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22 January 2025

The lure of Scotch whisky lies in the dramatic landscapes of its home

But it’s human endeavour not soil, stone and water that makes the difference.

By Andrew Jefford

When sleepless in the small hours, I think of the most soothing workplace I know: the stillroom at Caol Ila distillery on the Scottish island of Islay. Day and night, there’s someone there. (Whistling, like as not.) They’re snug, warmed by six stills. These colossal copper seahorses gently digest boiling beer, then exhale whisky vapour from their nostrils; the air is malt-laden and nourishing. Beneath plate-glass windows, a tussle of eddies swirls past.

Across the Sound of Islay lies , the “un-get-at-able” island to which George Orwell retreated to write Nineteen Eighty-Four. Jura is home to 5,500 deer; they’re mostly awake in the small hours, too. A handful will be gazing at the lights across the water – for unbroken minutes at a time. As deer do. Very elemental, very comforting.

Every alcoholic beverage sells on a dream; strip the dream away and it withers. Part of the power of such drinks is that their dreams are often predicated on their places of origin. Since place furnishes much of the architecture of human experience, this floods these drinks with meaning, even before the first sip. All marketers have to do is run with it. None are nimbler in this regard than those selling Scotch.

My French concitoyens make up Scotch whisky’s largest export market (174 million bottles downed in 2023), and wilderness Scotland dominates most Scotch sales messages here. The idea of terroir (the notion that particular products taste as they do because of the physical milieu and local culture among which they come into being) is cherished in France: it all fits. A little too neatly, in truth.

The aromas and flavours of malt whisky derive from three main sources, and none of them relate to the physical milieu of most distilleries. Those sources are recipe, kit, and stowage.

Malted barley is malt whisky’s primary ingredient. Yeast is standard. What matters most for flavour is the extent to which that malt has been exposed to peat smoke during the kilning process (this varies from none to lots): a recipe decision. Brewing water is barely significant; most of it finishes in the drain.

Brewing and distilling vessels, and the manner in which this equipment is used, are the second major factor. These are boringly complicated technical choices that marketers avoid. They are indeed consequential.

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The third main flavour source is the wood used to age the finished spirit for a decade or two. Much of the genius of Scotch lies in the canny decision to deploy second-hand barrels for this purpose, since this brings a quiet dappling of flavour in place of the toasty vanilla sweetness of new wood. Scotch has borrowed a little of the lustre and intrigue of wines and spirits via “finishes” in barrels that formerly contained these drinks. This narrative novelty is a huge marketing boon, offsetting that most whisky production is at root an industrial process: one based on protocols and duplication, whose aim is consistency.

You will find artistry, too, notably in the blending process. More than 90 per cent of Scotch whisky is sold in blended form, and the subtlest blends offer the finest whisky value. There’s a marketing problem, though. The exact constitution of blends is secret, so you can only tease and not tell. Moreover, blends are built around a core of grain whisky, produced in multi-acre, silo-strewn plants near arterial roads rather than picturesque distilleries by gurgling burns.

It’s this, as much as their characterful and sometimes confronting aroma and flavour profiles, that keeps malt distilleries at the apex of the Scotch whisky pyramid. Place in Scotch is indeed of primordial importance – thanks not to soil, stone, water and air, but to the poetry and drama of this singular human endeavour in Scotland’s magnificent wilderness landscapes.

Andrew Jefford is the author of “Whisky Island: A Portrait of Islay and its Whiskies”

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This article appears in the 22 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Messiah Complex