Raw Spirit (33 page)

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 luxurious, 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 custom 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 exclusively 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 intact 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 sherry, rather than a mixture of mostly bourbon with a dash of sherry, makes the whole process expensive, but without its profound sherry influence Macallan would hardly be Macallan.

Those Italians again; they have their own special edition of the stuff, bottled at seven years old. Look, are we sure these people actually drink such eccentrically young whiskies? They’re not using it as fashionably expensive after-shave or something, are they? It isn’t being drizzled into the fuel tanks of sundry Vespas and Fiats to produce an increase in power and a pleasant pong in the crowded streets of Rome and Milan, is it?

Anyway. In the tasting room Ann and I try clear, newly made raw spirit, plus Macallan at 12, 18, 25 and 30 years old. I’m just nosing because I have to drive afterwards.

Even the raw spirit doesn’t smell too terrible; it reminds me of Pear Drops, the synthetic-tasting sweets I used to like when I was a kid. Otherwise, quite clean and spare. Faced with the choice, you’d definitely knock this stuff back in preference to a few rough vodkas I’ve had the misfortune to have tried over the years.

The later and older expressions of the whisky itself just get better and better. With the 30-year-old I do take a small sip
rather
than just sniff. The oldest Macallan I’d tried until this point had been a 25-year-old.

There is, obviously, lots of sherry-wood influence in the taste, and that influence increases with age, but the subtlety of the whisky is such that the result is a spectrum of different flavours which owe a distant debt to the alchemy between the spirit and the cask, rather than just a single dominant taste of sherry (if you want to test this, buy a cheap blend and mix it with sherry; it really isn’t the same at all). There’s honey, Christmas cake, heather, a whole fruit bowl of citrus tones, smokiness, syrup, peat (usually fairly elusive, but poking its head out of the thickets of other tastes now and again), vanilla, leather, straw, ginger and even other sorts of wood beside the oak you’d expect in there; cedar is one, and I thought I smelled something like the balsa wood we used for the initial few lessons in first-year woodwork class.

It all sounds like a clanging, clashing orchestra-tuning-up kind of mishmash, but of course not all these tastes are in every expression, and the beauty of Macallan is that every single bottling comes out like a coherent whole, like a symphony, everything working together, all the tastes in harmony, complimenting their neighbours and creating something rich and deep and worth going back to again and again.

You can pay gaggingly large amounts of money for very old Macallan. If you do have the money though, by all means go for the older stuff, because with Macallan, as far as I’ve been able to tell, you do tend to get what you pay for; this is a whisky that generally just gets better and better as it gets older, and while you will pay through the nose for the privilege, at no point are you going to get ripped off, paying more for less.

The only proviso would be to do with opulence of taste. I love Macallan because it’s just so packed with strong flavours, and the fact that the longer it stays in the cask the more wood and sherry elements it’s going to pick up means that of course for me older will equate to better. For people who prefer a lighter, less intense dram, or who just don’t like the sherry and wood notes, the 10-year-old might be as deep into Macallan
Land
as they wish to venture, as even the extra two years of the 12-year-old makes a difference, producing a more sweetly potent, heavily flavoured whisky.

The Gran Reserva I tried to impress John from Florida with the night before is eighteen years old, but a deliberately more forceful expression than the usual eighteen as it’s matured entirely in first-fill sherry casks (hence the name). This is an immensely powerful, imposing, woodily dominant expression, and while I love it, I can understand it might be just too much for people who prefer a more delicate dram, and would not be appropriate for every occasion or even every time of day.

Personally I think Macallan’s good at almost any age – well, maybe not seven,
capisce
– with the widely available 10-year-old serving as a perfectly fine introduction to the oeuvre, while the best compromise between reasonable price and sock-knocking-off taste is probably the standard 18-year-old. This expression is released most years as a specific vintage, the aim being to produce a balance between consistency and year-on-year change. The consistency is achieved by tasting as many as 100 casks, choosing about 50 of those, marrying the whisky from those casks together and leaving it vatted for a month, then performing a sort of mini-bottling and tasting the result (for the 25-year-old, the married whiskies stay vatted for a whole year before being evaluated).

The tasters are brought rather centre stage at Macallan. They’ve built a new and very tasteful tasting room with more groovily contorted but sexily smooth pale wood and comfy stools with wrought-iron legs. This is where you sit if you do the extended tour. It has a wall-wide window through which you can watch the distillery’s tasters do their work; sniffing and slurping, spitting and noting and choosing. This struck me as a bit of an invasion of work-space privacy (it reminded me of the overlooked coopers at Strathspey Cooperage) and I waited until the guys were out of the room before taking a photo through the wide-screen window. I think I’d find being watched a real distraction if I was trying to do something as concentration-demanding as choosing between a hundred-plus different whisky barrels, but maybe that’s just me.

On the other hand, it has to be a bit of a compensation that you’re getting to work day-in, day-out with unarguably one of the very best whiskies in the world.

One last thought, to let you savour that expensive Macallan with an even clearer conscience. The distillery is part of the Edrington Group, which also includes the Bunnahabhain, Glengoyne, Glenrothes-Glenlivet (so somebody still uses the G-word), Glenturret, Highland Park and Tamdhu single malts and the Cutty Sark and Famous Grouse blends. The Edrington Group is in turn largely owned and run by the Robertson Trust, a charitable body since 1961 which was set up by three sisters called Robertson who had inherited significant parts of the Scotch industry. The Trust gives about five million pounds a year to good causes, mostly in Scotland, so drinking any of these drams is practically a charitable act in itself. Good grief, how virtuous do you want to feel?

Stop Press Handy Anti-Midge Tip
.

During our visit to Macallan, Gary and Margaret, our hosts in the Visitor Centre there, recommended Avon Skin-So-Soft as being an unintentionally effective anti-midge treatment. As you’d imagine that making your skin softer would serve only to help the midge introduce its proboscis into your epidermis, it must be something about the smell.

Later in Glenfinnan, we’re assured it has to be the Skin-So-Soft Bath Oil.

Later still we’re told the spray works just as well.

Just thought you ought to know.

12: Porridge and Scottishness, Football and Fireworks

I DON’T LIKE
porridge. There, I said it. The reason I don’t like it is not so much because of the taste – the stuff doesn’t actually have much of a taste of its own, though what it does have I don’t find very attractive – as because of the way it feels in my mouth. There is, for me, something unbearably, slidingly glutinous about porridge that pretty much does turn my stomach. Frankly, any time that I do try it, I can’t get over the feeling that I’m basically eating wallpaper paste.

Now, I wish this was not the case; I feel a bit bad that I don’t like porridge, because I am Scottish, after all, and I even feel – albeit to a relatively small degree and with the usual liberal corollaries regarding nationalism, bigotry and the randomness of birth and subsequent identity – proud to be Scottish, and porridge is an undeniable part of my heritage. It’s arguably an important part of that heritage, because the seed it’s made from, oats, has played a vital role in keeping Scottish people fed over the centuries. Without oats – and barley – we might have had something like the Irish potato famine to add to our catalogue of Rubbish Things That Have Happened To Us.

So I keep trying to like porridge. I attempt to eat a bowl every year or so, especially if I’m in somebody’s house who is known for making great porridge, or if I’m in a hotel with a reputation for prodigious porridge or brilliant breakfasts or just good food in general. I have tried it with the usual things
people
add to porridge to make it, well, taste of something other than porridge, I suppose (and this is the main piece of evidence I’d offer for this dislike of porridge not being just me; if the stuff’s so bloody marvellous, how come you have to add all these other things to it?).

To this end, and to counter that familiar feeling that I’m eating something which would be better used to make rolls of anaglypta adhere to a wall, I’ve tried it the purist’s way, with a little salt (this makes it taste like salty wallpaper paste), with honey (it tastes like sweet wallpaper paste) and with strawberry jam (guess what?). Personally, nothing works. I just keep thinking the salt would taste better on an egg, and the honey and jam better on a bit of toast. There would seem to be these two basic approaches to adding stuff to porridge to make it remotely palatable; the sweet route and the savoury. The sweet way generally means preserves and the savoury starts with salt and ends with, well, Marmite, in the case of one of my sisters-in-law (if you’re grimacing at the thought of Marmite stirred into porridge, you are not alone). And/or you can add milk, which doesn’t really make the horrible, sloppy, squelchy stuff taste any better but does at least dilute it. Even this is a mixed blessing, of course, because although this means there’s less of the oily, mealy mass to consume in each grisly mouthful, the whole dish takes longer to consume, if you’re in one of those I’ll-finish-the-damned-stuff moods, or just don’t want to disappoint your hosts.

What is odd is that I do like oatcakes, which, once you’ve crunched through them, produce a mouthful of something not unlike porridge.

Then, of course, we have barley as one of our other historically staple foods. Which is fine when it’s made into whisky, but, again, I can’t stand it when it’s in Scotch broth. That glutinous thing again. And another national dish that I feel I ought to like but just can’t bring myself to eat.

But then for a long time I rejected a lot of traditional Scottish stuff, like the kilt, bagpipes, haggis and drunken self-pity. I was twenty before I wore a kilt because I associated the things with the whole ghastly chintzy, gaggingly clichéd image of
Bonnie
fucking Scotland; Eileen Donnan on a shortbread tin with a sprig of heather in the foreground and the sound of Jimmy Shand or Andy Stewart in the background; Scotty dogs and some thick-necked twat in a skirt trying to outwit a telegraph pole. For a long time I wasn’t even that keen – whisper it – on whisky.

Well, tastes change. I now own a rather splendid dress kilty outfit in one of my clan’s tartans; a simple black and white pattern that looks rakishly elegant with the black and silver Prince Charlie dress gear. Technically this colour scheme is the clan mourning tartan, but what the heck. I still don’t like massed bagpipes but I can tolerate and even enjoy a well-played single set, I now quite like haggis – though the best form I ever tasted it in was haggis pakora, an inspired example of Indo-Gael fusion that I did my best to take to ridiculous extremes in
Whit
– and as for drunken self-pity, well, I’m still working on that. I’ve not really had much excuse since I first got published, however there’s still plenty of time. Twenty-five years of desultory support for Greenock Morton Football Club, watching as they slid towards oblivion and the Scottish Third Division have to have had some effect, after all.

Whisky I decided I liked long ago.

It’s the last weekend of the season. Morton have one more game – a home game against fellow promotion contenders Peterhead – with which to secure promotion to the Second Division and the Third Division championship. Les, Ray and I think it behoves us to be there.