Whisky Online Blog

Well I’m back, which in itself is good news considering the questionable nature of my existence a couple of weeks ago, I even managed to avoid any major sunburn. We had some rather sticky issues at the Ecuador/Peru border at 1 in the morning, overslept and ended up much further into Ecuador than intended and I was seduced by the charms of a ridiculously oversized Alpaca hat in Lima much to the pain of my finances. Still, a wonderful, thrilling and often life affirming time was had. There are too many shreds of overlapping experience to begin talking about here but I will say a few things of interest/note.

1: Ecuador is fucking hot! I stepped out of a very comfortable, air conditioned bus into an oppressive weight of smothering, tropical heat that felt like being wrapped up in moist, recently microwaved, blankets.

2: Placing your body at the unfamiliar heights of 5000 meters above sea level is akin to having lengths of rope slowly tightening round your chest and head while someone pumps anorexic air into your brain with a large pair of fire bellows. It affected me so greatly that by the time we reached our destination of Lake 69 I was scarcely able to behold its otherworldly blueness (see below). Let alone make pointless and inappropriate jokes about its obvious sexual connotations (a missed opportunity that is most unlike me).

Lake 69. This photo is, believe it or not, completely unedited, the water really did look like that.

3: To be on a boat again after so long, winding lazily through a dark river beset by jungle, is something with true power to remove any weight from your shoulders.

4: A bottle of Johnnie Walker Green Label costs around 200 Soles (£45), Blue Label costs about 800 Soles (£175) and a bottle of Dom Ruinart Champagne costs in the region of 400 Soles (£88) while Dom Perignon will set you back at least 1000 Soles (£220). If there are any bottles of single malt whisky to be found in South America then I’m looking in the wrong places so far.

5: The best Ceviche is served in Lima.

6: Alpaca slippers are comfortably within the top five most wonderful things you will ever put your feet into.

7: Good cheese is more addictive than heroin and is technically classed as pornography when displayed in full colour A4 photographic form.

8: Macdonalds still tastes like shit on other continents.

9: I’d probably be dead if it wasn’t for the help, kind heart and multi-lingual might of Maartje Koelemij.

10: There is certainly not enough time in even the longest lifetime to fully explore and understand the vastness that is South America and its many incredible cultures and peoples.

Anyway that’s enough holiday notes for now. I was going to make my first new post a tasting note or two seeing as I have been fortuitously furnished with a fresh set of tasting samples. However, in light of recent musical developments, I have decided to do something I haven’t done on these pages for a while, a whisky and music pairing.

I think the second or third post I did on this blog was concerning my love for the music of Paul Simon, I said I would write again about his music and, true to my word, here we are. Simon released a new album in April, ‘So Beautiful Or So What’, new Paul Simon albums are rare thus making them special by any standards but this one came in a kind of perfect storm of happenstance. I was about to travel as it was released, this meant long silent night busses to spend alone with the music, to become deeply acquainted with every flicker of melody and couplet of lyric, to know the darker corners and hidden shades of the album as a whole. It was also at a point where I have recently been learning many of Simon’s songs on guitar simply to force myself to improve my simplistic abilities, this has lent me a whole new understanding of his songs and his staggering fluency as a musician, not to mention an even deeper respect for the man. Finally this album is actually brilliant, which helps a great deal. All too often with your most cherished artists you find yourself listening to a new album and subconsciously making excuses for them, politely pretending to yourself that this is still good stuff they’re doing. Here there is none of that, the album is the best he has done since ‘The Rhythm Of The Saints’ twenty years ago, it is comfortably the equal of that great album (if not quite as majestic as 1986′s ‘Graceland’).

Through the years Simon has strived to explore new musical territories, many of them rhythmic in nature as his songwriting has for a long time been based from the rhythm upwards. Here he seems to offer a musical landscape populated by the hallmarks of his past and yet still somehow new. The elegant melody of his folk derived sounds is in rich abundance, but like on all his albums the melodies are never obvious enough to drift into predictability or trite prettiness. Instead they are woven through a textured fabric of world class musicianship that is not about grandstanding or solos but about the service of the song. Simon has, over the years carefully surrounded himself with some of the most intuitive, sensitive and brilliant session players in the world and this album seems to showcase this achievement almost more than any other. The impression upon listening is that everyone cares deeply about ‘the song’, the musicianship is bereft of ego or vulgarity, the guitar lines are sparse and beautiful, focused in such a way that only intensifies the power of the music and channels your attention deeper into the innards of each song. There are the Latin and African influences that are a career mainstay since ‘Graceland’ only here they are a balanced, if essential, component of a larger whole. Those flickering rhythms and beds of percussion percolate the whole album in a way that gives it a ‘sound’ yet still allows each song its individuality. Simon has stated that this album was an experiment to some extent with the idea of the album as a piece of work in its own right. In this age of downloads, randomly mixed Ipods and instant playlists, is the album a dead artform? The answer is obviously no but the album is very much an ‘album’, perhaps the most thematically cohesive work Simon has produced since his eponymous solo debut in 1972. Nowhere is this in better evidence than in Simon’s lyrics. Most songwriters seem to lean in strength either towards musicality (ie McCartney) or lyricism (ie Dylan) in their songwriting skills. Simon however seems to be one of the few who truly balance the gap with equal ability on both sides of the songwriting coin. The answer is probably in the fact that he releases an album so infrequently, his style is one of a slow and playful craftsman, a deeply intuitive ability with music but a methodical and disciplined will to take the right time to perfectly craft the songs. This natural method hasn’t always worked but when it does, as with this album, the results are almost unbeatable. He displays levels of songmanship and musical craft that leave most other contemporary songwriters miles behind in the shallow waters of distant memory. Songs like ‘The Afterlife’ (see above) set the thematic tone for the album with a deep rooted yearning for spiritual comfort but channeled through a fabric of humour, wit, warmth and cold honesty in his social and self assessment. The journalistic nature of the song reveals a recently deceased man waiting in line for the afterlife where in equal measure he is lost against the incomprehensibility of God and the universe…

After you climb, up the ladder of time, the Lord God is here.
Face to face, in the vastness of space, your words disappear.
And you feel like swimming in an ocean of love, and the current is strong.
But all that remains when you try to explain is a fragment of song…

… and yet, while he waits in line he tries to chat up a girl…

Woah, there’s a girl over there, with the sunshiny hair, like a homecomin’ queen.
I said, “Hey, what you say? It’s a glorious day, by the way how long you been dead?”
Maybe you, maybe me, maybe baby makes three, but she just shook her head…

His ability as a lyricist is showcased on this album almost better than on any other, although they lack the bite of earlier works they compensate with riveting honesty and depth. His ruminations on love and God that are the emotive driving forces of the album are typically melancholy but inescapably truthful and bereft of cliche or sentimentality. The power is compounded by the warmth and truthful intimacy of his voice. For a man pushing 70 his voice is in remarkably unchanged condition, slightly darker in timbre here and there but otherwise his levels of expression and freshness remain startling. The overall impression is that the extra years have served to impart a wisdom to his voice that has come naturally in place of some his earlier more powerful vocal passion. In all this album is a beautifully crafted and thematically precise collection of songs that seem effortless yet offer haunting and humorous speculations on loss, life, love and God. Without a doubt one of Simon’s best albums and a perfect example to shatter the idiotic myth that songwriting is a young man’s game. These songs are seething with experience and sound just like the thoughts wrung from a mind startled by the immense pain and joy that a lifetime can bring in equal measure. If you are at all interested in songwriting and the art and craft of the song as a means of communication then listen to Paul Simon, most others pale in comparison.

So, as is tradition on this blog, lets pick a whisky to drink while listening to this album. This, I am realising as I type is a much greater challenge when considering a whole album, a work full of twists and turns, quirks of melody and lyric that offset various moods and themes against each other, jumping over and between different feelings and ideas and often returning to but equally abandoning these same contemplations. Tricky in other words and the only thing that comes to mind is a whisky that keeps developing, a dram that evolves in complexity and depth over time but returns upon itself to central flavours and aromas, a whisky that has an obvious structure but with a myriad of adorning and overlapping complexities that add flesh and personality to its bones. It is tempting to just say ‘fuck it lets have an old Ardbeg or Brora‘ but this is a cop out I feel. Besides I don’t really feel compelled to wrestle with such a beast while listening to this music, the two forces need to be complimentary not competitive. A whisky in this situation should be a liquid conductor that helps to fuse the music to your mind and soul.

Oban is an often overlooked or underrated spirit. This is probably due to the fact that most people try the 14yo and quite like it but never get any further because the whisky world is virtually bereft of independent or aged examples. They do exist and most are actually fantastic, the majority of the more obscure expressions you can try range from good to utterly stunning. Like Paul Simon with his rare album releases, he never really wrote a bad song or made a bad record, some are just better than others. I’ve been fortunate enough to try this old seventies era bottling a couple of times and it is a wonderful dram, an example of west coast highland whisky that is not made any more, except perhaps at Springbank (and arguably Oban but lets not get into that). Salty, coastal, powerful and fruity with a gentle complexity that keeps it interesting and evolving all the time. Like the best Obans it is deeply evocative of the place it was made, of the west coast of Scotland and all the weather and memory that those words entail but it is also a mentally nourishing dram. Not overtly peated, not boisterous, just confidently full bodied and potent in its flavours and intensity of personality. I love Oban and, like the music of Mr Simon, I wish there was more available but I suppose the rarity is part of the charm, that’s what makes it special, when one comes along, you can bet it will be worth waiting for.

Next time we’re going to Campbeltown, until then, have a joyful time of it and try and listen to ‘So Beautiful Or So What’, ideally with a big dollop of Oban in a glass.

It’s been a long time since my last post. This is largely due to epic quantities of work here at PSF and many ‘extra curricular ‘ activities at the weekends as well. Activities like trips to the Ocucaje desert.

The Ocucaje Desert in all its silent splendor.

The Ocucaje Desert is infamous as a fossil hunting ground for everyone from homely geologists to determined smugglers. It is essentially a forty five million year old fossilized sea floor. Parts of the desert are so startling in their oceanic qualities, with endless beds of wind worn shells and partially exposed whale skeletons, that just being there spaces you out too far to fully grasp what you are looking at.

One of many ancient whale skeletons that the desert coughs up every few years after erosion and sand reallocation.

Our guide was a man of spectacular and commendable madness named Roberto Penny Cabrera. A native Peruvian, although a direct descendent of the conquistadors apparently, he spoke technically excellent English of which only 30% was understandable due to his own brand of passion infused, sanity starved ranting. During the four hour drive into the desert from Ica we gathered that Paleontologists and Archaeologists were the enemy, but that Geologists were acceptable. We also learned that he had forgotten it was his birthday the next day, his main interest was in brains and asteroids and that he knew of a spot on a woman that when touched would make her “…open like a flower!”

Roberto in all his glory. My friend Rupert having a bit of wander in the background.

We saw many things in the desert, we saw things so thick and fast that the one day we spent there felt like time expanded across a whole week. Whole days of experience concentrated into one pure and endless scattering of hours. We saw the fossil beds, the whale skeleton with crystallized brain tissue, a gorge cast in waves of corrugated rock walls by moulds of air over countless millennia. We saw human remains scattered across an ancient burial ground that belonged to the Paracas People, the exposed bones and fabric discarded like strewn fragments of brilliant white china, brittle, forgotten and unknown. The hands of what might have been children were draped across the desert floor, some still with mummified skin and fingernails attached. In short, we agreed it was one of the best weekends of our lives.

One of the many bones lying idle in the Ocucaje.

But of all the endless wonders we were exposed to in the desert there was one thing that struck me more than any other. It was in the darkness the night we arrived, after we pitched the tent and sat down underneath one of the most star drenched skies we ever saw, it was the silence. Not just the quiet you get in a deserted forest, not even the kind of quiet you get in the remotest parts of Scotland or another country. Here there was nothing, not a single lick of breeze, no distant breath of aircraft in the skies, no occasional flicker from a far off highway, no creatures, no life, only the fossilized sound of extinction all around us. The silence was deafening, heavy and thick. A transparent weight across the night through which you looked at magnified stars. Every patch of sky threw up a dusty splatter of milky way that you had never seen before, each new corner revealed quiet shooting stars and the infinite fizz of the universe. All filtered through the greatest absence of noise you could ever hope to hear. The only piece of music that springs to mind is this one, perhaps it would be one of the only places on earth you could truly ‘hear’ this music.

For all that this piece of music has been mocked in its time, its purpose is not really directly musical. Here at PSF there is a communal courtyard that is filled with people working during the day and at night with people relaxing, socialising, drinking and eating. The volunteers change as people come and go, the jobs change the work changes and the only constants are the tick tock of day and night, the heat of the sun and the endless carnage of music that is played from our speakers all the time. I am driven often to distraction with the kinds of music played here so endlessly, music that is not my taste at all that is rendered even more aurally poisonous when re-mixed with the whine of circular saws in the yard and the bleating traffic outside the house. One man’s music is another man’s noise and like the piece by Mr John Cage above, the desert reminded me that sometimes a true and deep love of music is reliant upon its occasional absence, sometimes silence is the missing part of life’s score. The desert was the most silent place I’ve ever been, it made our slow return to civilization a noisy one. Now I hear the cars outside my window and the shrieks of the nighttime in Pisco with a greater sensitivity than I thought possible, now the cacophony is a symphony of pain. But I wouldn’t change the experience of the desert, no matter how loud things get.

I thought quite hard about what whisky I might have chosen for this experience if I could have taken one with me. In retrospect it’s probably for the best that I didn’t. Knowing me I would have opted for something obscenely delicious, expensive and silly. The problem is that swimming in pure, liquid silence under a field of stars is something of a humbling experience, if you’re going to drink anything with it it should really be as unassuming and quietly beautiful as possible. That’s where the old official Longmorn 15 comes in. Leaving aside the olfactory beauty of these old Longmorns for a moment, it is worth remembering that for a long time this was an under-appreciated bottling, especially in its glory years of the late 80s and early 90s. So to drink one now is something of a quietly special experience, a moment when you can reflect on what a great and simply delicious drink whisky can be and so often is when it works. When all the bullshit is stripped away and you are left with only a simply put together yet beautifully crafted spirit. These old Longmorns are among the best bottlings, in my opinion, at reflecting this. It is whisky at its most honest and humbling, uncomplicated, delicious and satisfying. Not something to be precious about but something to respect, share and love. I would have loved to have had a bottle of this that night in the desert, to have shared it with Rupert, Stephen and Walter, the friends I travelled there with. I miss whisky, but at least I know there is plenty of it awaiting me upon my return home, I might never go back to that desert and to have shared it then with such great people is an experience that probably not even whisky could have improved. The silence was intoxicating enough.

ps: That spot was the big toe (apparently).

This post is something out of time a little bit as it concerns neither whisky tasting nor peruvian travels, it is also sadly overdue as it really should have been written a couple of weeks ago when Gerry Rafferty sadly passed away. For those of you who are not familiar with Gerry Rafferty you will probably know him as the author of the famous song ‘Baker Street’ with its timelessly mind burrowing saxophone solo. To me and countless others though he remains one of the finest Scottish songwriters of all time. He was a quiet musician, unconcerned with the trappings or powers afforded a man by fame and money. He was concerned more deeply with the point and craft of songwriting and the expressive powers that lay within.

Gerry’s first serious musical foray was with Billy Connolly in The Humblebums, after which he formed Stealers Wheel with Joe Egan, a partnership which produced his other famous composition ‘Stuck In the Middle With You’. But with Gerry Rafferty the devil really is in the detail, his finest songs are his quieter more reflective ones. I always thought he shared something with George Harrison in that he is often brushed aside as easy listening MOR fare by most brainless music critics who’s sole investment in the music is a quick skim through a greatest hits album. In reality his songs display a rare maturity, their taught and disciplined structures are designed around melody and precision rather than excess and self indulgence. The lack of garish or intrusive solos and instrumentation (Baker Street is the one notable exception here) leave harmonically lush platforms from which to let the lyrics and melody speak loud and clear. If you read much of the music posts on this blog you’ll know my musical tastes lean heavily towards the idea of songcraft and the work of the song writer. Gerry Rafferty was one of the great unsung song craftsmen, he had great natural affinity with the ticks and bones of music, it makes so many of his songs feel effortless. Perhaps that’s why he was so often dismissed as ‘easy listening’, maybe people were just not really aware of what they were hearing.

That was ‘Night Owl’, the title track from his 1979 album. It’s one of his best songs in terms of sheer craftsmanship, emotive yet precise and controlled, every instrument in close alignment with each other, in other words every individual part serving the greater whole of the song. It is the radio side of Rafferty, the side that is often played on classic rock stations, the sort of music that is too easily filed under the ‘Dad’s driving music’ category. It is an odd state of affairs that the moderate success he had actually served to make his greatest abilities more obscure in many ways. But that obscurity was perhaps inevitable, he disliked the music industry and there was always a distance inherent in his songs. There is no overt effort in them to lay the narratives bare or hand their meanings to the listener on a plate. He wrote and sang those songs most of all for himself, a musical pressure valve that he periodically tapped into because it was what made him tick, not for the gratification of those that might hear it. He enjoyed the ultimate obscurity he achieved, he was rarely recognised in the street and was at liberty to record if and when he felt like it with little pressure for commercial success. He lived comfortably due to his yearly income of at least £80,000 per year from the revenue of Baker Street alone, although this was probably his undoing in the end. At this point I would usually write some nonsense about pairing a suitable whisky to go with his music but Gerry Rafferty was an alcoholic, a vice he never conquered and from which he died only a few weeks ago, so I think on this occasion we’ll forgo the whisky pairing. After all, who really needs anything to drink to truly enjoy music, who needs anything but ears? Gerry was a valuable commodity in this world, a creature that arrived and created honest and meaningful music. Music that was conjured up without political design or strange motivation. He did not use what fame he garnered to grind a personal agenda or half heartedly attempt to raise awareness on behalf of issues or causes that tickled his fancy. He simply wanted to make music and he did so in a unique and beautiful fashion, and although he paid a heavy price for it in the form of alcoholism and depression in parts of his own life, the rest of us are a little richer for having his songs to listen to. This is my favourite, ‘Whatever’s Written In Your Heart’ from his finest album ‘City To City’, an album you should all own.