by the Glasgow blending firm of Whyte & Mackay, who also own Dalmore and Fettercairn distilleries. Whyte & Mackay is in turn owned by the United Breweries Group of India, who make some of their own Indian whiskies.

Jura’s water for mashing comes from the local Market Loch and malted barley is shipped in from Bairds in Inverness with a ppm of just two. The mash tun, I am reliably informed, usually holds a mash of 4.754 tonnes. It is stainless steel, as are the six washbacks that hold 50,000 litres each and take two mashes to fill.

The four lantern-shaped stills are 7.5 metres high, second in height only to Glenmorangie’s, so I am told. They are wide at the base of the neck above a narrower section, as if they have been pinched in to give more of an oil lamp figure. Sue says that this aids a gentle ‘reflux’, which is the swirling action of the vapours in the neck of the still that encourages the heavier, oilier parts to fall back again. The distillery once employed 35% of the island’s population, when most of the other processes like malting and coopering were done on site. Jura’s eight production workers now produce 2.2 million litres per year, 60% of which goes to the parent company’s blends.

A certain amount of whisky is matured here on the island, about 28,000 casks in a few warehouses, including the one I passed on the way. Most of what is matured here being earmarked for their single malt, the rest

is sent to warehouses at Invergordon on the Moray Firth. Due to increased global demand for the heavier peated malts, Jura is now extending its range and producing a more powerful whisky made with barley of up to 60 ppm.The water, as already stated, flows through fields of rushes and heather from Market Loch, which is three miles up the hill to the back of the distillery. It was originally a burn that they dammed to secure supply. The reason why they were at all concerned that there might ever be a shortage of water in this neck of the woods is beyond me, especially today. Sue says that I can see the loch as I go back along the road, it is up on the hill behind that black warehouse I saw on the way here. I ask and she can’t remember the name of the whisky fungus either. Sue tells me an interesting story that I recall hearing something about at the time. In 2007, a few cases of MacKinley whisky were found underneath Ernest Shackleton’s base camp in the Arctic, left behind after the ill-fated Nimrod expedition of 19091. MacKinley MacPherson Ltd, previous owners of Isle of Jura, were bought out by Whyte & Mackay in 1994. It was Richard Paterson, the almost legendary master blender at Whyte & Mackay, who was invited to go and nose some of the salvaged whisky, though not to the Arctic, to New Zealand. This hardly being the

1 | The Nimrod expedition did not make it to the South Pole as intended but did break the furthest south record of the time, and also located magnetic south. Having been forced to turn back about 100 miles from the South Pole, Shackleton later told his wife that he thought a ‘live donkey is better than a dead lion.’

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sort of invitation you would pass up, he went and found the whisky in apparently excellent condition. And that wasn’t the end of it. The master blender was allowed to take some back to Scotland to ‘deconstruct’ and ‘reconstruct’ the lost recipe. By blending different malts Whyte & Mackay have released a special bottling that is intended to reproduce the old taste that warmed the hearts of those intrepid explorers. No need for chill filtering there, I think, and as for adding ice, I wouldn’t bother.

Now officially 200 years old, Isle of Jura distillery has quite a tradition at its back, and I am keen to taste something of this lighter than usual island malt. Jura’s range might sound more like that of a designer perfumery, with expressions like ‘Superstition’, ‘Prophesy’ and ‘Boutique Barrel’. Some of the names are linked to old Jura legends and fairy tales, such as the 1700s ‘prophesy’ that the last member of a local clan would leave the island with one eye and all his possessions in a cart pulled by a white horse. Oddly enough, this came true in 1938. There is also the witch of Jura’s magical thread, with which she would draw towards her anything or anyone she desired, and that adorns the bottle of Legacy. I pick up a miniature of the Jura 10 year old and a few drops of it will go into my own blend, or blended malt, that is going to contain a little bit from every distillery I visit. At the moment, the small sampling bottle has just five different whiskies in it, but by the end it should contain about forty. I tell Sue that, should I crash into the bogs and it is found under turf in a few hundred years, Mr Paterson’s descendants can have my permission to come and reconstruct it.

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Recreating the past could be a theme here at Isle of Jura, considering that it was resurrected after half a century of roofless, untaxed inactivity. The way they have done it is admirable, and though some of the buildings and most of the machinery date from the latter half of the twentieth century, the distillery gives a good impression of the continuance of a long-standing tradition. The proximity of Islay will always mean that they are operating in the shadow of that more famous whisky-making isle, but they seem content to get on with their own way of doing it here without worrying too much about the others across the water.

I ask Sue if the weather is always like this on the island and she says that actually for the last couple of weeks it was sunny every day, but I suspect they always tell tourists that. Then, as I am about to leave, I look through the panes in the door to see a strange yellowish glow over the bay that brings back distant memories of something warming and summery. Sue is looking at it too, and is thinking the same thing as me. Yes, it is the sun! It is a firm intention of mine to paint or at least sketch the emblematic Paps of Jura, which Sue tells me are not two but three, but I haven’t seen them yet. I have high hopes of the mist clearing now because the sun is definitely making a comeback. Returning along the Long Road and up to the rise of the last hill, the road swings round to give a splendid view of the Sound of Islay. The ferry is already making its way across here from Port Askaig. I have to catch that to make it in time for my appointment at Bunnahabhain,

and having already witnessed its speedy turnaround this morning, I realise that there is not much time to spare. Freewheeling down the remaining mile of the hill to the jetty, which is probably faster than using the Vespa’s engine, I am soon carried across the water back to Islay. Then to the main road from Port Askaig to Bowmore, past the turn off for Caol Ila, until a right turn leads along the high shelf of the coastal hills for a few miles. Approaching the distillery I stop and for some reason optimistically put on a bit of sun cream. Next to me is an old barrel on the roadside. On one side Bunnahabhain and an arrow are painted to guide and encourage the visitor that little bit farther. On the other side, for those leaving, is an arrow pointing to Other Places.

BUNNAHABHAIN

Hello Ben, I look forward to seeing you on Monday 18th of July at 11.00, come to the general office and introduce yourself and ask for myself. Regards Andrew Brown

Although there was that helpful barrel pointing the way, when I reach the distillery it is not entirely clear to me where visitors are supposed to go. I like that. No didactic signboards or pre-tour videos here and fewer tour guides than production workers on the staff.

The distillery sits in its own sheltered smugglers’ cove at the edge of the water, though it is more spread out than Caol Ila down the road and rather less modernised. The layout of this distillery around the large central stone courtyard was likened by Michael Jackson - again, the writer, not the singer - to a chateau in Bordeaux, but the location and view I see now are somewhat different.

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Photo: P. Lüdemann

Someone appears in the courtyard and I ask for the distillery manager. He says that I should go up those external stairs over there and knock on the office door. I am almost on time, thanks to my not missing the ferry. The secretary shows me in. I wait on a sofa by her desk for a short while, before Andrew comes out of his office to take me round. He is a local Islay man, in his late forties, I’d say, with close-cropped Viking fair hair, docker’s physique and that unmistakable undertone of island seriousness/humour in just about everything he says. Bunnahabhain was set up by the Greenlees brothers in 1881, thirtyfive years after Caol Ila and is said to have been designed to rival that distillery. Nowadays, the two whiskies are quite different. Caol Ila is closer to the trademark Islay malt, while Bunnahabhain has the reputation of being a very lightly peated alternative at no more than 2 ppm. They even make a point of channelling the production water from the bedrock spring just to avoid it running too much over peat.

I am beginning to see the Great Divide between what are known as northern malts and southern malts of the Islay range. Only about half of the eight distilleries currently producing on Islay make those really peaty malts as their flagship expressions. The further south you go, the peatier they get. It is amazing to think that an island twenty-five miles

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long should even have northern and southern malts. All around Scotland master blenders have been taking note of the growing popularity in the market of the smokier Scotches, and here they also offer a 35-ppm expression, which is probably closer in style to the Bunnahabhain product of the 1800s.

but Bunnahabhain do four and then mix them together afterwards to become what is known as the ‘worts’. ‘Why four sparges?’ I ask. ‘Because that’s the way it’s always been done here.’ I thought he was going to say that.

The original founders built the road I have just come along to connect the distillery to the main road. They also built some houses for the workers, then some shops and then a school. The place must have been quite a whisky village, and surely this location had some special attractiveness for them to go to all that trouble. The purity and softness of the water, together with a local supply of high-quality peat, would have played a major part. The name Bunnahabhain, pronounced boona-haven, and not easy to spell correctly after a few, means ‘river mouth’. The natural harbour that it sits in was an ideal situation for transport by sea.

Their six enormous 100,000-litre Douglas fir washbacks ferment the cooled worts with yeast for up to 100 hours. Bunnahabhain’s massive stills, among the biggest in Scotland, are four dark, onion-shaped, copper monsters, paired up in a compact arrangement in the stillhouse. The wash stills are just bigger than those at Bowmore, holding 35,400 litres and the spirit stills are about half as big. Only one of the stills has its

Andrew begins to show me round, firstly pointing out the handsome Burgundy-coloured Porteus malt mill, still going strong after half a century. He says that most distilleries have the same type. He tells me that Porteus of Leeds made the best malt mills and so all the distilleries wanted to get one. Then when everyone had one the firm went bust, because they were so well built they never required replacing. I suppose that is what’s known as being a victim of your own success. We proceed like the malt grist from the malt mill to the copper-topped mash tun. Here four warm rinses, or ‘sparges’ dissolve the fermentable sugars from the ground malt. Normally, distilleries only do three sparges,

Photo: Bunnahabhain distillery

condenser in the stillhouse, the other three lyne arms disappear through the walls to other rooms. Presumably, like at Bowmore, when the distillery doubled the number of stills in the 1960s, instead of building a new stillhouse, they decided to try to fit the new ones in somehow or other.

I notice bright green mineral deposits collecting in the spirit safe, and find out that they are actually bits of copper from the condensers. With all that copper being shaved off the inside, the condensers, like the stills, need to be replaced every few years. Replacing them is an expensive procedure and although they tend to wear out more at the bottom, they can’t be replaced in sections like the stills can. Bunnahabhain had theirs craftily designed to be reversible, that way they could just turn them upside down when they needed to be renewed. In practice, however, Andrew tells me, it costs just as much to turn them round as to replace them.

Up to 1.3 million litres of new make spirit are produced here per annum, though the capacity is 2.5 million. Most of that is reserved by the parent company, Burn Stewart, for blending to such labels as Black Bottle and Famous Grouse. Under 10% is released as the highly regarded Bunnahabhain single malt at 12, 18 and 25 years old, with a smokier expression called Toiteach. Burn Stewart also own the distillery

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of Deanston north of Glasgow and Tobermory on Mull, both very Scottish concerns, but then I learn that Burn Stewart is in turn owned by a company called CL Financial from Trinidad and Tobago, which ranks alongside India and Japan for surprise.

It may be tucked into this picturesque cove along the hilly coast, but there is no particular shortage of storage space, and they have the luxury of maturing all the stock of Bunnahabhain single malt on site within drenching distance of the winter breakers. At present, 21,000 casks are maturing here, mostly sherry casks, and some ex-bourbon.

‘How much do you think warehouse location affects the final taste of a whisky?’ I ask as we come out of the distillery courtyard. Andrew squints across the misty bay. ‘Nobody knows, really,’ he says. ‘Maybe not as much as some would have you believe. But it’s part of a whisky’s identity. Gives it soul.’ Matured at its distillery, a whisky has soul. I like that. I know of a certain story linked to Bunnahabhain, and ask Andrew where the ship is. He knows which one I am asking about. There is a wreck of a ship, well known in whisky circles, that just missed the pier of Bunnahabhain and crashed onto the rocks in 1974. It would seem that

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the captain of the trawler was not entirely sober at the time, though nobody knows what he had been drinking. The old sea dog at the ship’s wheel on the label of Bunnahabhain might just be a reference to this historical whisky-related event. The ship, the Wyre Majestic, is still there, the prow end at least, rusting away in all its melancholic ‘majesty’. It is just around the corner from the distillery cottages. These wonderfully situated cottages, by the way, are ex-worker residences that were, until recently, let to holidaymakers. Andrew says he was spending more time dealing with complaints about the hot water in the showers or blocked toilets than running the distillery, and so they gave that up.

It is a short and pleasant walk around the cliffs to the wreck of the ship. The hull has an odd sort of coppery sheen of oxidation to it now, much the same colour as the Bunnahabhain stills. It is just one of something like 340 wrecks around the coasts of Islay. That other famous whisky-related wreck, the SS Politician, which ran aground in stormy weather with a few thousand cases of whisky on board en route to Jamaica in 1941, still lies at the bottom of the sea off Eriskay Island in the Outer Hebrides. Besides whisky, that ship was also carrying a consignment of pianos, car parts and bedding material, but nobody seemed very interested in any of that. Tormented by wartime restrictions on the production and consumption of alcohol, the islanders looted a substantial part of the reported 264,000 bottles on board, inspiring

Prologue - Appenzell, Switzerland

Compton Mackenzie to write his book Whisky Galore. As in the story, the authorities put a stop to the Eriskay islanders’ fun by dynamiting the ship and sinking it. One can only presume that the customs officer in charge managed to escape from what must have been quite a lynch mob that night.

Some of the bottles salvaged from the SS Politician still turn up at auction. Bonhams, for example, recently sold one bottle of King’s Ransom for over £4,000. Some Eriskay islanders were prosecuted at the time, and some even served jail sentences, but little of the whisky was ever found. In 1998 a legal salvage operation on the wreck tried its best, but brought up a mere two dozen bottles that had escaped the blast. There must be, then, quite a bit of whisky still down there. With such thoughts of treasure beneath the waves, I sit for a while and look out across the swift-flowing sound to where the Paps of Jura must surely be. The view from here would, I am led to believe, be a fine vista of the wonderful mountains, if it weren’t for the constant presence of the thick island mist still obscuring the tops. The gradually strengthening sun, however, is doing its best to make an appearance.

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There seems to be nowhere else to go other than ‘other places’ from Bunnahabhain, and that is where I now go, heading back towards the main road and right towards Bridgend. Then at Bridgend there is a right turn towards the western half of the horse shoe of Islay along the shallow bay of Loch Indaal, where Vikings once beached their longboats and the Lords of the Isles set out to sign treaties with those who would stand against the Scottish crown. The distillery, which our guide at Bowmore pointed out through the rain yesterday, is easily found on the coast road before the village of Bruichladdich, just after the minimarket.

BRUICHLADDICH

Hi Ben, Lovely chatting earlier. Mark our MD has told me he will have a chat with you on the 18th at around 2pm. Kind Regards Mary

As I pause outside to take in the scene, the honeymooners from Hamburg are coming out after a tour of the distillery. They camped down at the far end of the island near Port Ellen last night and could probably smell the maltings in the village from their tent. They are doing pretty much the same round as me, and we are destined to meet again on the ferry up to Mull in a couple of days. ‘Did you enjoy your tour of Bruichladdich?’ ‘Yes, we did,’ he answers for himself and his wife too. ‘Very much.’ In the spacious courtyard the whitewashed stone buildings give an immediate sensation of brightness and space. On the wall in colossal aquamarine letters are the words: ‘Progressive Hebridean distillers since 1881’. Progressive for quite a while, I see. In his book, Whisky Dream, Stuart Rivans tells the engaging story of how Mark Reynier sat in his solicitor’s office with £4 million still needed to secure the deal, and minutes to go before the sale would be called off. He found the extra investors and went on to revamp the distillery to become Islay’s biggest single employer with a current staff of 46.

Bruichladdich originally opened the same year as Bunnahabhain, in the good times when demand from mainland blenders seemed unceasing, and the difficulties of the next half a century were quite unimaginable. When Alfred Barnard visited here a few years after it opened on his Distilleries of the United Kingdom tour, he thought it a ‘solid, handsome structure’, and records the proprietors as being the ‘Bruichladdich Distillery Company, Limited’. Though it has passed through several hands since then, visiting today Barnard would record the same proprietor’s name. The Scots Gaelic motto on the distillery flag is probably more recent: Clachan A Choin, which I am led to believe translates as ‘The Dog’s Bollocks’.

Mary in the distillery shop, whose grandfather and great grandfather worked at Bruichladdich, takes me up to the office to meet the MD. She introduces me as ‘the young man who has come all the way from Zurich on his Vespa’. Mark is on his coffee break after talking to a couple of French journalists.

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I mention that I have read Mr Rivens’s book about buying Bruichladdich and, doubtlessly pre-empting a common question, Mark puts in, ‘It’s all true!’ I half suspect, after having just shown the journalists round the plant, he won’t have much energy or time left to do the same for me, but that turns out not to be the case. On the contrary, Mark is restless with energy and enthusiasm and can’t wait to start telling me about what they do here. He sits on the side of the chair in the corner of his office that overlooks the grey-blue loch, while his dog, Badger, stares out the window and pines mournfully. ‘He’s on the trail of a couple of dogs on heat,’ says Mark, carefully shutting the door.

The office has that kind of borderline threadbare look to it that would seem to be common to distillery managers’ offices, at least the ones I have seen so far, with Dickensian piles of papers, files, testing bottles, scribbled notes and a very borderline threadbare sofa along the wall. I sit down on the low sofa, occupied usually by Badger judging by the rugs and hairs, and find myself looking up at Mark as he talks with infective enthusiasm about his work. At one point he opens the display cabinet and takes out a bottle of crystal clear liquid. ‘This is four-times distilled whisky,’ he says. ‘It was used by James May and Oz Clark to run a racing car on their TV series.’ ‘So, it is like petrol?’

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One of the standard questions I ask as I go round a distillery is ‘What would you say is your unique selling point?’ If Bruichladdich ever needed a USP, it would have to be this: the barley used for each bottle is now traceable to the exact farm where it was grown, one of twenty-eight at the moment. Many of the farms are actually on Islay and half of the total is organic, some of it now biodynamic. ‘So this means you could pick up a bottle of whisky and find out exactly where the barley was grown,’ says Mark. ‘You could talk like a wine connoisseur does about the soil, topography and climate, the terroir of the barley, that sort of thing, which is not something whisky drinkers usually do.’

‘Yes, you could probably run your Vespa on it.’ ‘That would help to pass the time during breakdowns.’ There is another clear bottle of what Mark calls ‘biodynamic’ whisky, or so it will be after at least three years in a cask. He invites me to taste it. I take the smallest sip I can manage. It brings to mind that old description of whisky, ‘like water with fire in it’. ‘You’re one of the first people to try it,’ he tells me. ‘Well, I can heartily recommend it to those who follow in my footsteps. It’s great. Lovely. Take it away from me.’

I start asking about the stills and washbacks, standard technical questions that I read out from my list, and so Mark takes me on a tour after closing up his whimpering Badger in the office. As we go round, we meet the relaxed and affable workers of Bruichladdich, some with famous names in the whisky world, like Jim McEwan and Duncan McGillivray. Most of the staff are locals with generations of family history connected to the Bruichladdich distillery. Many of them have other jobs too, several are crofters and the bottling hall manager is a shepherdess. Nobody is stressed, everyone takes time to talk, and they all seem content to be doing what Frank at Springbank called ‘caretaking’. You have to remind yourself that this is a factory, but how often do you meet such cheery, relaxed, simply happy to be here workers in a factory? Turnover of staff tends to be fairly slow in distilleries and the pensions are good, so the days of siphons and sneaky drams of new make spirit are presumably over.

‘Progressive’ is certainly a word to associate with Bruichladdich. It is by no means incidental that the first things Mark points out are two large white vats that mean nothing to me until he explains that this is the ‘anaerobic digestion waste treatment plant’. ‘Basically, a lot of bugs eat away at the waste products of the whisky process and fart out methane gas that is burned to produce enough power to run the whole distillery as well as my electric car.’

Photos: Bruichladdich distillery

Progressive they may be, but they have a wonderful old, belt-driven Boby malt mill and an open mash tun similar to the one at Glen Scotia. While the handsome Victorian rakes slowly churn away at the steaming mash, Mark tells me that the word mash comes from the same root as maceration, and here they prefer a long and calm mashing process. Mark likes etymology, he tells me that back is a Germanic word meaning ‘vessel’, and tun is probably Scandinavian for the same.

Fermentation is allowed between 60-80 hours, and 105 hours at the weekends. They have six Douglas fir washbacks, one of which dates back to 1881. Douglas fir, otherwise known as Oregon pine, was popularly used because these are tall trees with fewer knots in the planks. Mark also maintains that as much as 60% of the flavoursome esters of a whisky is generated at this part of the process. It is believed that wooden washbacks contain special bacteria that aid fermentation. Wood also absorbs some of the heat of the process, and is therefore less volatile and produces less froth than steel, thereby reducing the need to use switchers or add surfactants. This sort of anoraky information is never going to be something you will read on the blurb of a bottle, but I lap it up.

In the stillroom sit two pairs of tall pot stills that are significantly broad at the base of the necks. These were designed to preserve the delicate floral and fruity notes by aiding a refining reflux action, without those bulges in the necks known as ‘boil balls’. The Bruichladdich stills were apparently the first to have anti-collapse valves fitted, which was a wise safety addition, and all other distilleries quickly followed suit. They do not go to great lengths to polish or lacquer their stills here. The greenish oxidisation is instead allowed to run down the sides

Chapter 2 - Islay and Jura

and look unpretentiously functional. The six-metre wash still No.1 dates back like the washback and mash tun to the founding of the company in 1881, and so while it may not be the shiniest, according to Mark, it is the oldest working still in Scotland. He quotes the French proverb: ‘C’est dans les vieilles marmites qu’on fait les meilleures soupes.’2 No frills here, and no computer screens either. A patient, ‘trickle’ distillation is monitored under the eye of the skilled stillman, a sturdy fellow, who has been in the business as long as he would care to remember. He probably knew Mary’s grandfather, and great grandfather for that matter but I do not venture to ask. Next to the stillman stands another fellow who is a retired stillman. He just can’t keep away. In a corner of the stillhouse is an old Lomond still that they call Ugly Betty. It is cylindrical and looks rather more industrial than the other stills in the room, like the dumpy, only interested in mathematics sister of the other four cheerleaders. Effectively it does lack the elegant swan neck of the whisky stills, but it has its own charm and has recently been cranked up to start producing Islay’s one and only gin. Gin is perhaps a shrewd business move, as the profits from that particular spirit are rather more quickly gained than is the case with whisky.

We approach the warehouses on a rise at the back of the distillery. The name Bruichladdich, pronounced with a couple of half-aspirated Gaelic ‘k’s, refers to the banking along the seashore that extends for some miles in both directions from here. An array of casks are used from exbourbon to sherry to vintage wine, and stacks of them sit in the yard waiting to be filled. Most of the colour comes out in the first few months of maturation, and much of the flavour too, according to Mark. ‘The years of sitting in damp warehouses by the sea really serve to mellow or add to the finer hints that separate one expression from another. The basic flavour profile is already there without ageing. I mean, have you ever heard of a vintage perfume?’ Some of the casks predate the present ownership and are also released, but their real milestone ten-year-old bottling is 2011. Mark’s son Ruari was born on that eventful day back in 2001 when backers were found at the last minute, literally, and the deal to buy the distillery was made. His name is proudly marked as the owner of cask No.1. The mashing and cutting water is brought by tractor from a local farmer’s spring. The intriguingly named Dirty Dottie’s Well on Octomore farm, itself site of a defunct Islay distillery, is the water source. As we come out of the bottling plant, a tractor and trailer arrives as if on cue and James, a huge figure of a man, the farmer of Octomore Farm, gets down. He effortlessly carries over two large containers of water.

Mark thinks he had better soon go and see if his dog is all right in the office, but first we sit at the tables outside in the courtyard. I look around and see that we are being observed by one of the web cams that were the subject of intense scrutiny by the CIA around the time of the Gulf War. Second-hand distillery equipment was being brought in by boat, and on the satellite imagery it got somehow mistaken as possible ‘weapons of mass destruction’. The webcams were subsequently monitored, phones were tapped, investigations made, etc., and a lot of fuss was made over nothing. When they got word of it, Bruichladdich’s response was to release a distillery bottling of WMD, a Whisky of Mass Distinction.

James notices me drinking plain water from a Bruichladdich glass. He suggests to Mark that he should go into the shop and get us a taste of Octomore. I reiterate my pledge of not drinking and riding on my trip, but then realise that I am at the end of my day’s travels around the island. I had meant to reach Kilchoman distillery by this evening, but it will still be there tomorrow, and one wee dram isn’t going to put me over the limit.

Bruichladdich offers what some consider a baffling gamut of expressions, but the core range can more or less be considered as the Laddie Classic, Laddie 10 to 22 year olds, Rocks, Waves, Über-Provenance, Organic and Octomore expressions, all non-filtered, non-coloured, cut only with Islay water from James’s farm.

The Bruichladdich house taste is very lightly peated, grassy, cereal and sweet, but Octomore is none of these. Since its inception, Octomore has been released with quite astonishing ppm levels way in excess of one hundred that some said was probably impossible. This particular version, Octomore 3, comes out at a smoky 80 ppm, still one of the peatiest whiskies in the world and quite a mouthful. The peatiness inevitably

Things like that seem to just happen here. A previous bottling commemorates another humorous saga of the lost Royal Navy unmanned submarine a few years ago. A local fisherman caught it in his nets and took it ashore. The Navy refused to admit the loss, and when they eventually owned up and came to collect it, they were presented with a bottle of Bruichladdich’s freshly released Yellow Submarine whisky on the pier.

Just to mention it, besides being a farmer, James is also a digger contractor, holiday cottage manager, Highland cow breeder, until it got automized the lighthouse keeper and other jobs besides. So come on, to be served a glass of Octomore by the farmer of Octomore, diluted with a dash of water fresh from Octomore farm, in the grounds of the distillery - well, that is an offer I can hardly refuse. James is also, incidentally, the local policeman.

2 | The best soups are made in old pots.

Chapter 2 - Islay and Jura

pervades everything, particularly the nose, but it isn’t overwhelming. On the palate, the full-bodied mouthwrap brings out much more complexity than you might expect, but, while you are contemplating that, the finish arrives to leave you exhaling plumes of smoke from your nostrils like a steamed up bull gasping for more. Carefully pouring the remainder of my glass into my little flask, I ask about the spring on James’s farm. He tells me with a smile that it isn’t really called Dirty Dottie’s Well, it’s just that Mark can’t pronounce the real name in Gaelic, which does begin with a ‘d’, but I can’t pronounce it either. The well water, he tells me, comes out clear as crystal, but the burn a few yards away is as brown as bog water.

Mark hears a bark at the distillery gates and scuttles off to find Badger. Someone has let it out of his office. Later, as I am riding through the gates, I catch a glimpse of Mark, turning to wave goodbye as he runs this way and that after his dog. Surely someone didn’t let it out on purpose as a practical joke? Mind you, though the Ìlich take their whisky seriously, it does seem to be that sort of place. Perhaps in time they will release one of their special bottlings to commemorate the event. I wonder what they might call it. Clachan A Choin springs to mind, but perhaps even the progressive distillers at Bruichladdich wouldn’t go that far. 3

Evening light on Loch Indaal. The sun is setting behind curiously optimistic crimson clouds and passing on vague shimmers of pinkish 3 | Since my visit, Bruichladdich has been bought by Remy Cointreau and Mark no longer works there, so I suppose the Clachan expression is never to be.

Chapter 2 - Islay and Jura

light to the waters of the bay as I ride the couple of miles to Port Charlotte. I would have camped, and this would have been a great evening for it, but for the fact that I read in a guidebook that the Islay youth hostel occupies buildings that once belonged to another of Islay’s distilleries. This was the former Loch Indaal distillery, which worked for a century from 1829 before finally succumbing to the general economic calamity of the age. Islay did not suffer anything remotely like the disaster of Campbeltown across the water, perhaps due to the reliance of blenders on their distinctive tastes, but times were nevertheless hard and most distilleries even here were subjected to prolonged bouts of company mothballs.

The dormitory rooms in the youth hostel smell nothing like a distillery any more, and I certainly wouldn’t drink a whisky with that kind of bouquet. Since I have bought nothing to cook for this evening, I ask the manageress for tips on where to eat. She recommends a couple of places to the south of the island that serve good food, but on foot I pass a pub that looks much more like my sort of place, the Lochindaal Hotel.

Two men, one with what I identify as a Scouse accent, the other with a Brummie, neither of whom turns out to be from those places, are sitting on a bench outside the door with a bag of crabs’ claws that the barman has just presented to them. They have evidently been on the road for some time judging by their wind-burned faces, salt-stiff hair and clothes that the swimming pool attendant at Bowmore wouldn’t be too impressed by. ‘Are you on a mission?’ one of them enquires as I pass. ‘A mission?’

‘We’ve seen you with that loaded-up Vespa. You look like a man on a mission.’ ‘Kind of, I suppose.’ I briefly explain the ‘mission’ that has brought me from Alpine Switzerland to the rugged extremes of the Hebrides. ‘Are you an alcoholic?’ he asks. ‘No.’ ‘Are you wanted by the police?’ asks the other. ‘Not yet.’

I think they are the ones on a mission. There are four of them, three friends and the son of John, who spoke to me first. Later, after picking him up off the floor and handing him his sticks, I learn that John has an advancing case of Motor Neurons Disease. The group of friends are making what they say is a last tour of the remoter parts of Scotland together. They are travelling in a camper, a self-converted black burger van, and intend to find some wild countryside to hang out in and pick up a few bottles of decent whisky along the way. Eddie behind the bar is an original Glaswegian with a fast turn of speech and a hard eye, the sort of barman that would offer you the shirt off his back, but turf you out with the tip of his boot if you started making trouble. Eddie seems to be quite a character, and must have something of a name in whisky circles. He tells us about a bottle of whisky he sold for £29,400, a 50-year-old Bowmore. We are all impressed as he shows us the article in his scrapbook to prove it. We are also amazed that he is still

here behind the bar if he can make that sort of money on a single bottle. Eddie serves me my dinner and tries unsuccessfully to give me a complimentary bag of raw crabs’ claws. I show him the bottle of Laddie Classic they gave me at Bruichladdich. ‘That’s something, that is. Mark Reynier gave you that? Promise me this, Ben, never open it. Don’t open that. Keep it. That is something.’ Then Eddie tells me to wait a moment and he disappears out of the bar. He comes back after a while wearing a Bruichladdich t-shirt exactly the same colour as the bottle, a sort of turquoise that was inspired by the greeny-blue waters of the loch in sunshine. He got it at the Islay Whisky Festival. I ask if that is his favourite whisky, but Eddie wouldn’t tell anyone his favourite whisky. A man’s favourite whisky is a personal thing, not something you would reveal to all and sundry. No, no, he’s not telling anyone that. Not many people do commit themselves, I’ve discovered.

But Eddie does teach us how to taste whisky. ‘You don’t drink it. Just wet your lips. Like this, you see. That’s how you taste whisky. Wet your lips. Don’t just drink it. Take if from me. Taste the sweetness, go on, try it.’ So John and I take it from him and try it, while the others stick Quiet Riot on the juke box and headbang round the bar singing:

We’ll get wild, wild, wild! Wild, wild, wild!

Chapter 2 - Islay and Jura

Later I am invited for crabs’ claws in the group’s black van down at the campsite. I follow on and bring along my day’s miniatures. We taste the whiskies more or less following the instructions that Eddie gave us. Inevitably, in a way, Isle of Jura loses out to the others this evening on Islay, since here it is something of an incomer. It has a light, noncombative lack of peatiness in a none too complex flavour profile that intentionally separates it from the local offerings. The quiet and stately distillery of Jura back there over the Sound makes a point of distancing itself, and perhaps wisely avoids the maelstrom of competition against great names, presenting itself instead in the soft light of its own mystical, whimsical, inoffensive character and deerlike charm. No doubt on its own turf Jura would fare better, like in that sodden tent on the windswept field by the hotel, or stranded on a rock after surviving the Corryvreckan whirlpool. It is slightly oily with a pleasant malty, caramel sweetness about it with perhaps something like liquorice and dried fruits. Some tasters detect butter, cod liver oil, roasted coffee beans, aniseed, pine needles, birch wood, sour cream, muesli, steamed meat and unused soap. The most popular in the black van tonight turns out to be the least peated of all Islay malts. This powerful, ship-wrecking, stalwart Bunnahabhain 12 may not deliver much of what most people expect from an Islay malt, which is smoke and lots of it, but ignore it at your cost. The nose is dominated by sherry cask and the overall taste leans heavily on sweet notes too, with a certain amount of wood and tannin flavours mingling

Chapter 2 - Islay and Jura

After some pressing, Eddie of the Lochindaal Hotel did confess his favourite whisky to us. It turns out to be an Islay whisky, but you could have guessed that. We promised not to tell, suffice to say that you’ll find that particular distillery down a little road in the opposite direction to ‘other places’.

around. We think we can taste things like citrus fruit, hazelnuts and possibly fine French chateau wines, whereas other tasters report blood oranges, caramelised nuts, marron glace, pepper, cloves, corn syrup, stewed fruits, oxidised copper, beeswaxed table and boot polish. Personally, I now have a soft spot for the über-peaty Octomore, at around 60% ABV, from those progressive distillers at Bruichladdich. Whatever about the angels’ share, Octomore is the holy smoke. Dominated, to say the least, by peat fumes, just give it time to breathe, perhaps a little (preferably Islay) spring water, no swilling in the glass, gently coax it out and there is a myriad of other interesting things going on there. This is a young whisky in comparison to most peaty giants and has a great future. Some connoisseurs taste burnt caramel, citrus fruit, barbecued beef, Montecristo cigars, bicycle inner tube, burned oak, toasted grain, coconut and tractor diesel.

One thing Mark Reynier mentioned comes to mind, that whisky, compared to gin or vodka or other spirits, is a more complicated taste sensation, and so it becomes linked in the sensory memory with the places, people and feelings of a particular time when you have drunk it. This could be true. I can often remember the brand or type of whisky drunk on a particular occasion, not just that it was whisky. Even just the smell of whisky can bring you back vividly to a distant memory, good or bad. Mark thinks this is why some people say they were sick on whisky as teenagers, probably a cheap blend, and now can’t stand the smell of it.

Photo: P. Lüdemann

Next morning, I ride about twenty miles down to the south of the island, a bracing hour’s journey in Vespino terms. I pass again the front of Bruichladdich and the black gneiss rocks at the water’s edge, round by the calm mudflats of Loch Indaal that spread out under what seems to be a huge expanse of sky and broken cloud, turn right at the Bridgend post office, bypassing Bowmore on the single track B8016 across the peat bogs, and then down the right hand bit of the Islay horseshoe towards Port Ellen.

Bottles of closed distillery whiskies usually fetch decent prices at auction, particularly if they are distillery-own bottlings, and Port Ellen is no exception. Prices have skyrocketed since the distillery was shut, a closure which may have seemed a good idea at the time, but is a shame considering the upsurge in demand for Islay whisky at the moment. I suspect, whichever executive signed the warrant regrets it now. Port Ellen distillery was established in 1825 and, though it may have been among the best of malts, it did not survive the streamlining of the parent company during the 1980s. Whereas most distilleries have closed their maltings down, here the opposite happened: the distillery

has closed but the maltings survive. This gargantuan modern malting plant run by Diageo provides many distilleries across Scotland with malted barley. The characteristic Islay peat they burn is uniquely rich in its distinctive cocktail of mosses, bog myrtle, heather and gorse, together with a generous drenching of briny spray from the sea and lots of seaweed mixed in there too.

Distilleries can nowadays order malt with the precise intensity of smoke they want from Port Ellen. Some, as I saw the day before yesterday at Bowmore, still do a proportion of malting themselves. It does give them a certain kudos and adds an interesting chapter to visitors’ tours, but they are in the proud minority. With the white warehouses along the waterfront, Port Ellen could almost be mistaken for a working distillery. The large stacks of Islay turf outside the factory, though, are an unmistakeable sign of what is going on inside, and the huge plume of fragrant smoke belching out of the chimney is a dead giveaway too. No pagodas here, not even fake ones, and no men with wooden shovels turning the grains either. This is as near to a factory as it gets in the whisky business with huge drums that smoke the barley in industrial quantities. For those interested, there are tours available during the Islay Whisky Festival in May, but they are fairly technical and are apparently not recommended for anyone who has a fear of heights.

Chapter 2 - Islay and Jura