Drink: Monarch of the glen

As one approaches St James’s Street from Pall Mall, there is an enticing window full of whisky bottles. Part of Berry Bros & Rudd’s temple complex, it is devoted to Glenrothes, a Speyside Malt. The bottles do not look as if they were designed by a marketing man and their labels largely consist of tasting notes. I could not recall whether I had sampled Glenrothes (take that as you will) so it was clearly time to concentrate some attention on this rare malt.

Scotland has its pastoral symphonies as well as its bleaker grandeur. From Aberdeen airport, the autumnal road to Rothes eases its way across rich farmland into the Spey country. Apart from salmon, Speyside was always notorious for unlicensed distilling. Everyone was at it — today, it would no doubt be called the illicit-still community — until George IV and Walter Scott reconciled ingenuity and legality. King George visited Scotland, and felt obliged to favour local traditions. Where they did not exist, they were invented: hence tartan. Where they did exist, they were refined: whisky. Once distillers could acquire licences, the whisky no longer needed to be drunk in a hurry lest the excise men capture it. So it became possible to create one of the world’s finest drinks.

Whisky lore is a lifetime’s study, for there is a huge range of tastes, from the peat, iodine and seaweed of the great Islay malts to the subtleties of the silvery Spey. Two vital questions are continuously debated: whether to add water, and when to drink it. No-one would dream of putting water in a cognac or armagnac, so my instincts were always against adulterating the malts. Over the years, I have changed my mind.