The trifecta of Lagavulin, Talisker and Oban, all distilled in Scotland's Western Isles, share the tang of the sea.
Photo: CHRISTINE SPREITER
Setting Sailin Search of Whisky's Spirit
By Lyn FarmerThere was a time last summer when, standing on the bow of a 42-foot sailboat, gripping cables to keep my balance as we rose and fell in ten-foot seas, clouds gathering ominously over the Isle of Muck, a cold wind blowing and the icy spray biting my face, I asked myself if this was any way to get someone to buy me a drink.
I will confess there were perks to traveling with Andy Cant, a soft-spoken whisky maker who manages a group of Diageo's distilleries in the Highlands, but who had lived on Islay for six years. "Oooch," he says, imitating the particular brogue of Islay, "By the time I left, I think they were starting to think I wasn't a stranger. Not quite one of them, but not a stranger."
We were sailing together as part of the 2003 Classic Malts Cruise, a carefully organized but loosely structured regatta that is generally considered the greatest sailing event of the season in Scotland. The two-week, 200-mile trek through the Inner Hebrides that seemed so arduous to the neophytes among us, started out a decade earlier as a vacation taken by a group of whisky lovers who belonged to a small yacht club.
It didn't hurt that one of the club's members was, at the time, chairman of United Distillers and Vintners. His company owned many distilleries, but six had been identified as producing extremely fine, distinctive whisky representative of regional styles. Called The Classic Malts, the group consists of Dalwhinnie in the Highlands, Glenkinchie in the Lowlands near Edinburgh, Cragganmore from Speyside, Oban from the far western mainland of Scotland, Lagavulin from Islay and Talisker from the Isle of Skye.
Three of them - Lagavulin, Oban and Talisker - are situated in the Western Isles and were built with easy access to the sea, originally to facilitate shipping their casks. The yachtsmen decided each would make ideal stops on a tour, and The Classic Malts Cruise was born. Every summer, the three whisky makers now open their doors to the crews of a hundred sailboats sporting The Classic Malts flag and host a series of well-malted open houses.
Tagging along with Cant, I met some of his colleagues at Lagavulin, and we tasted through a range of whiskies before stopping by the Port Ellen maltings where the barley is prepared for a number of distilleries on the island.
At the maltings, it's easy to smell where Islay's whiskies get their smoky character: Local peat infuses the malted barley with an unforgettable and tantalizing, smoky aroma that I carried on my heavy Shetland sweater for the rest of the trip. They call it "peat reek" for good reason.
There were seven of us crowded on the Chantilly, and we had spent a starry night tied at the small pier in front of Caol Ila, one of six distilleries operating on the small island. Wolfing down prawns with a glass of Caol Ila's 18-year-old malt and hearing whisky lore recounted by Caol Ila's manager, Billy Stichell, I thought life was pretty good.
That was before the ten-foot seas.
We had started out in Oban, a lovely town on the western mainland of Scotland where its eponymous distillery looks out over the Western Isles. At that point, before the sailing began but after a rousing ceilidh (pronounced KAY-lay), the sort of party the Scots consider the ultimate accompaniment to whisky, we met some of the other crews preparing their departures.
Like Lagavulin, Oban is another of The Classic Malts, and a small distillery even by Scottish standards. Andy Cant says the current thinking in the whisky industry is that it's the still itself -- Oban's copper still is Lilliputian compared to some -- and not the water, that forms the basic taste of a whisky. "It's the temperature and the shape that give the whisky its character," he says, though as I tasted through the range of Oban whiskies, I also knew there was some magic at work that mere chemistry can't explain. That is the elusive spirit of Scotland for which I was searching.
Ask a non-Scot about the land made famous by historical figures such as William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, and they are likely to recite lore most closely associated with the Highlands. It was poems attributed to the Celtic bard Ossian, who had lived in Scotland, that sparked the Romantic era in Europe, and the fire of romance was stoked with the Highland stories of Sir Walter Scott. Legends of Rob Roy, the fight for independence from England and, of course, the great malt whiskies of the Highlands, all shaped an image of Scotland as an untamed and wonderful place; indeed, many well-bred 19th century Continentals felt their educations were not complete without a trek into the wilds of the Scottish Highlands, naturally capped off with a wee dram of the country's spirit at journey's end.
In regard to its depth of flavor, Scottish Malt whisky is one of the world's most complex spirits. And although it may be spelled "whiskey" in most other countries, the thrifty Scots even manage to save a letter when it comes to their national drink.
The verdant glens and beautiful vales of the rugged Highlands provided, for several centuries, a convenient place to hide illicit stills from English tax collectors. An unintended result of the pragmatic need for isolation and the irregular production schedules of the moonshiners was something akin to the market scarcity we associate with today's cult wines. When the industry was finally legalized in 1824, the first of the Scottish stillmen to obtain a license was George Smith, a Highlander who had for years illicitly made a legendary whisky from local barley in a small glen off a tributary of the River Spey called the Livet.
Yet Smith didn't have a brand name; he just sold his whisky "from Glenlivet" in cask to merchants, who then put it in bottles for sale. It was the merchants, such as Johnnie Walker, George Ballantine and the Chivas brothers, who dealt with the erratic flow of whisky from the remote glens by making up blends and doctoring the powerful malt flavors with neutral alcohol and water, reducing its strength to a level that by the late-19th century was standardized at between 40 and 43 percent (80 to 86 proof). The blend became the chief product in the marketplace. The current fascination with the "real thing" - the pure malt whisky from a single distillery - is a fairly recent phenomenon.
Just how far the appeal of the traditional whisky has come is evident in a new bottling by The Macallan, one of the Highland's greatest distilleries. It has long been famous for aging its whisky in casks previously used for maturing sherry rather than the industry standard of used bourbon barrels. When The Macallan was established in 1824, the barrels were different -- distillers would use whatever was available -- so to explore the taste of whisky in the early days, Macallan's chief distiller recently sampled its sole remaining bottle of whisky from 1841, then recreated its malty taste to produce a modern replica of the company's original whisky.
This fascination with recapturing the past is easily indulged today. It is a relaxing drive on well-maintained roads to reach the visitor center at The Glenlivet or The Macallan (the Scots are fond of establishing absolutes in naming their distilleries) or any of the whisky firms clustered in Speyside. Glenfarclas, Glenfiddich, Aberlour and others in the neighborhood provide various tours and programs for visitors that reveal some of the mystery of whisky making, but also perpetuate the Highland image of whisky as not only a product of local grain and water but also a distillation of character.
One of the joys of malt whisky, as with wine, is discovering the nuances that vary from distillery to distillery. Crafted today from grain that is generally grown far from where the whisky is made, one can't look to terroir in quite the same way as with wine, but there is a strong sense of place associated with every distillery.
Even though the idea that local water affects the flavor is losing its grip, each distillery remains unique through some enchanting combination of elements, and the master distillers somehow manage to bottle this magic. To recapture some of the remoteness and essence of a bygone era, however, one must descend from the Highlands to the lowest part of Scotland - the country's rugged coastline - where many of the qualities that made the Highlands so popular in the 18th and 19th centuries are more evident today.
Traditionally, the Highlands have claimed the Western Isles - with the exception of Islay, which has a powerful, smoky style all its own - which may suit cartographers, but it doesn't serve the palate. On a map, the distances don't seem far, but in the glass, you can travel a long way from one distillery to the next. Searching for the ancient romance of whisky, the quest seems even longer if you travel by sea.
Earlier in the summer, I had cruised around the British Isles aboard a small ship, the 700-passenger Radisson Seven Seas Voyager. It dropped anchor near Glenmorangie in the village of Tain, on the shores of the remote Dornach Firth (just as valleys are glens, bays are firths in Scotland). Not only does the distillery offer a terrific tour, but it is also one of the most market-savvy single malt producers in the country. But despite the worldwide reputation of its whisky, this is a small company where Glenmorangie's "Sixteen Men of Tain" craft a spirit that, to them, is every bit as unique as a classified growth Bordeaux. Perhaps reflecting the increasing interest in malt whisky, Glenmorangie purchased Ardbeg, a revered but long shuttered Islay distillery, in the mid-1990s and has been re-releasing older whiskies, and busily making new ones that should start coming to market in the next few years.
There may have been ten-foot seas on the cruise from Dornach Firth to Scapa Flow and the remote island of Orkney, but onboard the larger vessel I didn't feel them.
Orkney was, until air transportation became commonplace, about as remote as one gets in a modern country. At the far northern edge of Scotland, Orkney's claim to fame is a friendly colony of puffins, several stone circles (like Stonehenge) and an exceptional distillery.
Highland Park, smaller even than Glenmorangie, is unusual in many ways, not the least of which is that it still does its own malting. Malting is the very heart of Scotch whisky, the process by which barley is moistened and allowed to germinate, developing enzymes that make the grain's sugar available for fermentation. The trick is to stop the germination before the seedling starts to consume starch and sugar. This is done by quickly drying the barley at which point another layer of flavor and aroma are developed by adding peat to the fire - the amount of which determines the smokiness of the whisky after distillation.
Nearly every distillery in Scotland outsources this laborious task to an operation like the Port Ellen Maltings, but Highland Park does its own to preserve the heather character of the whisky attributed to the local peat. The tour guide was quick to point out that whisky making is hard work, yet it doesn't take many people. (It was difficult to leave without picking up a bottle to ward off the chill.)
I returned to Scotland three weeks later to set sail on the Chantilly, which carried five landlubbers and a crew of two. We were packed tighter than fifths of whisky in a case, but we felt like courageous explorers. We had placed our fate in the capable hands of our skipper, Graham Moss, who knew both his craft and the waters well (he grew up sailing the blustery coast of the Hebrides).
Of course, Moss thought ten-foot seas made for a pleasant ride, and nothing brought a smile to his face more than what he termed "a moderate breeze" that tipped the ship's mast at a 45-degree angle. Every time we hove to, Cant and I ran to the galley to be sure the whisky bottles were secure. The swells would have kept any revenue agent at bay, but to Graham and more than a hundred other fellow sailors, it was a heaven-sent day.
Altogether, we spent three days sailing from Islay to Skye and Talisker, the end of the journey, taking time to buy some fresh prawns and lobster from the skipper's family on the Isle of Muck, population 30, and to spend an afternoon in Iona, the Holy Isle where Christianity was brought to Scotland from Ireland by St. Columba. The Abbey Columba, built in 597, still stands, albeit with some later additions, and Iona remains one of the most magical spots in Scotland.
The island of Staffa, just off Iona's shore, is the legendary location of Fingal's Cave, celebrated in music by Felix Mendelssohn, who made a pilgrimage to the Hebrides in the early 1800s. The cave became something of a shrine during the 19th century, for it was here that the bard Ossian was said to have lived and written his poetry.
It was later discovered that the words attributed to Ossian by James McPherson in the 1790s were nearly all McPherson's creation. That never diminished the majesty of the Western Isles, nor the lure of making Iona a stop en route to Harport on the Isle of Skye.
Because the seas had diminished to mere seven-foot swells as we came down the long sound leading to Harport, our skipper determined we would make our arrival under sail rather than motor, and do it with a flourish, as well as a good deal of spray.
Our reward at the end of the journey was another tasting that proved wonderfully illuminating, though what I really needed was a fresh water shower. Talisker's gregarious manager, Alistair Robertson, brought out his stunning whisky at six different ages, and also shared the "new make" - the water-clear spirit straight off the still.
New make has a curiously sweet impression though there isn't a bit of sugar in it, and at Talisker, the new make and 25-year-old ($250) whisky alike carry a tang of salt air as well.
Searching for Old Scotland from the bow of the Chantilly, I knew the tang well and it warmed me like a memory from childhood. The seas finally as quiet as a night in the glen, our band of seven creaked up a ladder and into Talisker's welcome embrace.
Senior Editor Lyn Farmer is the recipient of the 2003 James Beard Journalism Award for magazine writing.
TASTING BAR
Ardbeg: This distillery was closed for many years, but reopened in the mid-90s under the same ownership as Glenmorangie. A 10-year-old ($37) is the standard whisky currently available, and it is an elegant dram though made in a less smoky style than old hands on Islay remember from mid-century. It is beautifully balanced with moderate peatiness.
Caol Ila: Considered a sister distillery to Lagavullin on the other side of the island, this distillery's name, pronounced cull-EE-luh, means Sound of Islay, which is exactly where it is situated. Overlooking the water in a cove near Port Askaig, as remote as a distillery can be, Caol Ila is particularly welcoming to the sailor. Its large stills face the sound through huge windows offering a striking view for anyone taking the ferry to Islay from the nearby Isle of Jura. The spirit made here was only infrequently available on its own in the past; most of the whisky went into blends, especially Johnny Walker. Diageo, which now owns both properties, is beginning to give Caol Ila a tiny but well-deserved marketing nudge. The 12-year-old has a trademark oily texture with an appealing, moderate smokiness, while the 18-year-old is one of the best malts I've had in ages. Still moderate in its smokiness, it is noticeably richer in texture and surprisingly fresher on the palate with a dazzling hint of pepper.
Glenmorangie: Most commonly found as a 10-year-old ($35), but the 18-year-old is also widely available. Medium body and fruity, Glenmorangie (pronounced glen-MOR-an-gee) is a good place to start for the newcomer to malt. In recent years, the company, which also owns Ardbeg on Islay, has experimented with finishing its whisky with six months to two years in casks previously used for wine, so there are versions finished in Port wood ($45) (slightly sweet and appealing), Madeira (quite dry) and even Rhône and Sauternes.
Highland Park: Unusual for malting its own barley, Highland Park is one of the most elegant and appealing of whiskies: Moderately smoky with an undeniable impression of honey and heather, it is wonderfully smooth. Available in a range of ages from 12 years to 25 ($44 to $175), with occasional special bottlings periodically released.
Lagavulin: The most heavily peated of The Classic Malts and one of the smokiest of all whiskies, Lagavulin only shows its charm over time. Once one gets past the smokiness, there is a beguiling fruitiness and smoothness to the whisky. Normally only available as a 16-year-old ($55), but age is not absolute with any distiller's malt whiskies - some malts are best at 10 years, some at 12 or 14 and others at 16. Each malt has an optimum age, and Lagavulin just takes time.
Macallan: One of the great Highland whiskies, The Macallan has long been famous for being aged in casks that previously held sherry rather than the more traditionally used bourbon casks. Consequently, the spirit is darker than many with a richness in body and flavor that is immensely appealing. The 12-year-old ($42) is the main bottle, with an 18-year-old ($90) also readily available. Recently, Macallan's distillers sampled a bottle of whisky from 1841 and recreated the blend in a limited release whisky ($180). The result is much maltier than whiskies today and is very unusual.
Oban: The town of Oban is a main center of ferry traffic to outlying islands, making this distillery quite accessible. The single malt is widely available as a 14-year-old ($48) that has the elegance of Highland malts, but also with some of the sweetness and a hint of peatiness that speaks of the Islands. A terrific, all-around malt, it is perhaps the most widely appreciated of the six Classic Malts.
Talisker: The only distillery on the Isle of Skye and ringed by mountains, Talisker has one of the most attractive locations of any distillery in Scotland. Fortunately, the 10-year-old ($50) is as good as the view: Well peated and quite powerful, it is notable for its silky texture as well. Some tasters pick up a touch of iodine or salt in the whisky. A lovely dram with a long finish. All The Classic Malts are occasionally available in very limited reserve bottlings. Talisker sent just 2,000 bottles of an intensely flavored and exceptionally well-balanced 25-year-old whisky to the U.S. Distilled in 1973, it was bottled in 1998 at Natural Cask Strength, which means not only undiluted (it measures 60 percent alcohol) but also without the chill filtration that helps a whisky maintain clarity, but which many believe also strips it of some flavor. - LF
