Scotland: A 'pour' man's dream distillery trip
WHISKY TRAIL | Nearly 100 distilleries dot the countryside
Let other poets raise a fracas
About vines, and wines, and drunken Bacchus,
(Frank Main for the Sun-Times)
STAYING THERE:
* In Edinburgh, the Caledonian Hilton, a stone's throw from Edinburgh Castle, starts at $219 a night; hilton.com/caledonian. Channings Hotel, which occupies five Edwardian townhouses, goes for roughly $122 a night; townhousecompany.com/chan nings. It's a short walk from the city center.
* On the Isle of Skye, Kinloch Lodge, where Scotland's best-selling cookery writer, Claire MacDonald, is often found in the kitchen. Starts at about $200 a night; claire-macdon ald.com. The more rustic Duisdale Hotel, starts at about $100 a night; duisdale.com.
* Near Fort William, Inverlochy Castle is at the foot of the Ben Nevis mountain and has a beautiful garden; inverlochycastlehotel.com. Starts at $480 a night.
* In Inverness, the award-winning boutique hotel, Reserve Rocpool, starts around $252 a night; rocpool.com.
* In the Speyside region, Knockomie Hotel, owned by a husband and wife team who are experts in whisky, starts at about $175 a night; knockomie.co.uk.
DON'T MISS: Loch Fyne Oysters in Cairndow on the west coast serves authentic Scottish seafood; lochfyne.com. Order the Cullen Skink, a traditional soup with smoked haddock and potato, as well as the langoustines and, of course, the oysters.
WHISKY TRAIL: Several Web sites can help you plot your course: discovering- distilleries.com, whiskycoast.co.uk, maltwhiskydistilleries.com and altwhisky trail.com.
And ill natured names and stories torment us,
And vex our ear:
I sing the juice Scotch barley can make us,
In glass or jug.
-- Robert Burns (1759-1796)"Scotch Drink," standard English translationOBAN, Scotland -- It was closing time when our bus pulled up to Oban Distillery, our first stop on Scotland's whisky trail.
Our merry band of four journalists traveled west across Scotland through constant drizzle to visit this 18th century shrine to single-malt Scotch whisky.
Scotland has about 100 of these single-malt distilleries, many of which offer tours and have excellent restaurants and lodging nearby.
Scotland is hoping thousands of foreigners with Scottish blood -- Americans, Canadians and others whose ancestors were kicked out of the Highlands in the 1800s to make way for sheep -- will visit this year, the 250th anniversary of Scottish poet Robert Burns' birth, and hit some spots along the Whisky Trail, the roads linking the country's distilleries.
In early May, for instance, the Spey River area of north-central Scotland will host a whisky festival with local music, food and tours of many of Speyside's 50-plus distilleries.
Our goal was less ambitious: three distilleries in four days. And we were off to a bad start because we were late. Very late.
It was 5 p.m. and our Oban Distillery guide, Ewan Mackintosh, needed to lock up. His mother-in-law was waiting with dinner.
Luckily, though, he felt sorry for us. He led us into an elegant tasting room paneled in blond wood and lined up crystal dram glasses. He poured a wee sample of amber liquor into them. We swirled it, greedily inhaled its vaguely smoky vapors and knocked it back.
It was Oban's signature 14-year whisky.
"Slanje," one of us toasted, testing out our new Gaelic vocabulary.
Then we were off. Mackintosh hustled us up a flight of stairs and into the cavernous, museum-clean interior of the distillery. There stood a row of giant wooden tubs, each the circumference of an above-ground swimming pool.
Our guide pointed to one of the tubs where the miracle of whisky-making begins. In it, barley dried with peat smoke was brewing in hot water -- a process similar to making coffee. (Oban uses city water, not the spring water that some other distilleries use, someone in the company later disclosed to us, saying it doesn't really affect the taste.)
The warm liquid, which takes on the smokiness of the barley, is piped to other wooden tubs and mixed with yeast to produce alcohol. The barley juice in those tubs was bubbling as it interacted with the yeast, giving off a sweet, pungent odor of alcohol and baking bread.
Another giant room held a row of tall, cylindrical copper stills. We climbed up a flight of stairs and
stood on a platform to inspect the bell-shaped tops of the stills, which render the clear alcohol that eventually becomes scotch.
Finished with our whirlwind tour, which Mackintosh had condensed into less than 15 minutes, we walked out of the distillery. He shut off the lights, slammed the door and locked it to keep out thirsty thieves.
Mackintosh herded us across an alley to a damp storage room. In a corner was a weathered oak cask -- the Holy Grail of our six-hour journey from Edinburgh.
It was a used cask.
Like most Scotch whisky, Oban buys its casks from Kentucky bourbon producers, who, by law, can use them only once. The flavor and color in the scotch comes from the charred interior of the cask, whose oak gives the liquid the pleasant aromas of vanilla, flowers and chocolate -- as well as some less-pleasant odors like sulfur.
Mackintosh popped the bung on the barrel, which was marked "1996/2009" for the years it will remain in the oak, and decanted enough whiskey to give each of us a taste.
He put a pitcher on a heavy wooden table and we each poured into our whisky a drop of water, which he said would open up the flavors.
It was cask strength -- about 55 percent alcohol as opposed to the 43 percent alcohol that winds up in a bottle of Oban 14-year-old. It was worth the drive: pungent, with chocolate notes and a peaty, slightly briny finish.
With that, Mackintosh jumped on a beat-up bicycle and pedaled off to dinner as we stood in the cool, overcast, drizzly, misty evening -- what they call dreich here.
Our continuing travels along the Whisky Trail led us through a chain of glassy lakes, or lochs, in the valleys of the western Highlands.
Surrounding the lochs were hills cloaked in purple heather and tawny brown and yellow grasses. Some of the hills rose toward rocky peaks. You could imagine Braveheart running along the ridges.
It's no coincidence that Scottish tweeds reflect all of those hues, explained Tony Walker, our informative driver from Rabbie's Trail Burners, a company specializing in small group tours.
Tweeds were designed as camouflage for hunting in various terrains and seasons in Scotland, he said in a soft brogue as he pointed our Mercedes coach northwest and headed toward the Talisker distillery.
We stopped to stretch our legs at the medieval Eilean Donan Castle on Loch Duich, a stone fortress first occupied around the 6th century and rebuilt in the 1930s.
Clad in a kilt, Ossian MacUrcrin -- part actor and part docent -- gave a hilarious dissertation on the castle's role in clan warfare over the centuries and filled us in on the meanings of some of the clan names. (Campbell means crooked mouth in Gaelic and Cameron means crooked nose, for instance.)
We continued west to Talisker Distillery, a short drive away on the Isle of Skye.
The distillery is fed by natural springs. Because of a dry spell on Skye, the springs were waterless and the distillery was temporarily shut down. But we still were able to walk through the distillery with a guide.
The white, barnlike Talisker Distillery is across the street from a sea inlet. But unlike Oban, there's no bustling city of shops, hotels and restaurants to explore. Talisker's tasting room is not as elegant, either.
Still, it's still worth the trip to sample the whisky, which is fruitier and less smoky than Oban's, and to roam the countryside in the rugged Isle of Skye, whose Cuillin Mountains attract climbers and hikers from around the world.
From there, we trekked north to Inverness, a working-class town where the River Ness empties into the North Sea, and then drove east across northern Scotland, where the hills gave way to flat farmland.
When we rolled up to Strathisla Whisky Distillery, young anglers were fishing for salmon on the adjacent Isla River.
Strathisla is a cluster of gabled dark stone buildings and is the oldest operating distillery in the Highlands. It doesn't appear to have changed much since 1786, when it was founded.
Unlike Oban and Talisker, most of Strathisla's single-malt whisky goes into a blend, Chivas Regal, which is lighter and sweeter than the western Highlands' whiskies because no peat-dried barley is used in the process.
Our tour of the Whisky Trail ended in Strathisla's comfortable drawing room.
We sank into the deep, maroon couches, sipping Chivas 12-year-old as rain gently beat on the windows.
We'd barely seen the sun in four days, and no one seemed to mind.