Raw Spirit (13 page)

When I arrive at Glenfinnan, there’s not a cloud in the sky and Loch Shiel is just lying there, barely ruffled in the faint breeze, disappearing into the pale distance between the surrounding mountains, shimmering.

Loch Shiel: an appreciation, with reservations
.

Loch Shiel is a great loch. Well, I like it, anyway. It’s never more than a mile wide but it’s nineteen miles long. Fairly deep, too, at 120 metres. At its head is the village of Glenfinnan, where our friends the McFarlanes live. Their house looks out to the water and the place where we moor the boat, then along the shore, past the Lodge (the Glenfinnan House Hotel to give it its full title, and effectively the local) to the stone tower that is the monument to the 1745 rebellion. Everybody seems to assume that the figure at the top of the monument is Prince Charlie; it isn’t, just a representative Highland chief. Beyond, on a clear day, you can see Ben Nevis. There’s a National Trust centre for the monument, the Glenfinnan viaduct – as seen on postcards, shortbread tins and in Harry Potter films throughout the world – another hotel called the Prince’s House, a photogenic Catholic church with a bell in the grounds which you’re allowed to ring, a pier and a railway station and that’s about it. No shops apart from the souvenir shop and café in the Trust. There is a shed that doubles as a Post Office, but only when the wee detachable sign’s displayed.

At the other end of the loch there’s the even tinier village of Acharacle, and between the two nothing but scenery; loch and mountains the whole way, the hills descending in height as they head south-west. There is a forestry track on the south-east side but it’s locked at both ends; only the forestry people and the postie have keys. On the north-west side it’s trackless.

There are beaches, fish farm cages and platforms with incongruous wooden sheds perched on them, numerous little islands, submerged rocks to avoid and rivers to explore. At the far end you could conceivably shoot the rapids – if you were in a canoe – and end up in the sea (a century of global
warming
could well turn Loch Shiel into a sea loch).

Every year Les and I say we’ll take the boat back out of the loch and onto the trailer and go to another loch or even down to the sea, and every year we find there’s ample to do on Loch Shiel alone without having to go anywhere else. This does mean, though, that we are unable to describe ourselves as a pair of old sea dogs. We’ve settled for being loch puppies instead.

Back in the early part of the twentieth century, when the local roads were either non-existent or little better than tracks, there was a steamer service linking the far end of the loch with the railway station at Glenfinnan. These days the good ship
Sileas
plies the waters during the season, and very relaxing it is too; it’s generally insect-free out on the loch and anyway the
Sileas
, though it always seems very quiet and even sedate as it putters along, is easily faster than any midge.

I do have slightly mixed feelings about this stretch of water, all the same. When we had the Drascombe rigged we discovered Loch Shiel has extremely capricious winds. Capricious is what Les christened them, anyway. I believe my term was ‘fucking annoying’. You could be tacking happily across the loch in a fine strong breeze one second, only to have it disappear utterly in the next moment, and then, a random and therefore completely unpredictable amount of time later, just as you were beginning to think about firing up the motor, the wind would come back. Usually from exactly the opposite direction from before, necessitating some rapid resetting of sails. We put this meteorological eccentricity down to the numerous tall mountains at the Glenfinnan end of the loch; they get in the way of the wind and make it swirl.

Sometimes the wind wouldn’t come back at all and we’d be left sitting there in perfectly calm water, as though we’d been deposited on the world’s biggest mirror. This led to behaviour that Les designated – rather unkindly, I thought – as Speculative Sailing.

Speculative Sailing consists of sitting in one’s boat in conditions of absolutely zero wind speed, with no appreciable movement whatsoever, save possibly that of the general mass
of
water in the loch moving from its head towards its distant outflow (worth, oh, a good millimetre per day or so), under a sky that is either cloudless or, if clouded, utterly still, Then, when one’s chum (played here by Mr Leslie McFarlane) – understandably bored after an hour or so of languishing becalmed like this going nowhere – suggests starting the damn engine, oneself has to jump up, point three or four miles down the loch and saying something like, ‘Why, no! Look; there’s a wee sort of ruffled looking bit of water way down there. See? There is! No, really! And it’s sort of heading this way. Let’s just leave it a bit longer …’

Pitiable, really.

My other resentment dates from the time of Joanie’s party down the loch. This was last summer (2002 as I write this). Donald-John and Joanie, like Les and Aileen, are both teachers who live in Glenfinnan. For Joanie’s 50th, Donald-John thought it would be a laugh if the party was held at one of the pebble beaches a few miles down the loch, so people set up a makeshift pier, an oil-drum-size barbie, a couple of shelters in case it rained (it didn’t) and we all took boats and drink, food and fold-up camping furniture. Ann and I went with Les, Aileen and their daughter, the lovely Eilidh. A very fine time was had. My principal memory is of Ian McFarlane (no relation) piping energetically while his dad Charlie tramped back along the shore with an unfeasibly large tree trunk perched on his shoulder, bound for the fire. That and Donald-John’s T-shirt, which bore the legend ‘The Liver is
Evil
and Must be
Punished
.’

Later, in the post-party gloaming, on the beach in front of the house, we started to unload the boat. I think I must have overloaded myself with, well, with whisky, obviously, but also with two camping seats, a camping table, a cool box and my camera, because I fell in. The water was only about a foot deep, but this was quite sufficient to ruin my camera, drown my mobile, soak me to the skin and fill my waders. Allegedly I sort of teetered for a second or two, which supposedly made it even funnier. Eilidh was heard laughing from the house. She claims seeing me fall in the water is the funniest thing she’s ever seen, but then she’s only fifteen, so what does she know.

The camera was eventually repaired, but the mobile was a goner. I wouldn’t have minded so much but I’d only replaced it the previous year after an unfortunately similar incident while canoeing with Les on Loch Eilt, just up the road.

So, Loch Shiel and I have issues. But it’s still a great loch.

We get the boat safely into the water, the engine starts first time and we zap down the loch a few miles to a pebble beach and back, just to make sure everything is working. There are maybe a dozen other boats on the loch, which is a lot, for Loch Shiel. This, it turns out, is because it’s one of the three annual Glenfinnan Fishing Competitions. Then it’s time to sit in the garden with a beer (pre-midge season; no worries). After a very fine dinner of venison and a sensible amount of fine red wine – a Red Wine Frenzy is always a danger on such occasions – Les and I have a couple of cask strength whiskies, just to get into training for the week of intensive researching ahead.

Cask Strength

Drinking cask strength whisky, especially if it has only been roughly filtered, gives you a chance to get back to something more like whisky as it used to taste. Not so long ago there was very little whisky available at cask strength; too much of even the best whisky had been chill-filtered, watered down and – in some cases – mixed with caramel to produce a darker colour.

None of these processes will absolutely ruin a malt, and the whisky manufacturers would argue that in each case they were simply giving the whisky-buying public what they wanted, but it was certainly the case that this was an imposed taste; if you wanted your whisky without any of these processes having been applied, you had to live near a distillery or a very good off-licence, know somebody in the trade, or resort to buying your own cask.

I was told about the whole chill-filtering, caramel-adding thing by a guy in Cadenhead’s whisky shop on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, not long after I’d moved back to Scotland in
1988.
I’d just bought a flat on South Bridge and I was exploring the area when I found this shop that sold nothing but whisky, much of it stuff I hadn’t seen in other off-licences or even heard of at all. The guy was almost messianic in his zeal, and I duly left the shop clutching several bottles of cask-strength, completely unadulterated whisky and with a certain degree of righteous ire that our national drink had been interfered with, emasculated and basically laid low by blandly vicious corporate suits with dollar signs in their eyes.

Something of all this duly got into
Complicity
, a novel I wrote a year or two later; Cameron Colley, the journalist who’s the central character, works on a story about this and is personally and professionally affronted that his tipple of choice isn’t as hairy-chested as he’d always assumed it was.

So what does chill filtering do? It takes out of the whisky certain oils that would otherwise make the stuff go cloudy when it’s chilled. The story I heard was that this was the fault of the American market; most people in the States take their whisky with ice, and – because the whisky has been watered down to get it to a consistent strength – this makes the resulting mix look cloudy, like there’s something wrong with it, when the oils come out of solution. The remedy is to chill the stuff before it’s bottled and run it through a fine filter (at one time the filter was made of asbestos, which wasn’t something the industry used to publicise heavily; there’s no evidence that anybody ever came to any harm through drinking asbestos-filtered whisky, it’s more guilt by association, though you do have to wonder if anybody ever contracted asbestosis from handling the filters themselves). The whisky will now remain clear when ice is added, but the oils that have been removed will no longer be there to be tasted, or contribute to the feel in the mouth.

The watering-down bit is just to get the whisky to a standard strength, and means the manufacturer doesn’t have to keep altering the print on the label that tells you how strong the whisky is. It also makes life easier for the tax people, as they do their calculations. This is the least problematic alteration, always assuming that the water that’s added is stuff
you’d
want to drink neat in the first place. Most Scottish water is quite soft and drinkable straight from the tap; if you wanted to be really purist about it you might want to specify that the water added to your whisky should come from the same source as the water that went to make the whisky – via the mash tun, etc. – in the first place, however even the most nit-picking taster is usually happy with water that simply and neutrally dilutes without adding any taste of its own.

Adding caramel is done to make whisky darker. Some whiskies are just supposed to be dark, according to the public’s perception and the manufacturer’s promotional efforts. If the whisky isn’t dark enough, some distillers will add caramel. It’s done in relatively tiny amounts, and caramel itself is a pretty innocuous material – just heated sugar, basically – so if it imparts any taste whatsoever it’s surely completely swamped by the flavours left over from the barrel’s earlier bourbon, sherry or whisky fills.

What it boils down to is that adding caramel is cosmetic, and – if you are any sort of purist – does seem a bit like cheating.

The trouble with whisky as a product is that it’s so variable; each barrel will produce a different whisky, and each charge of the still will have created a subtly different spirit in the first place; even the season of the whisky’s production has been known to make a difference to the final taste. This is why the blender in a distillery, or at a bottling plant, is so important; even with a single malt they will mix together different barrels to create something as consistent as possible over time compared to earlier examples (the blending of different whiskies from different distilleries to produce blended whisky is an even more complex task – there are blends with dozens of different whiskies involved and up to a hundred-plus is not unknown).

Les and I drink our whiskies from glasses based on Spanish copitas …

… No, I don’t see how we can avoid this. I’m going to have to say something about how whisky should be drunk.

* * *

Drinking: you’d think it would be obvious
.

Now, real purists will tell you that nosing a whisky and tasting it are quite different things, and require different glasses. This, I submit, is taking things too far for us civilians. Frankly, a fine malt taken from an old enamel tea mug will taste ten times better than an indifferent blend sipped genteelly from the most carefully designed whisky glass (always providing the enamel mug is clean to start with, natch). Take your whisky from a tumbler if you want – though the old-school cut-glass or crystal tumbler is more about making room for the ice than letting the whisky breathe – but a brandy glass is probably as good as anything, and lets you get your nose into the glass for a good sniff.

Proper professional nosers/tasters will tell you the best way to sniff a whisky is to draw in the aroma while keeping your mouth slightly open; apparently this improves the sensation. I haven’t noticed the difference yet (I was only told this last month at Macallan) but I’m going to persevere.

So, what to add, if you don’t want to drink it neat? Look, if you’ve bought the damn stuff you can drink it however you like, but adding, say, Cola or lemonade to a fine malt whisky is a bit of a waste. It’s rather like buying a Ferrari and never taking it out of first gear; you want to ask the person concerned, Why did you waste your money doing this? Are you just showing off? Look; I have a small belt and a barely used syringe; let’s just inject your favourite dram and see what that does …

Malt whisky is expensive. It’s expensive because it’s made in small batches by skilled people and has to sit for years and years and years doing nothing except taking up warehouse space, evaporating slowly and getting tastier. It will not get you any more drunk than a much cheaper similar-strength blend, so what you’re paying the extra for is the taste, and that taste’s going to be completely overpowered by the sugary fizz you’re adding. If, at the end of all this, somebody still wants to drink their malt with ice and soda, well, that’s their choice, and every measure and every bottle sold is helping to keep the industry going, people employed and a way of life thriving, no matter.