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would be starting to take on too much of the character of the barrel they’ve been matured within, turning woody. Not this stuff. At ten years it’s ferocious, full of antagonistic flavours, sweet and sour and tarry, redolent of peat, pepper and burnt toffee. It shouldn’t all work together – and as I say, for some people, it never will – and yet it does, magnificently. Five years later it’s still powerful, though more balanced, slightly sweeter, less demanding, and deeper, while at 30 years it’s finally getting to the Hmm, just about perfect stage (apparently – I’ve never tasted Laphroaig this old; I’m relying on usually reliable sources here).
    Lagavulin, barely a whisky-barrel’s throw away along the coast, is a close second on the in-your-faceness stakes, which was kind of the idea, as the guy who had the place built, Sir Peter Mackie, was trying to make a whisky like Laphroaig. What’s there on the site now is the result of a combination of three separate distilleries, themselves the distillation of about ten distinct bothies-with-stills which used to make spirit back in the pre-excise days when it was all just a cosy wee cottage industry and everybody was basically semi-pro.
    Once upon a time: distilling as a cottage industry
.
    In the old days people made whisky because it was just part of the life of being a crofter (a croft being the Scottish term for a small farm). You grew barley, you harvested it, and what you couldn’t feed your family or your animals with, you could either sell, or make into whisky, which you could also use yourself, or sell. Turning barley into whisky was a good way of storing your surplus; barley goes mouldy in a damp climate. Whisky doesn’t.
    To people like this, making beer or whisky from their crops was as much part of their lives as sowing the seeds at the start of the season or bringing in the harvest at the end. To them the government was a distant entity with little day-to-day relevance to their lives; when, during the gradual commodification and commercial exploitation of whisky, the politicians decided that people would no longer be allowed to make their own whisky unless they did so on an industrial scale, and paid the government for the privilege, it must have seemed as outrageous to the crofters as if they were to be taxed for heating a kettle of water, or making soup. Little wonder the excise men, charged with policing these new and generally hated laws and bringing in the loot they would produce, were so despised, obstructed and vilified.
    Lagavulin – made in pear-shaped stills which are
so
pear-shaped they look like they were deliberately modelled on pears – has a dry, salty taste, and is usually more sherry-influenced than a similarly aged Laphroaig, though still reeking of smoke and peat. For a long time this was my second favourite Islay, a short nose ahead of the wonderful Ardbeg.
    My tastes do seem to have changed over the years, and these days I’d put Bowmore near the top of the list just under Laphroaig. Bowmore is north and west of the south coast’s Big Three, on the – relatively – balmy coast of Loch Indaal. As a producer, Bowmore has a richness throughout its range of whiskies that makes it one of the handful of very best distilleries in Scotland; as well as the 12, 17 and 21-year-olds they have others with names like Legend (eight to ten years old), Mariner (fifteen) and Darkest (probably about the same age as Mariner, though there’s no age stated). There are lots of other expressions available given sufficient time and money, but that’s enough to be going on with for now.
    Put it this way; those mentioned above range from merely very good indeed to utterly stunning, with a power and opulence of taste bursting through the older whiskies that beggars belief. There’s intense smoke – though like summer bonfires, not just peat fires – whin scent on a sea breeze, plus the entire contents of a well-stocked florist. Just the most