Owing to its highly successful marketing of an image clothed in kilt, bagpipe, mountain and stag, Scotland appears, from the outside, as unimaginably simple: it’s the home of golf, the haggis and scotch. The romanticised touch points of a Scotland first dreamt up by the likes of Sir Walter Scott, it’s an almost ahistorical take on a country that, scratch the surface, is as real as anywhere else. Scotland is complicated, richly so, and nowhere more obviously than in the labyrinthine world of Scotch whisky.
FROM UNWRITTEN BEGINNINGS
The story of Scotch whisky begins in happy confusion. The very first mention of whisky being made in Scotland is as late as 1494, when Brother John Cor is recorded by the Exchequer Rolls as having taken receipt of ‘eight bolls of malt to make aqua vitae’.
It’s a tantalising piece of first evidence. Enough to be considered more than a kitchen and kettle operation, Friar John’s order suggests a sizeably developed practice, no doubt one that had been going on for years, and on which it’s highly unlikely he exercised a monopoly. As for whether knowledge of distilling beer had escaped the monastery and court, we can’t say for sure. Certainly, Hector Boece’s The History and Chronicles of Scotland, published in 1527, makes claims for a generations-old practice, while perhaps more factually revealing is an act in 1579 restricting distilling to earls, lords and barons that speaks volumes: people were making their own hooch, and enough of it to have become a threat.
Whatever the truth of its origins and early reach, Scotland’s relationship with Boece’s ‘kind of aqua vitae’ (‘uisge beatha’, a flavoured distillate) was such that, by the 1700s, ‘consumption’, writes Dave Broom, had ‘become ritualised: it is sacrament, payment, the cornerstone of hospitality’.
A FINE MESS
Tax records indicate that large-scale commercial distilleries were in operation in Scotland from at least the 1600s, the largest being the Ferintosh distillery, though it was during the eighteenth century that things really took off, with Lowland distilleries producing spirit for export to London, for the express purpose of being made into gin. This was a boom time for Lowland whisky makers.
Not forever, though – and never for everybody. A government-initiated stranglehold gradually took shape: a tax on capacity was introduced, forcing Lowland distillers to develop saucer-like stills capable of holding only small amounts of beer, and which discharged at breakneck speed, the result a high volume, very low-quality spirit. Gin makers in London lobbied successfully for a greater duty to be paid on Scottish exports. Home distilling was finally banned. Corruption was rife. Operations north of the Highland Line, largely farmer distiller size, were taxed into the ground, export south of the Highland Line outlawed.
By the turn of the nineteenth century many a maker had either gone to the wall or operated illegally. Highland whiskies had gained an increasingly better – though heavy and uneven – reputation, while Lowland whisky was an unmitigated disaster. Anyone who drank decent whisky drank ‘Irish’. Scotch was what you drank in the shebeen, the tavern, or ‘when in Scotland’, a reputation it found difficult to shrug off, even after a fundamental relaxing of the law in 1823. Irish was made and consumed in Scotland. It was clearly – in the minds of many, the Scots included – the better stuff. Scotch was, on the other hand, as Broom says, ‘a northern oddity’.
DAY OF THE BLEND
If in any doubt as to the design element of revolutions, look no further than the evidence amassed by the Royal Commission on Whisky in 1908. The birth of the blend was in direct response to the Irish question: how to achieve the same uniformity of style as that of Irish whisky?
The answer, to the chagrin of purists, was to blend a small portion of grain whisky(s) with a number of single malts. Blending of just malts had been allowed under bond from 1853. Private experiments with grain had been going on for years. The Spirit Act (1860) would bring everything together, legalising the blending of malt with grain whisky, the first official example of which was Scotch Ushers Old Vatted Glenlivet. The floodgates gaping, in came Johnnie Walker, Buchanans, John Dewar & Son, Greenlees Bros, Mackie & Co. All would eventually set up office in London, and from there expand into the Empire, their whiskies designed, as Samuel Greenlees would later report to the Commission, ‘to suit the public at the time’.
Innovative, adaptable and highly competitive, the new Scottish whisky company was also a master of the idea of the brand, and spent as much time on consistency of image as it did product. It was utterly relentless in its pursuit of the market, managing during Prohibition to hobble the Irish, and so position itself to take full advantage of the years that followed. Fast forward to 1945 and the northern oddity was the meaning of top shelf whisky. Scotch had come an awful long way in an awful short time.
GUIDE TO THE LABYRINTH
Today, Scotland has 109 active malt distilleries, located in one of six whisky making regions: Campbeltown, Lowlands, Speyside, Islay, Highlands and Islands, the last of which is legally classified as part of the Highlands, but in reality is treated by everybody as a separate entity. Of the current 109 distilleries, just seven are grain distilleries.
The Highlands and Speyside cover off every mainland distillery north of the old Highland Line, which runs at an angle from west of Glasgow to Dundee. The Highlands consists of 32 distilleries, from Glengoyne in the south to Old Pulteney in the north. North-eastern Speyside is a rough inverted triangle narrowing as it runs upriver either side of the Spey. It’s home to 48 malt distilleries, most of which sit cheek-by-jowl, the most concentrated collection of distilleries in the world.
Major victim of a late nineteenth century blip, courtesy of Pattison, Elder & Co., whose flamboyant owners, the brothers Walter and Robert Pattison, floated a company neither worth the valuation nor wholly honest about the contents of its blends, the Lowlands is every mainland distillery (a comparably paltry 11) south of the Highland Line, except the three in Campbeltown, which, owing to its individual historical importance, retains status as a separate region. Similarly, Islay is on its own, and has eight distilleries. The rest of Scotland’s islands make up the remaining seven distilleries, which stretch from Jura in the south west to Highland Park and Scapa in the north east.
There is no single good reason as to why the regions should shape up as they do. History and/or geography may explain distilleries existing in certain places, but they fail to account for why two distilleries within spitting distance of each other should produce two very different styles of single malt whisky. Islay apart, there is no such thing as a regional style. Each region is its own mix of difference, each distillery its own universe.
The Scottish whisky industry is no longer owned by its founding families – or even by the giant blending houses that ruled the roost at the turn of the twentieth century. Over half of its active distilleries are owned by either Diageo (British) or Pernod Ricard (French), with the remainder divided between a mix of mainland Europe, British, South African and Asian companies. Founding families make up a tiny minority of Scottish distillery owners, the Grants being the most prominent.
Blends account for over 90% of Scotch’s export market. Single malts make up about a fifth of the Scottish market. Single grain whisky is a tiny category, but very much the most exciting new area. Much has been said of the current boom, the diversity and depth of the market, but the industry is worth about £3.95 billion, down on the previous year (2014), which in turn was down on the year before. This said, Scotch remains the whisky world’s giant.
RETURN OF THE MALT
While always beloved by aficionados, single malt as a drink in itself had been stripped of all individuality by the success of the world of blends. Until the 1960s, very few whisky producers promoted single malts in and of themselves. It was an old drink. It was too full of flavour. It had no sex appeal.
—For scotch to be Scotch, it must be matured in Scotland in oak casks for a minimum of three years.
—There are five distinct categories of Scotch whisky: single malt, single grain, blended Scotch, blended malt and blended grain.
—A single malt is made from 100% malted barley in a single distillery. A ‘single grain whisky’ is made in a single distillery from a mash of one or more grains and a portion of malted barley.
—A ‘blended Scotch’ is a blend of one or more grain whiskies with one or more single malts. A ‘blended malt’ is a blend of two or more malts hailing from different distilleries. A ‘blended grain’ is the same as a ‘blended malt’, only referring to grains rather than malt.
Until, that is, whisky’s catastrophic slump in the 1980s. The reasons for its fall are many, with a world oil crisis playing a decisive role, but the industry as a whole was caught napping – sunning itself beside a gargantuan and now difficult-to-sell lake of 1970s whisky. The market retracted. Vodka took off. Distilleries haemorrhaged. The only way out was mass rationalisation, an in-house euphemism for frenzied self-amputation. By 1986, a quarter of Scottish distilleries were closed, with many of the survivors working at reduced capacities. Things looked worse than bad.
Out of the ashes, however, a liquid phoenix: the big, deep flavours as exemplified by many of Scotland’s single malts. In the 1970s, the likes of Glenfiddich, the Macallan and the Glenlivet had gone against the market, promoted their malts, and sparked a small and vociferously loyal support. In 1986, Diageo launched its Classic Malts of Scotland series, as represented by six of its distilleries, and the support became a cult. People took notice and spread the word.
There’s more to the story, of course, but much of the attention paid to single malts arose from their ability to mark themselves apart from the herd – blends, white spirits, you name it. Interesting, slightly uncomfortable, possibly an acquired taste, their very attraction was in their tricky approachability. They were stallions, different, headstrong, full of character. They demanded a special understanding, an education that took in not just the product, but also the whys and wherefores of its creation – distilleries, production, wood. Suddenly, a tipping point: the second age of the big flavour was back – and with it, the whole of Scotch whisky.