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  • Scotland Day Eight: Edinburgh and the castle

    We had a nearly four hour drive from Speyside to Edinburgh for our last day on the trip, but it wasn’t drama-free by any means. Once again, the back door of the van popped open while we were going down the highway and two peoples’ luggage fell out. I watched as one tumbled behind our bus and was run over by the truck behind us. The suitcase was ruined and the guy’s laptop’s screen was cracked, but the bottle of Pimm’s No. 3 and the Linn House bottling of 35 year-old scotch survived intact. Hooray!

    We stayed at the huge and impressive Balmoral hotel in Edinburgh, but I didn’t spend more than 20 minutes awake in the room. I had bars to see! My drinking pal for the day was Bill Dowd, and we stopped into about 7 venues in three hours. Not bad. I’ll have to reserve the write-up on those for a future story, but I loved Oloroso and Tonic most of all.

    Back in the room for a quick change into the first suit jacket I’ve owned since First Communion (50 bucks at H&M), I was ready for a private dinner in Edinburgh Castle. Several of the distillers and blenders from earlier in the week joined us, and it was like everything else in the week: ultra-fancy. The people at Old Pulteney were kind enough to contribute some 31 year-old scotch for us to drink at dinner and at the after-party at the Balmoral Hotel.

    It was almost a beautiful ending to a fantastic (and educational) trip, but alas, the trip home was not-so-fab. The combination of Delta and JFK airport caused delays, a missed connection, a night in New York, sleeping on a friend’s floor, and an early next-day flight 15 hours later than I was supposed to be home.

    Luckily when I arrived there, there was a bottle of scotch that had been delivered waiting for me.

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  • Scotland Day Seven: The real post

    This was our final distillery day in Scotland, but it was a double-header. We started off the morning with a tour of the Glenlivet distillery. By this time distillery tours were old hat, so we just stopped off at the points that deviate from other brands. The we had lunch and a demo of an old still that they set up on the driveway. It produced some pretty good new make spirit, as far as I can tell.

    After a tasting, we headed off on one of the new Smuggler’s Trails. These were set up as nature walks meant to be historically accurate trails that smugglers would take to get the whisky out in the days when distilling was illegal (without paying taxes, anyway). And due to our three hour walk, I actually came home from Scotland with a sunburn!

    We drove over to our hotel for the night, the Linn House. It’s the property of Pernod-Ricard, owners of Chivas, and it’s pretty darn fabulous. After a quick walk around the grounds and building, it was time for dinner. We walked over to the Strathisla Distillery, where the Chivas visitor center is. The distillery itself is gorgeous with the double pagoda roof and stone front. Inside, the visitor’s center is themed like an old grocery store, which is how the Chivas brothers started off.

    We were treated to access to the Chivas archives, where there were some great old product catalogs, then treated to dinner in a modern part of the distillery where they hold corporate meetings. For the afterparty, we returned to the Linn House’s Garden Bar, which is like a little club house in the gardens behind the house equipped with a pool table, jukebox, and a fully stocked bar. I stayed up to a sensible 2AM, unlike some of the less responsible writers who tried to re-rouse me for the after-after party in the living room.

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  • Scotland day seven: a quick note

    Yesterday at Glenlivet and Strathisla were amazing, but I've no time
    or Internet with which to post. The picture is of my hotel from last
    night, at which we were at the bar in the garden until the wee hours
    of the morning.

  • The Bar Coat Hook Hall of Shame

    5/1/08 update: Fish and Farm has a great homemade cocktail ingredient program, but alas, nowhere to hang your jacket at the bar. They’ve been added to the Hall of Shame.
    —

    Every bar top should have coat hooks beneath it. That way you don’t have to try to hang your jacket off your bar stool under your butt, having it slip off half the time and getting dirty when you put your feet up.

    Bar hooks seem like such a simple and necessary bar element, like toilet paper in the bathrooms or lemons in the garnish tray, yet there are many places that have not installed them. I’m constantly running my hands along the underside of bars feeling for the hooks and getting nothing but gum and boogers. This has to end!

    It is up to us to shame these establishments into installing coat hooks. Together we can make a difference! Thus I present to you:

    The Bar Hook Hall of Shame
    (add your nominees in the comments and I’ll expand the list here)

    • Fish and Farm (added 4/18/08)
    • The Transfer
    • The Pilsner Inn
    • Colibri Mexican Bistro

    9/25/06 Congratulations to Bourbon & Branch, the first bar to be removed from the Bar Coat Hook Hall of Shame by finally installing their hooks.

    5/1/07 I went to check out Etiquette Lounge where they had no coat hooks, and they admitted to not having them at their other venue Element Lounge either.

    5/15/07 Congratulations to Rye, where they finally installed coat hooks and made the bar a more comfortable experience for us all.

    5/1/07 I have decided to drop Etiquette and Element Lounge from the Hall of Shame, as they’re not really venues where you sit at the bar. Nightclubs do not need coat hooks.

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  • Scotland Day Six: Macallan and no bagpipes

    I was on a roll there with two bagpipe days back to back, but alas, the trend didn’t continue. On our sixth distillery day, we drove from Inverness to Craigellachie. On the way there, we stopped in Elgin to visit Johnston’s cashmere center, a huge wool and cashmere factory where they sew scarves for Burberry, Chanel, and other brands, in addition to their own. The tour was surprisingly cool and I even found things to purchase in the large gift shop- books.

    Then we popped in to a supermarket and I headed straight for the liquor aisle. I found Pimm’s Winter, a.k.a. Pimm’s No. 3 Cup with the brandy base. Wahoo!

    Off we went to Macallan for a tour. At each distillery, there is a combination of old and new technology present since most of them have been around for at least a hundred years. Much of the equipment lasts for up to five decades, so what’s been replaced lately is rather variable. I was surprised to find Macallan a very modern distillery. I guess I believed the brand messaging story a bit too much.

    Macallan has an incredible “wood expreience” exhibit as part of the tour. It’s not like a museum where there is a lot of text and you lead yourself through it, but rather the tour guide takes you through and tells you what you’re about to learn at each point. There is information on types of wood, sizes of barrels, color in whisky, a smell area with different substances in jars to identify, and other stuff. Interestingly, despite this nice big exhibit they try to keep the number of tour visitors down, not accepting large busses, and only doing about 6, 10-person tours a day in the high season.

    For dinner and overnight, we stayed at the Easter Elchies house. It’s the house on the Macallan label, built in 1700. I stayed in the room on the top right on the label, so now every time I drink Macallan it will be like looking at a postcard from my trip. Score.

    We have just one distillery left to visit, and I’m already feeling separation anxiety from Scotland. I freaking love this place.

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  • Scotland Day Five: Glenmorangie and the fancy hotel

    Pipercount: 3!

    On the fifth day of our trip, we headed to the Glenmorangie distillery. They use the tallest stills in Scotland, as the original one was a former gin still. The taller the stills, the lighter the particles have to be to reach the top during distillation, and the resulting scotch has a lighter, more floral character than the heavier, oilier ones from lower stills.

    We had a lovely barrel tasting of some Glenmorangie that was first aged ten years in an ex-bourbon cask, then an additional seven in a sherry cask. (The finished whisky line by Glenmorangie is ten years in bourbon plus two extra in a sherry, port, etc. cask.) The stuff came out a dark vermouth color, and tastes like pecan walnut maple ice cream-yummers.

    After that we headed to the Culloden Battlefield Visitor’s Center, a new museum on the site of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s last stand. It was built in the modern museum style, with high-tech displays interspersed with historical photographs, maps, and artifacts from the time. Cool stuff.

    Then it was off to the Culloden House Hotel, where I am currently typing this. They have a bag pipe player wander around the front lawn of the estate before dinner time, so that brings our Pipercount up to three! As you can see from the picture, the place is incredible. I tried to convince the trip’s sponsors that I “didn’t get the right material for my story” so I’d need to stay on a few extra days here, but it didn’t work.

    Usually when people say that their hotel room is bigger than their apartment they’re exaggerating, but in this case it’s true. Walking back and forth between the rooms to pack is wearing me out. But then again, I’m still tired from the midnight croquet game on the front lawn of the estate. Ahh, country life.

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  • Scotland Day Four: Pipercount- Two!


    I started the morning at 5AM catching up on live blogging Scotland. Then I had a walk past Huntly castle and the adorable town of Huntly. It reminded me of towns in Napa and Sonoma in a way, in that it’s all cute all-too clean small-town goodness, except in this case it’s 400 or so years old and not created by some entrepreneurial developer.

    We drove to the Ardmore distillery, which has a relatively new single malt on the market despite folks distilling whisky there for many years. It’s one of the primary single-malts in Teacher’s Highland Cream, which is a blended whisky once popular in the US and still popular in the UK and other markets. The distillery isn’t open to the public for tours, yet is all shiny and new-looking despite its age. They do a good job keeping things clean.

    We then headed off to a local estate now owned by the Scottish trust, had a tour, then a great tasting session of Ardmore and Laphroaig (also owned by Jim Beam). We were lucky enough to sample a Laphroaig 27-year-old whisky that was just terrific. I highly recommend buying a bottle if you’ve got a thousand bucks laying around.

    We hopped back onto the bus, our second home, and drive for a few hours to the Glenmorangie House, an incredible hotel on the sea owned by the distillery. For dinner that night we were greeted by a bagpiper (Hooray! Finally!) who announced the meal, then later recited the traditional Robert Burns haggis poem. The cook even made veggie haggis for little old me so I could finally try some.

    While I passed out early, the rest of the crew stayed up to three in the morning. I’m uncomfortable in my new role of party pooper.

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  • Scotland photos

    By the way, the photos from my trip can be seen on my Flickr page here, organized by day and distillery. I’ll be adding more pictures as I go along.

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  • Scotland Day Three: Death defying

    This morning I feel much better after having suffered from near-fatal jetlag the whole trip. I was averaging four hours of sleep or less since the day before the trip began, but last night I finally caught up and had nearly ten hours’ worth. It was easier here, as we’re staying in the hotel adjacent to a castle in Huntly.

    Yesterday we rushed out of the not-as-fancy hotel to drive across the mountain towards the Spey river and the famous Speyside whisky region. Most of the group then had their own death-defying experience canoeing down the Spey river. Almost all of them tipped over, up to three times, in the freezing water. One writer said, “Just minutes ago I was curled up in fetal position on the riverbank.” When the four of us smarter folks who declined the experience showed up at the end point, everyone else was shaking like wet chihuahuas and had in their eyes the crazed stares of people who just survived something awful and had a new appreciation for life.

    What I was doing instead was visiting Ballindalloch castle, where we were greeted by the family who lives there and owns it. They had the affected accents and mannerisms of the moneyed gentry that you couldn’t pay a character actor to imitate better. They were awesome.

    Afterwards, the river people dried off and we went to the Speyburn distillery. The place doesn’t have a visitor’s center, so we were given the close-up tour. What I never realized about scotch production is that there are two different steps to prepare the barley. First you soak it so that the barley germinates, then you dry it out at just the right moment. This is now mostly done at centralized malting houses rather than onsite at distilleries as it was in the past. (The pagoda shaped buildings many scotch distilleries have are the old roofs of the drying rooms.)

    After you (now) buy your malted and dried barley, you have to grind it up, then soak it again several times to release the sugars. Only then does it go to the fermentation tanks, then on to be distilled twice. We tasted the products of the distillation in the barrel room, sampling the entire range of Speyburn and Old Pulteney.

    We headed off afterwards to Dufftown where we were given a cooking lesson by the chef at A Taste of Speyside restaurant. It was tasty stuff -even my veggie version was delightful. Then we checked into our lovely hotel where I skipped dinner and slept through the night. Ahh. I”m up at 5AM but after 10 hours of sleep that doesn’t bother me at all.

    That’s right folks- two days in a row without bagpipes! My whole theory about this trip has so far proven wrong.

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  • Scotland Day Two: Pipe-free

    Yesterday we visited the Royal Lochnagar distillery, a very small, pristine place located next to the summer residence of the Queen of England. (The distillery was there first.) On the drive here the landscape turned from lush and green to tall rocky hills covered in heather- which looks like an ugly brown bush when it’s not blooming.

    Also on the way here, the back door of the shuttle bus popped open and someone’s luggage fell out onto the street. We turned around and went back a few miles to find a lady holding it by the side of the street waving us down. Nice people, the Scots.

    But here’s what’s not nice: no bagpipes all day! Can I get a piper up in here?

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