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A distillery and the outside world: neither we nor whisky are made in isolation.
Dave Broom said that ‘we smell our way through our lives’. I for one get rather excited when someone meditates on the role our senses play in how we interact with the world around us and how those encounters shape who we are. For now, let me just say that I agree with Mr Broom (the beard commands respect) and I shall endeavour to explain why.
Our olfactory senses trump our eyes and ears, hands down. By this I am not inviting blindness and deafness; I am immensely appreciative of my ability to see and hear: the beauty of Scarlett Johanson would be lost on me without the former and the same applies to the melodies of countless rock groups minus the latter. What I mean to say, however, is that sight and sound are absorbed and compartmentalised with very little conscious input from ourselves. It is as if the vision of the desk in front of me and the sound of my flatmate rummaging through the kitchen cupboards is jealously contained within the neural pathways connecting receptor and processor. They are signals alone, and do not illuminate any other regions of my self.
My Pears soap, on the other hand, is a very different story, because it attaches me to a much earlier personal narrative edited and arranged by my brain into a neat, startling order. When soap vanished from the shower tray and appeared on my shopping list, I was intrigued to see Pears in the local supermarket. Once home, I extracted the bar and was hooked bodily back to the shower room of the Port Askaig Hotel. Those sweet, nutty/grainy and herbal fragrances wiped away in a fraction of a second the five intervening months since my time on Islay. It was quite uncanny.
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So many young-ish crisp Speysiders have taken me back to this perfect moment.
The smell of the green tea and blackcurrant infusion of the London Fruit and Herb Company, freshly-brewed, has the capacity to transport me back years to a summer holiday where I drank little but. Aroma create 3D postcards from life’s archive. Unlike images and noises (except perhaps in the cases of those with seriously powerful emotion attached), the brain lodges away sniffs and snufflings, and when one encounters a scent that resembles it (entirely, or only in one sharp respect) it is as if an electric current has been conducted through your head. Engaging with flavour and aroma immerses us in the tangible world much more immediately and rewardingly.
A smell can speak of the recent past, too, preserving a moment in time, when perhaps the principal actor has since departed. Have you ever wandered along a corridor and been hopelessly beguiled by an abiding suggestion of perfume? One can speculate endlessly as to the wearer – it might even have been Scarlett Johanson (provided it was Dolce & Gabbana): one’s imagination was been piqued. Whilst we humans are not bloodhounds, certain fragrances do persist: the bottle of Lagavulin may have disappeared from the minibus in November, but the traces of peat and crisp malt in the atmosphere and upholstery spoke of its lingering presence the next day.
Every time you nose and taste a single malt, Irish whiskey, Bourbon, whatever, you are unconsciously challenging your brain to surprise you, to excavate something you may have experienced and then forgotten about decades ago. I shan’t apologise for mentioning him yet again, but Keith Wood enjoyed just this breed of revelatory moment recently. Little did he know when he poured out his test sample of Port Ellen that he would relive a holiday he had had on the Yorkshire coast as a very young boy.
In the 2009 Malt Whisky Yearbook, David Stirk tackled the tricky issue of whisky tasting notes and ratings. A salient point for this discussion is precisely how personal a response any whisky tasting is, unique to the individual. The better one appreciates this, setting out on an exploration of whisky undaunted by the terms they have to use or the flavours they ‘ought’ to find but motivated by the possibility of discovering a compendium of sensory memories contained within them, the more fulfilling our drams become.
A whisky’s maturation can, as Gordon & MacPhail have shown, extend to and encompass 70 years of quiet interactions. People are formed over a similar time scale. I would contend that a whisky’s complexity is so closely tied up with our own arcane recollections and aroma archives that the line between those qualities which we extrapolate from a whisky and those which a whisky unlocks within us is very difficult to draw indeed, and uncovers a fascinating subtext to those personal tasting notes of yours.
Whilst not wishing to put words in anyone’s mouth, I suspect that the reason Keith is considering inducting the Port Ellen into his personal Top Ten whiskies is not just because it is a brilliant whisky (I’m sure it is), but mostly because it could penetrate deep into the subconscious, and earth his intangible memories into a very real, experienced sensory world. Our nose and mouth have the power to convinve us that we are not creatures isolated, alone, in the present moment. One taste, one fragrance, can illuminate our personal timelines, retrieve and reanimate what we had never thought we had remembered.
Use your senses, I urge you: they just might take you somewhere amazing.
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A singular moment in Time, revived by a single malt: in this case Highland Park 12yo.