Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
that couldn't successfully seed until they'd been through a fire). A never-ending wave of
fire …
Now
we were getting into decent skiffy-type ideas, I thought. And with SF, you're
allowed, even expected to keep upping the scale. So, if you made the island really big
… it could girdle a planet! You could have a sort of island continent going right round a
world, edged with sea to north and south. On Earth it would be like having nothing but
ocean except between the tropics. Big enough planet, fast enough growing plants (I re-
membered reading about some bamboo species which grows so fast you can hear it creak-
ing as it gets taller); it should be possible …
A couple of years later, when I was looking for an exotic setting for the climax of a
novel called
The Player of Games
, the fire-planet thing was already there, sitting on the
shelf just waiting to be used.
Anyway,
that
is where ideas come from.
Macallan has a cat. Unlike the nameless mog of Old Pulteney, this one is blessed with
a name. He's called Cyril, and when we see him he's lying stretched out, shaggily lux-
urious, on a large wooden desk in the pleasantly warm still room, beneath a flat-screen
computer display edged in gleaming, polished brass and showing some colourful cus-
tom software indicating the state of the local storage vessels, pipe work and valves. It's
a wonderful, almost iconic sight worth stopping to stare and grin at (I would have taken
a photograph, but that, of course, would inevitably have led to the whole place instantly
blowing up and burning down).
Macallan uses Golden Promise barley, a variety which is out of favour with farmers
these days because it produces much less yield than more recent, more productive but
less tasty forms. As a result, Golden Promise has become hard to get hold of over the
years and even Macallan has had to resort to other varieties, using only about 30 per cent
Golden Promise since 1994. It'll be interesting to see whether the 10-year-old Macallan
bottled in 2004 tastes appreciably different compared to the year before.
The 21 small stills are heated directly with gas, which also alters the taste of the final
product compared to stills heated indirectly with steam pipes, introducing a caramelised,
slightly burned flavour into the mix.
The main influence on the taste of Macallan, however, is the sherry casks it's exclus-
ively matured in, and the distillery goes to some lengths to control their supply. Macallan
buys 70- to 80-year-old Spanish-grown oak, has it made into sherry butts in Jerez and
then loans the barrels to various bodegas for three years; one year for the fermentation
of the dry oloroso sherry and two for storage. Then the complete butts are shipped in-
tact to Speyside. This is more expensive than breaking them up for shipping, as happens
with most American bourbon barrels, but it's reckoned complete casks have a stronger
influence on the maturing whisky than re-formed ones. In most Macallan two-thirds of
the whisky will be from first-fill casks and one-third from second-fill. Using nothing but
