Raw Spirit by Iain Banks Page A

like it’s almost been torn in two by the Atlantic gales. (Actually, for the purposes of the geographical and historical background in my novel
The Crow Road
, it
was
torn in half; I’d decided I wanted to locate the fictional town of Gallanach near Crinan, on the mainland. I needed the place to have a deep-water port with easy access to the Atlantic and I didn’t want to edit out the Corryvrecken so I blithely cut Jura in two. You get to do this sort of thing when you’re a writer.)
    Jura is a short ferry ride from Port Askaig on Islay’s east coast, close to the Caol Ila distillery, so – as we’re here, the weather’s fine and there’s a whisky book to be researched – it has to be done. The perfect trip will include a visit to the distillery, a look at the house where George Orwell wrote
1984
, and then a hike to the northern tip of the island to see the tidal race there between Jura and Scarba, that wide, roaring whirlpool called the Corryvrecken where Orwell once nearly drowned.
    We managed the first two of these, missing the Gulf of Corryvrecken because we need to make the last ferry.
    Meanwhile we’ve visited Caol Ila, the slightly less remotely sited but even more precipitously shore-pitched neighbour of Bunnahabhain, a couple of miles up the coast. Standing between the big, modern still house and the sea, the view is stunning whichever way you look: to Jura, its mountains mounded high and hazed across the waves, or back at the great coppery bulks of the four great stills, gleaming behind giant windows in the maritime light of an unseasonably warm spring; Ann practically has to be prised out of the visitors’ waiting room, mesmerised by the vista.
    Yet again, this is a whisky that could well be a total star by now if it had had a bit of marketing oomph behind it, and maybe a bit more consistency in its younger bottlings. It’s oily and seaweedy – hardly a surprise, so close to the water – toasty and brisk. Caol Ila is probably the least familiar, least lauded Islay, but find a good one and it’ll stand up to almost anything. Arguably the very distinctive toastedness of Caol Ila has mitigated against it being well known as a single malt just because it is so in demand as a constituent in blends. (A couple of months later Jackie, one of the tour guides at one of Caol Ila’s sister distilleries, Blair Atholl, assures me it’s especially good with a cigar. So there.)
    The Isle of Jura distillery at Craighouse is a friendly place – most of the small or out-of-the-way distilleries are. All the same, I start with slightly iffy memories of Jura malt because I once bought a bottle when I was coming back to Dear Old Blighty from France on a truck ferry after a couple of months spent hitch-hiking round Europe, back in the early seventies.
    It was not a very good bottle of whisky. Drinkable, but poorer than most blends, which is a pretty damning thing to say of a single malt.
    Happily only the waisted bottle shape remains the same and the malt itself is peaty-flowery, salty (again) and smooth. The bottle of the new Superstition expression we buy is all of these plus smoky.
    * * *
    Willy’s Definitive Dram Definition
.
    Willy, one of the guys at the distillery, comes up with what Oliver and I agree is the best definition of what a ‘dram’ actually is: ‘A measure of whisky that is pleasing to both guest and host.’
    Favourite memory of the Jura distillery? They had a wooden ball on the end of a bit of string which could be swung against the neck of one of the stills, a bit like you’d swing a bottle of champagne against the stem of a ship being launched, though less destructively, obviously. This was a leftover from the Islay (well, Islay/Jura in this case) Whisky Festival of the year before, when the guys thought it would be fun to show people how, in the old days, a distiller would work out how far up the still the mixture was bubbling. Nowadays stills have wee vertical windows like glazed medieval