J.R.H. Mcewen

The soul of a single malt

Scottish people, known to be a bit touchy on occasion, sometimes wonder if that customary attitude of jocular condescension displayed towards their country by, in particular, the nearest neighbours, does not disguise something like envy.

Jealousy would be forgivable: as a brand, Scotland has all the trimmings: the scenery is fabulous in what Alex Salmond likes to call ‘the undisputed home of golf’, the beef and raspberries first-rate, the knitwear coveted around the globe. And as for delightful cultural inessentials, what other country of comparable or of any size can boast such a collection of instantly recognisable and authentic national signifiers?

The Royal Mile hawkers do their best to turn tartan to tat and to make Muzak out of the old, old music but when faced with the real thing, the massed pipes and drums marching past in full fig, who can resist? Likewise the ceilidh: neither granny nor toddler can dance it and leave the floor glum.

For several reasons — geological, meteorological, historical — Scottishness is just that bit more tangible — and tangy — than, say, Englishness. Alcohol — that most exquisite and precise utterance of a country’s ‘mysterious power’ — in England characteristically inhabits a pint of warm bitter, in Scotland a dram of single malt whisky. While each drink cannot but insist on its origin, the whisky’s sense of place is urgent and unignorable, the very essence of the experience of drinking it. Even if you have never been to Skye, or Speyside, or to lovely, gentle Islay (‘the Queen of the Hebrides’), images of those landscapes will begin to form in your deepest being as you smell, sip, savour Talisker, Glenfiddich, Bowmore. The produce of any distillery is so intimate with its immediate surroundings — the water, the malted barley, the smoke, the patient processes and the three years and one day (at least) that any Scotch whisky must spend maturing in oak casks in Scotland to warrant the name — that the sense you get that you are somehow drinking Scotland is no mere trick of the fancy.

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