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From the Cauldron of the Speckled Seas

There are three key moments in the history of my relationship to whisky. The first occurred probably sometime around the turn of the millennium, when I still lived in Prince Edward Island. A friend who lived in a beautiful and expansive house in the country, and also benefited from her mother’s habit of leaving town for summers at a time, decided to throw a “Scotch party,” which, it was decided, would also be an “old-timey” party. We all dressed up and there were cards and billiards, and, of course, Scotch. In a relatively fortunate twist of irony, this was the one party that was ultimately broken up by some nosey noser of a neighbour, and I can imagine their perplexity upon finding the house populated by dapper teens in ties and evening dress, listening to ragtime and playing baccarat, in lieu of the pantslessness and pool-ruining and weed and irresponsible meat-cleaver brandishing that might have greeted them at any number of other parties throughout the summer. After most of the revellers were cleared out by this well-meaning dipstick who thought it a good idea to make a bunch of teenagers drive home from their “liquor-themed” party, my best friend and I found ourselves alone in the basement, finishing up our game of pool. Neither of us drank at the time, in spite of being in the twilight of our adolescence and otherwise quite ill-behaved, so we were mainly in it for the tie-wearing. But out of curiosity my friend took a swig from an abandoned glass, and him gagging violently and removing himself to the sink to thoroughly wash out his mouth provided my first association with Scotch as a thing.

More meaningful—in terms of taste, at least, rather than affect and nostalgic reverie—was when many years later I, for the first time, tasted a well-made, well-aged single malt. The name isn’t important, for at the time its identity meant nothing to me (actually, it was a Lagavulin sixteen year). I knew it was “good,” and that it was expensive, but I approached it as an unknown entity. Not completely unknown, because I knew of course that it was a whisky, but in the initial tasting it opened up for me a space of the unknown. Which is to say that it did not immediately taste like anything I knew, anything I had ever drank. For a moment, the idea of what whisky was or could be was banished, replaced by this space of possibility, of uncertainty, of suddenly not knowing what it was I was tasting, and having to devote considerably more attention to its ascertainment than I was accustomed. This is now an experience I know well, where food or drink suddenly exerts a monopoly on the imagination: confronted by a wealth of intense and unfamiliar (or strangely familiar) tastes, time slows down, the moment distends, and we must focus all of our attention on what is happening in our mouth. In that first drink there is a swell, a disorienting pulling of focus, and the world recedes into the background.

The experience is all the more challenging because of the borderline familiarity and peculiarity of the flavours one encounters. Indeed, as I have come to know Scotch better, what is fascinating is how much of the tasting lexicon evokes aromas and flavours of things that one might never actually have smelled or eaten, and in many cases cannot or should not be eaten: tar, peat, straw, trawling ropes, scorched wool, brackish water, plastic buckets, and so on. To be sure, many of these aromas would be familiar to those who have spent time in, say, rural Scotland, or many maritime locales, but such direct experience is hardly prerequisite, for it is to a great extent in the mobilization of the imaginary that these tastes become intelligible as such. The imaginary—the sea, the peat, the tar, the whatever—comes to stand in and do some of the important associative work of tasting. It can be quite remarkable, and I appreciate Scotch, and to a lesser extent the culture of Scotch, for encouraging these flights of associative fancy that are nonetheless still ostensibly rooted in what is happening in one’s mouth.

Many years later I found myself on the island of Islay itself, traipsing about quite improbably with a very tiresome Spanish leftist (the type of old-school socialist who talks a lot and tips poorly) and a charming if possibly evil Norwegian editor of a very exclusive Scandinavian luxury lifestyle magazine that, as I understood it, is all but hand-delivered by Slavic thralls to manor houses with dirigibles moored overhead. I had been thinking much about terroir and whether one can meaningfully speak thusly about Scotch, or any hard liquor production, for that matter. Although any credible definition of terroir must incorporate an element of culture, tradition, and human agency alongside the natural contributions of soil composition, climate, and the raw materials themselves (grape, grain, milk, what have you), there are questions as to whether in the case of something like whisky such nuances as the kind of water and the provenance of the grain are not stripped away by the harsh rigours of the distillation process. Are we speaking of the same register of terroir if something is merely made in a place, but not of the place?

I am inclined to think that the persistence of the specificity of such material constituents in the formation of the identity of the final product is important if we are to speak of terroir (or for the product to speak of its terroir), although I find attempts to reduce terroir to a collection of objectively measurable variables somewhat naive, or perhaps merely confused (whether trying to validate or disprove its existence).1 While many of the distilleries on Islay (a sparsely populated island in the Southern Hebrides that boasts a whopping twelve single-malt distilleries) make a point of pride that their whisky is made completely with water drawn off the lochs of the island proper, the malt itself is often composed at least in part of mainland barley. So how might one speak of terroir if the very thing being fermented is the fruit of another land? One of the more compelling arguments for a physical terroir component to Islay whisky I’ve encountered is that the peat burned to give Islay malts their distinctly medicinal, smoky character is a composite matter, formed of naturally compacted and partially decayed grasses, leaves, moss, earth, seashells, and so forth. Feathers and bugs and bird dung too, probably. Thus, peat from Islay would (plausibly) differ from that of the Highlands, Speyside, the Isle of Skye, providing a sort of snapshot of each region’s local biodiversity. A snapshot that you then set on fire, of course.2

It occurs to me, however, that so deep is the structuring dichotomy of nature/culture that even as I believed myself ready to see terroir as one of those deconstructivist always-already-both-natural-and-cultural hoozlewazzles I am always on about, I was still drawing the same old dividing lines in an attempt to keep “nature” on one side and human intervention on the other. If, by contrast, we turn the telescope (microscope?) around and start from the other end, take as our starting point the reality of terroir, and then see of what it consists, we arrive at a very different understanding of the thing before us. For terroir is of necessity an indeterminate thing (if it is a “thing” at all), not only because places and traditions and the people that people them change over time, but because we are always in the process of learning, being told, and deciding about terroir, and that education is in its way part of the production of terroir. Terroir is thus not only a product in part of human work, but of human thought, something we apprehend into existence. I can understand that some Chardonnay grown in the Jura (the French wine region, not the Scottish island just north of Islay) has a mineral quality reminiscent of some Burgundian wines, perhaps because of a similar latitude, proximity, and shared veins of marl and calcareous soil, and that whether intentionally oxidative or not, a nutty quality persists, perhaps due to idiosyncrasies in local winemaking practices so ready to hand as to be invisible to the vintners even as they practise them. And when a winemaker tells me that this cuvée has a particular quincey acidity because that parcel of grapes, that bit of (physical) terroir, sits at just such an elevation, shaded from the summer sun by the treed hillside opposite just so, I am learning something about terroir, in a very particular way. I can pass on this information in the form of technical miscellany to another, I could even go and visit to confirm and say, “Yes it is just so,” because I am seeing it and I have been told what it means.

Or I can sit in a pub in Port Ellen and watch the old men try to flick their beer tabs into a glass behind the bar, listening to a friendly, brassy local proclaim, with the latent Gaelic lilt that undergirds the frank, ready wit of the Ileach, her preference for the French over the British (“At least they’re bloody Celts!”). Then I can walk out the door and smell the soft smoke of the malting plant, look at the ocean, and the line of distilleries hugging the shore, with their intentionally drafty barrel warehouses taking what they may from the wicked wind, the stinging brine. Then I can think about taste of place, and I don’t think I’ve learned anything less about what terroir means.