Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
a low hill crowned with a dry-stane dike on the skyline, its silhouetted stones filigreed
against a still bright sky of slowly sliding clouds.
The room looks like an old kitchen. There's a wide chimney and a gaping dusty hole
where an old cast-iron range might have been. A chipped Belfast sink under the window
stands on rough-looking naked bricks, badly cemented. The single tap turns but noth-
ing comes out. There's no pipe beneath the plughole anyway, just a hole in the floor-
boards. No suspicious-looking pipe work or lumps of peat, no old copper water tanks ly-
ing around, not really anything that looks out of place or could be dual use.
Outside again, by the back doorstep, as another shower comes in over the fields, there
are a few slim ears of barley, growing in a tiny brittle posy. Pale straw gold but flimsy-
feeling, they are dry and light in the hand, barely more than husks.
Probably blown here from a far-away field.
A few grains, as a souvenir.
So a secret, still. I suppose I effectively tasted what I was looking for - raw spirit - at
Macallan and Old Pulteney and a few other places - whisky straight out of the still. I ser-
iously doubt that the stuff these guys make would taste any worse than what might come
out of an illicit still, and to the extent that genuine peatreek might have tasted different, it
would probably have tasted worse.
Of course, it isn't really the same, but I can live with this.
Time for some closing thoughts.
I like malt whiskies. And the malts I've come to truly love while researching this
book are those which in a sense have least to do with Scotland. What I mean is that the
whiskies I've really fallen for are those that have taken on the majority of their character
from drinks made in other countries; from American bourbon, or Spanish sherry, or Por-
tugese port, or French wine or Cuban rum. They are still very much single malts, they are
still very much Scotch, but it's the interplay between the raw spirit as made in Scotland
and those other tastes brought in from abroad that have made the greatest and most en-
during impression on me.
I love this assimilative aspect of whisky. I love the fact that single malts, those appar-
ent paradigms of purity, actually show far more variety in taste than any blend, that they
are much more influenced by outside factors than any other type of alcoholic drink made
without the same seemingly limiting strictures of law and tradition. I love the fact that no
other drink I've ever heard of has the same sort of ability to
absorb
(I mean, flavoured
vodkas? Really). Maybe they could, of course; I'd guess that brandy or vodka or bour-
bon or any other spirit finished in wildly different barrels sourced from around the world
could and would display the same amazing spectra of tastes and subtleties as single-malt
