towns, climbed a few of its mountains, boated on a couple of its rivers and canoed a bit. I’m moderately well up on its history, though I could, probably should, know a lot more. I think I have a reasonable grasp of the differences between the various regions of Scotland, the variety of attitudes and accents you encounter, shading gradually from one to another, as you travel from one part to another. I’ve talked to neds and nobles, got sense and gibberish out of each and I’ve tried, admittedly not with any great degree of intensity, to keep up with Scottish cultural life.
But there’s always more. And there’s always different. I guess a dedicated mountaineer, a Munro bagger, could have the same mixture of Scottish General Knowledge I’ve just confessed to above, but have a radically different idea of what Scotland is, what it represents, just because of their sport; they’d think of peaks unclimbed and climbed and the vivid memories of specific routes and peaks; their image of Scotland’s geography would be biased towards the West, the centre and North-West (indeed its physical geography would matter more than most other types of geography). I imagine a golfer has a different view entirely, with their internal map of the land’s most important areas being almost an opposite of the mountaineer’s, skewed to the South, the East and North-East. A union organiser might have a mental chart that differed radically again, prioritising the central industrial belt, or industry-specific sites like ports or electronics factories. Every job, every field of academic study, every interest, gives people a biased internally fabricated model of the country they inhabit, a weighting of meaning that will differ subtly from every other person’s and yet bear similarities of layout to those they share those jobs, pastimes or hobbies with.
So whisky. More to the point, the making of it. The marketing of Scotch is everywhere and its distribution worldwide, but its production is legally limited to Scotland, its focus concentrated on this one relatively small country, and, within that small country, on barely a hundred generally modest, usually out-of-the-way sites many of which employ only a dozen or so people.
Of course, there’s whiskey from Ireland, bourbon from the States and Japanese whisky which is Scotch-in-all-but-name and they’re fine drinks in their own terms (and, as with individual whiskies, some are fine in absolute terms), but this is a book about Scotch, about Scots, about Scotland, and getting to know about the making of whisky, its history, its relation to the land and what it means to people both here and abroad is a way of getting to know more about the country where it’s made and the people who make it.
And there’s a further quest involved here, too, besides this search for the perfect dram.
I’ve never tasted it, never been offered it, never really heard anything about it, but I’m convinced that somebody, somewhere, must be making illegal whisky; whisky the way it used to be made, before it became first outlawed and then legalised, before it became taxed, before it became (and this is very much a relative term, given the small scale and considerable art involved in the process) industrialised. There has to be a secret still out there somewhere; probably there are many, surely there have to be several. I’d like to see a still in action but I’d settle for a taste of the product (I mean, providing it isn’t likely to blind me or anything). I’d like to talk to the people involved, if I can convince them I’m not going to expose them or report them to Customs and Excise, but it’s that taste I’m particularly interested in, because it’ll be a taste, to some degree, of the past, a link to the place where the whisky we know now came from.
Apart from anything else, I’d like to know why there’s so little illegal whisky in Scotland. In particular, why is it so uncommon compared to its Irish
But there’s always more. And there’s always different. I guess a dedicated mountaineer, a Munro bagger, could have the same mixture of Scottish General Knowledge I’ve just confessed to above, but have a radically different idea of what Scotland is, what it represents, just because of their sport; they’d think of peaks unclimbed and climbed and the vivid memories of specific routes and peaks; their image of Scotland’s geography would be biased towards the West, the centre and North-West (indeed its physical geography would matter more than most other types of geography). I imagine a golfer has a different view entirely, with their internal map of the land’s most important areas being almost an opposite of the mountaineer’s, skewed to the South, the East and North-East. A union organiser might have a mental chart that differed radically again, prioritising the central industrial belt, or industry-specific sites like ports or electronics factories. Every job, every field of academic study, every interest, gives people a biased internally fabricated model of the country they inhabit, a weighting of meaning that will differ subtly from every other person’s and yet bear similarities of layout to those they share those jobs, pastimes or hobbies with.
So whisky. More to the point, the making of it. The marketing of Scotch is everywhere and its distribution worldwide, but its production is legally limited to Scotland, its focus concentrated on this one relatively small country, and, within that small country, on barely a hundred generally modest, usually out-of-the-way sites many of which employ only a dozen or so people.
Of course, there’s whiskey from Ireland, bourbon from the States and Japanese whisky which is Scotch-in-all-but-name and they’re fine drinks in their own terms (and, as with individual whiskies, some are fine in absolute terms), but this is a book about Scotch, about Scots, about Scotland, and getting to know about the making of whisky, its history, its relation to the land and what it means to people both here and abroad is a way of getting to know more about the country where it’s made and the people who make it.
And there’s a further quest involved here, too, besides this search for the perfect dram.
I’ve never tasted it, never been offered it, never really heard anything about it, but I’m convinced that somebody, somewhere, must be making illegal whisky; whisky the way it used to be made, before it became first outlawed and then legalised, before it became taxed, before it became (and this is very much a relative term, given the small scale and considerable art involved in the process) industrialised. There has to be a secret still out there somewhere; probably there are many, surely there have to be several. I’d like to see a still in action but I’d settle for a taste of the product (I mean, providing it isn’t likely to blind me or anything). I’d like to talk to the people involved, if I can convince them I’m not going to expose them or report them to Customs and Excise, but it’s that taste I’m particularly interested in, because it’ll be a taste, to some degree, of the past, a link to the place where the whisky we know now came from.
Apart from anything else, I’d like to know why there’s so little illegal whisky in Scotland. In particular, why is it so uncommon compared to its Irish
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