19

The Malt

It’s very strange. We live in an age when man’s interest in his body verges on obsession: every visible moving part is subject to daily scrutiny, internal functions are monitored at least once a year by people in white coats, youth is prolonged, wrinkles kept at bay, stomachs sucked in, vitamins gobbled up. Yet, in the midst of this feverish physical surveillance, one small but vital part of the human anatomy is suffering from consistent, deliberate neglect. The palate has become a second-class citizen, and the taste buds are an endangered species, threatened with extinction through boredom.

What has happened, presumably in the interests of more consistent nourishment, is that individual tastes and local flavours have taken a terrible beating at the hands of the mass-producers. A Third Avenue hamburger tastes exactly like a Champs Elysées hamburger. Chicken, once a bird, has been turned into a commodity along with pork and beef and lamb. And as for vegetables—when was the last time you ate a tomato, a potato or a salad that you didn’t have to smother with sauce or dressing before there was any hint of flavour?

Bread like plastic, apples like wet socks, cheese with the delicate complexity of a bar of cheap soap, onions with no bite, spinach that would make Popeye choke. It all looks genuine, because everything from the lamb chop to the string bean is bred for appearance, but its resemblance to real food stops the moment you start to chew. It’s enough to drive a man to drink.

Alas, even booze hasn’t escaped the insidious tinkering that produces uniformity and blandness. Beers are lighter, spirits are paler and drier, wine is being contaminated with soda water, and sales of taste-free vodka are booming. Ice is used with such reckless abandon that drinks are numbed rather than chilled, and the serious drinker now risks frostbite of the tongue more than cirrhosis of the liver.

But all is not lost. Up in Scotland, there are men engaged in heroes’ work. They are not concerned with providing refreshment for the millions, but a taste of heaven for the few. Slowly, carefully and in small quantities, they are distilling single-malt whiskies.

Basic scotch whisky, the kind you would be served in a bar if you didn’t specify a brand, is a blend of as many as thirty different whiskies—malts and the less distinctive grain whiskies. They are blended together for two main reasons. The first is to achieve a smooth and widely acceptable taste that is less idiosyncratic than unblended whiskies. The second benefit of blending is that it guarantees consistency. A good blended scotch, such as a Bell’s, a White Horse, or a Dewar’s, will never give you any unpleasant surprises. This is ensured by a master blender, who keeps a sufficient supply of malts and grains to maintain the balance that gives the brand its particular taste.

The next step up in the scotch hierarchy is also a blend, but one in which only malts are used. These blends—‘vatted malts’—reflect the characteristics found in perhaps half a dozen single malts. Often ten or twelve years old (the age on the label is the age of the youngest whisky in the blend), they can be legitimately described as ‘pure malts.’ More pungent and more expensive than regular blended scotch, they offer the student of whisky a chance to acquire a general taste for malt before moving onward and upward into connoisseur’s territory: the single, unblended dram.

It is here that the taste buds can be given some thorough exercise, because there are more than a hundred distilleries in Scotland that produce single malts, not one of which tastes exactly like another. With a magnificent disregard for mass marketing, the single-malt men are content to make their own highly individual whiskies—smoky, peaty and as distinct from one another as are wines from different vineyards. Some single malts are matured in old sherry butts, some in old bourbon barrels, some in old port pipes; all of these add different elements to the flavour. There is no rigid universal formula, no standard recipe, no ‘best’ single malt. It’s a question of personal tastes: the distiller’s and yours.

But where among the Lagavulins and Lochnagars and Glen Mhors and Balvenies and Old Fettercairns do you start? You have more than a hundred confusing but delightful options, and there is a limit to the amount of research you can drink. My best advice, as a researcher of long standing, is to sample three very different single malts that I try to keep in the house despite the kind attentions of visiting friends. These three, which are not difficult to find, will give you an idea of the enormous range of flavours that can be found in what is technically the same drink.

The first is Glenfiddich: light, with just a touch of peat, and at least eight years old. It is generally considered to be an excellent malt for beginners, and it is the best-selling single malt in the world. One nip will tell you why a bottle of single malt is £20.

It is, however, outsold in Scotland by Glenmorangie (pronounced up there with the emphasis on the o, as in ‘orangy’), which is aged for ten years in old bourbon barrels before being bottled and has what the malt men describe as a medium body. ‘Morangie’ is said to mean ‘great tranquillity,’ which may or may not have something to do with the end result of an evening’s enthusiastic consumption.

My third single malt is Laphroaig, pronounced La-froyg. It comes from the Scottish island of Islay, which would be my first choice of place to be shipwrecked, since it must have the highest concentration of whisky makers on earth: eight distilleries in the space of twenty-five miles. Laphroaig is a big whisky, bottled at either ten or fifteen years old, with a lot of peat in its flavour, together with another characteristic that, depending on the literary style of the taster, is said either to betray its proximity to the sea or, more bluntly, to have a whiff of seaweed about it. Don’t let this put you off. The makers describe Laphroaig as the most richly flavoured of all Scottish whiskies, and they’re not exaggerating.

So there you have three to start you off, with the pleasant thought of another hundred-odd to try. But to appreciate fully the subtleties of taste and colour, the sweetness of the malt and the dryness of the peat you’re going to have to revise your scotch-drinking habits.

Ice is forbidden. In Scotland, it is regarded as a more serious offence than wife-beating to anaesthetise a single malt with lumps of frozen tap water. Whisky should be drunk as you drink cognac, at room temperature. Water is allowed (indeed, some Scotsmen take their malt half-and-half, ‘with plenty of water’), but it must be pure spring water that hasn’t been laced with chlorine, fluoride, or any of those other chemical blessings that health conscious authorities insist we consume.

There is nothing complicated about drinking single malts. Unlike wines, they don’t need to be opened beforehand to breathe, or to be decanted. They don’t need glasses shaped like young balloons, swizzle sticks, slices of fruit, olives, sprinklings of salt or ritualistic paraphernalia of any kind. There are, as there always are, optional refinements concerning the size and form of your glass—a small cut-crystal tumbler sets off the whisky’s colour beautifully, for instance—and when to drink a particular malt (light bodies before dinner and something fuller afterwards), but there is nothing pretentious about single-malt whisky. It is a clean, honest drink that needs no ornamentation.

And it is reputed to be good for you. Nothing official, of course, but if you were ever to ask a Scottish doctor what he would prescribe for good digestion, a sound night’s sleep and a long and healthy life, he would quite possibly suggest a daily tot of the malt. The same view is held by enlightened Englishmen, and it has been the subject of some learned discussion in the House of Lords.

Lord Boothby, arguing that the level of taxation on scotch should be reduced, put it like this: “In the modern world, scotch whisky is the only thing that brings guaranteed and sustained comfort to mankind.” He was supported by one of his political opponents, Lord Shinwell (who had once tried to make scotch available under the British National Health Service). Shinwell went on to propose that members of the House of Lords should be allowed to claim scotch as an expense, “since there is general consumption of this liquid by noble lords, and since many of them cannot do without it because it is in the nature of a medicine.”

Lord Shinwell was ninety-nine at the time.