Many years ago, as a young backpacker, I made plenty of mistakes when traveling around Portugal – from trying to see everything on one trip to indulging in free appetizers that weren’t really free.
On the whisky trail: a weekend of wee drams in Moray Speyside, Scotland
09.02.2024 - 11:54 / theguardian.com
The world outside my sleeper-train compartment was black and white: trees with feather-like branches silhouetted against snowy fields; the grey stretch of the A9 and then the sleek steel of a river; white candy-floss clouds against an ever paler sky.
By the time I was in my hire car, driving east from Inverness, colour was slowly returning to the landscape, though the hills beneath the milky sun were still cloaked in snow. I was heading for Moray Speyside, edged by the Cairngorms in the south and the wide Moray Firth in the north. Over the course of my weekend, the water of the latter dipped in and out of view, while the mountains remained tantalisingly distant.
The region is famous for its whisky and justifiably so. Moray Speyside is home to more than 50 distilleries, more than a third of Scotland’s total. Despite knowing this, the number of brown distillery signs that greeted me came as a surprise – no sooner would I pass one pagoda-marked arrow than I would see another.
It seemed only right that whisky should be my first stop, and so I headed seven miles south of the small town of Forres, winding through quiet single-track roads lined by muddied, tyre-tracked snow, to Dunphail Distillery.
This is the newest kid on the whisky-making block, though it doesn’t look it, set as it is in 160-year-old farm steadings. The most interesting thing about Dunphail at the moment isn’t actually its whisky, which has only just started being produced and needs to be matured for three years to be considered scotch. It’s that its owners have decided to strip the processes right back, away from the computers and off-site maltings that are now common across Scotland’s distilleries.
Our affable guide, Mike, took our group into a low-ceilinged room where a perfect rectangle of barley rested on the floor while it germinated. We took it in turns to rake it with a contraption that one of the distillers had fashioned out of a huge rake and a couple of hammers to replicate a traditional hand tool. In the main distillery room, where the yeasty, fruity smell of the mash circled us, the spirit safe (usually locked) was left open so that the distillers could interact with the spirit being produced – the new make – rather than rely on computer readings.
In the absence of its own single malt, the tasting session at the end involved trying this new make which, at 63.5% ABV, is significantly stronger than what will be sold in bottles. “It makes me think of standing in a baker’s doorway,” Mike said as I dipped my finger into my glass (I was driving, after all) and I could see what he meant – at first fruity before the low, savoury note of barley came in, it had all the sensory hits of that experience, coupled with the anticipation of
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