Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
lery is that seeing where the stuff is made, meeting the people who make it - and often
breathing in the scent of the place where it rests for umpteen years - undeniably adds to
the experience in the future, just for the simple reason that that is what we are like; we
are connection-making creatures. You might be on the other side of the world, sweating
in a climate Scotland hasn't seen since the pre-Cambrian, when most of its land mass was
somewhere over the Equator, but the smell of a dram from a distillery you've been to
years before will suddenly whisk you back to a collection of black-walled buildings on a
chilly hillside in Angus.
It's a subjective encounter, drinking a whisky. You're bringing as much to the event
as the drink is; maybe more. Just as touring a distillery adds to the sensation of drinking
its products subsequently, bringing in resonances that have nothing directly to do with
the smell or taste or feel of the liquid, so knowing you're making a link to a proudly in-
dependent family firm, not a vast conglomerate, however well run and relatively benign,
allows you to enjoy the dram with just a little extra relish.
In any event, on taste alone, Glenfarclas is one of the Speyside greats, and deserves
to be ranked with the more heavily promoted brands.
We stay at Muckrach Lodge. The owners turn out to be called McFarlane too, though they
don't seem to be any sort of close relations to Les and Aileen (I mean, not that we'd actu-
ally have asked for a discount if they were. I have a brother-in-law who's a Penfold, but
do I ever ask for a discount on Penfold's Grange Bin 95?).
Faced with the irresistible attraction of the Muckrach's Full Scottish Breakfast - pretty
much the complete whangy; a typical Highland-hospitality-gone-mad wide-spectrum
belly-banging megabrek - I go into Hotel Mode, which consists of having one of these
big-boy breakfasts (well, you tell yourself, you're paying for it so you might as well eat
it), a snack for lunch - usually just soup - and then the equally generously proportioned
evening meal. The temptation is to have a big lunch as well, because your stomach is get-
ting kind of used to these enormous portions, but this leads to Expanded Waist Syndrome
and is a Thoroughly Bad Thing. I suspect a lot of tourists go into Hotel or B&B Mode
while they're here.
We get down to some serious research. Speyside is the focus of the Scotch industry,
its epicentre, its spiritual headquarters; if the industry was ever going to have a theme
park (may the thought perish), this is where it would be. Whisky Land! Whisky World!
Round here they have the Whisky Trail (they have a Castle Trail too, which both Les
and I feel we should do one day, but one interest at a time) and round here it seems you
can barely drive a mile without seeing a distillery; sometimes the whole thing, strewn
across a hillside, sometimes just the pagoda roofs poking up above the trees or the steam-
bannered chimneys standing out over the long roofs of a few acres of bonded warehouses.
