Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
against it being well known as a single malt just because it is so in demand as a constitu-
ent in blends. (A couple of months later Jackie, one of the tour guides at one of Caol Ila's
sister distilleries, Blair Atholl, assures me it's especially good with a cigar. So there.)
The Isle of Jura distillery at Craighouse is a friendly place - most of the small or out-
of-the-way distilleries are. All the same, I start with slightly iffy memories of Jura malt
because I once bought a bottle when I was coming back to Dear Old Blighty from France
on a truck ferry after a couple of months spent hitch-hiking round Europe, back in the
early seventies.
It was not a very good bottle of whisky. Drinkable, but poorer than most blends, which
is a pretty damning thing to say of a single malt.
Happily only the waisted bottle shape remains the same and the malt itself is peaty-
flowery, salty (again) and smooth. The bottle of the new Superstition expression we buy
is all of these plus smoky.
* * *
Willy's Definitive Dram Definition
.
Willy, one of the guys at the distillery, comes up with what Oliver and I agree is the best
definition of what a 'dram' actually is: 'A measure of whisky that is pleasing to both guest
and host.'
Favourite memory of the Jura distillery? They had a wooden ball on the end of a bit of
string which could be swung against the neck of one of the stills, a bit like you'd swing
a bottle of champagne against the stem of a ship being launched, though less destruct-
ively, obviously. This was a leftover from the Islay (well, Islay/Jura in this case) Whisky
Festival of the year before, when the guys thought it would be fun to show people how,
in the old days, a distiller would work out how far up the still the mixture was bubbling.
Nowadays stills have wee vertical windows like glazed medieval arrow slits set into them,
so you can just look and see whether the stuff's boiling away nicely, not boiling hard
enough (more heat required) or about to boil over and make a mess of the heat exchanger
(less heat needed), but back in the old days, before this hi-tech glass nonsense, they'd just
swing a wee wooden ball against the copper and work out from the dullness or otherwise
of the resulting
Dong
whether their liquid was simmering anaemically, frothing nicely or
about to blow the place up.
There is even a suggestion that all this whacking away at the copper stills with
wooden balls might have led to the stills starting to get a bit dented, taking on the appear-
ance of coppery golf balls, and that this might contribute to the character of the result-
ing whisky. Hmm, I say. (There is real, probably daft, pointlessly conservative and very
