Westering Home

A lot of godly folk seem to forget that the Lord’s first miracle was turning water into wine. But it was a minister from the Western Isles of Scotland who pointed out that this was hardly remarkable. In his part of the world, he opined, the Good Lord turns water into whiskey every day.

Of course he was right. Whiskey has its origin in the generous quantities of cold water which a benign Providence, aided by the Gulf Stream, pours onto the sodden and stony landscape of the northern United Kingdom. No rain, no whiskey. The English spell it “whisky,” the Scots prefer plain KY (yes, like the jelly), but either way it is an anglicized form of the Gaelic uisgebeatha, which means “water of life.” Few parts of Scotland are more sodden than the island of Islay (pronounced EYE-lah). This is the watery world of Compton MacKenzie’s happy novel Whisky Galore, filmed in 1949 as a rollicking Ealing comedy with the title Tight Little Island. Islay is located at the northern end of the narrow channel that unites Northern Ireland to Southwest Scotland in a Celtic cultural syzygy. The island gets more than its share of the rain brought in by westerly winds off the Atlantic. No surprise then to find a dozen distilleries on Islay, each making a distinctive single malt whiskey on the banks of the island’s peaty streams.

Water is essential. The other necessity is grain to make the malt. Moored alongside the wharves at the distilleries, you will see the ships, dirty British coasters with salt-caked smokestacks, which bring in the barley. The grains are warmed and moistened so that they germinate and generate sugars. Some of the peaty taste of the final liquor comes from the reek of the peat fires which provide the heat. The germinated barley, the malt, is milled and then mashed—brewed in water roughly the temperature of hot coffee. The resulting sweet liquor, full of sugars and all sorts of interesting enzymes, is then made to ferment with living yeast before it is distilled and drawn off into casks to grow old gracefully. As it ages, some of the spirit evaporates and makes the angels happy, but much single malt whiskey also comes to America, where, thanks to lower taxation on alcohol in the United States, it is often cheaper than in its country of origin (about $40 a bottle in these parts).

Single malt whiskey is the characteristic product of a single distillery. Much of it finds its way into the familiar blends of Scotch, where it is mixed with grain whiskey, a spirit produced by a less exacting process. It is the malt element which gives each blend its characteristic taste. Cutty Sark, for instance, a blend which appeals to the American taste for lighter sweeter Scotch, contains a good deal of Islay single malt. It was actually invented during Prohibition and shipped into the States by the redoubtable Captain Bill McCoy, whose name survives in the expression “the real McCoy.”

Blended whiskey is warming in a Minnesota winter, of course, but it is single malts which engage the intelligence as well as the heart. Laphroaig is perhaps the best known of the Islay malts, but it’s definitely an acquired taste—the unkind have compared it to iodine strained through creosote-coated railroad ties. Of them all Bunnahabhain is the most immediately appealing. The name (Gaelic for “mouth of the river”) is easily pronounced: BOON-a-haaven. On the label is an old boy at the wheel of his British coaster. The whiskey is pale gold, sweeter and lighter than most Islay malts perhaps because the spring water reaches this remote and beautiful place through pipes and is therefore not so heavily impregnated with the taste of the surrounding peat. A dram of Bunnahabhain taken before you walk the dog on a summer evening may well lead to a second. It ought to have you, in the words of the old song printed on the bottle, “Westering Home with a song in the air/ Light in the eye and it’s good-bye to cares.”

Oliver Nicholson is a classicist at the University of Minnesota, and former Secretary of the Wine Committee at Wolfson College, Oxford.