I have in previous posts alluded to what looks on paper to be the best business trip ever: a day and a half on Islay being shown around the Laphroaig distillery and lectured on its processes, a tour of the island, a night in the capital Bowmore and – best of all – dinner with the Distillery Manager in his office looking across the North Channel to Bushmills in Northern Ireland, sampling some rare and spectacular bottlings.
Except that it wasn’t. It was the late ‘80s and malt whisky wasn’t much of a thing; Islay was a remote and very dull island; it was February and very cold, very wet and very dark; the so-called hotel in the so-called capital was on a level of dinginess to shame even 1980s Scottish tourism; every brown peat field we drove past looked equally dismal and boggy, and the only glimmer of positivity was looking across at Jura and thinking how lucky we were not to be their advertising agency as it was even browner, darker and more desolate. Worst of all – believe this if you can – I couldn’t stand the taste of whisky, all thanks to a nasty incident some years before involving a litre of duty-free Famous Grouse, a tent in the Pyrenees and a now-esteemed member of the Royal Yacht Squadron. I spent most of the trip worrying that the Distillery Manager would offer me a dram and I would promptly throw up on his Chesterfield sofa.
Well, he did, and I didn’t. He kicked off with the then-unusual 15 year old before moving on to the special stuff, and I discovered to my astonishment that if you spent a few quid more than the Grouse you could buy whisky that you would actually enjoy drinking, and so I have spent the intervening years doing so (and, incidentally, helping Laphroaig’s biggest competitors sell their arguably-even-nicer product around the world, but that’s another blog).
Back to the sailing. I did stand on the beach at Laphroaig all those years ago and think what a ridiculous place to put a distillery, surrounded as it was by hundreds of the nastiest rocks I had ever seen, which was a shame because one day it would be fun to sail there. Well now, finally, I have, without hitting any rocks (so far), and I am very proud and pleased because it was a highlight of the trip. However, it wasn’t Laphroaig, it was their neighbours down the coast, for reasons that will be revealed.
Having missed Islay last year, I had held it in reserve to do justice to the increasing opportunities to combine whisky with sailing. Since the ‘80s the world of single malts has exploded, and the distilleries that closed then are being re-opened and expanded and they still can’t keep up with the demand created by my life-long dedication to global whisky marketing. So it was important to select companions who knew their whisky onions and Roger and Andrew were excellent choices: their ability to provide well-researched and insightful questions with which to show off to distillery tour guides only occasionally verged on geekery, while their inability to sit still on a boat for more than a minute means that we have visited pretty much every corner of Islay and either walked, cycled or sailed to every single distillery on the island.
But first they had to get there, and yet again the best way to the Hebrides by boat is via Northern Ireland, so we met up in Ballycastle ready for the 25-mile hop across to Port Ellen on Islay. Arriving from Belfast airport at tea-time we compared the option of motoring in a rainy calm immediately with sailing in a Force 4 westerly early the following morning and took the sensible decision to wait, go to the well-stocked Co-op, excellent pub and civilised restaurant, all of which took long enough that by the time we got back to the boat the forecast had of course changed its mind and was now promising Force 5 for breakfast swiftly followed by 6 at lunch and 7 for tea, then staying that way for two days. Faced with two days standing on the Giant’s Causeway looking at the promised land of whisky we made the only decision available – leave as soon as the tide turned, at 0530 the following morning.
This turned out to be even more challenging than we feared: it was already a full Force 6 with bigger gusts, and to avoid the nasty overfalls off Raithlin Island we had to motor into it for an hour and a half before finally putting up some very reefed sails and heading to Islay. It was very cold, very wet, and even out of the tide race there were some nasty green-over-the-bow waves to contend with, come to think of it the first of the trip (so far, I suspect). But at least it was soon over, and we made it to Port Ellen looking like proper seadogs and feeling we’d earned the full Irish breakfast cooked in Scotland.
After a punishing sail before breakfast many would go back to bed, but not my live-life-to-the-full guests. Faced with two days of strong winds, within the hour we had e-bikes booked for tomorrow and a warm-up six-mile distillery stroll planned for the afternoon. I wasn’t really complaining: challenging sailing weather is often brilliant for walking and so it proved as we struck out for Laphroaig and Lagavulin, my two favourites.
What a difference 35 years can make. And perhaps a spot of sunshine. The island that I had remembered as dull, dark and brown was green, cheerful and sparkling. Most importantly, it’s clearly benefited from the whisky boom as well it should. Even dour little Port Ellen was looking spick and span, with three pubs, two restaurants, a café and what purports to be a marina but is actually two and half pontoons. The walk revealed not only that Laphroaig had had to take over half the local forest to build new warehouses for its stock, there was even a brand new distillery being built next door. We trotted up to the gates drooling at the thought of the peaty nectar beyond and found it was shut.
I should perhaps explain at this point that we had arrived in the middle of Fèis İle, the island’s annual whisky festival. I promise we hadn’t planned it. This involves, alongside lots of other fun and games, each of the distilleries taking turns to host an open day, with a range of often silly things to do alongside trying out the product. Think bagpipes, bouncy castles, pizza ovens, food trucks, artisanal craftspeople and bunting and you will get the drift. Not unreasonably, the day after each open day the distillery shuts its doors to catch a breath and concentrate on making whisky again. We had arrived on Laphroaig’s hangover day, as it were.
Nothing daunted we pressed on to Lagavulin, whose whisky I like just as much but don’t drink so often on account of it being twice the price. I was in two minds about this since it’s owned by my lovely ex-clients Diageo, so on the one hand there was a good chance it would have been made all shiny and corporate and inauthentic and it would have been my fault, but on the other hand they had contributed quite substantially to Blue Moon’s refit, so I owed them a visit.
What a nice surprise: the opposite of corporate, they had somehow managed to either preserve or recreate a distillery from the ‘30s, with wood panelling and frosted office doors with words like ‘Manager’ and ‘Office’ stencilled on them. Better still, they had a bar selling beer as well as whisky, which is more in line with sailors’ needs after 25 miles upwind into a near-gale followed by four more on foot.
We drank their beer and walked down onto their bay which turned out to be smaller, more picturesque and marginally less rocky than Laphroaig’s, and declared it a better distillery in every way. The only fly in the ointment was finding that they charged even more for their whisky than Waitrose does.
I have of course cycled round islands with Roger before on this trip, so I was a little nervous about just how demanding the next day would be, but the addition of a battery to the bike levelled up the playing field and made it possible to cycle 20 miles into a Force 7 to explore the West Coast. We’d decided this was better done by bike than boat in such a wind, and we were right: it’s all cliffs and rocks with white horses, except for the occasional deserted sandy beach with huge waves crashing ashore. All very wild and remote, and the beauty of the beach was made poignant by the discovery of the war cemetery for the several hundred American soldiers and British sailors who had drowned there in two separate incidents in WW1.
Luckily there was another distillery at hand to lighten the mood, and it was their open day. Kilchoman is one of the new builds and rather oddly, for an island devoted to coastal peatiness, describes itself as ‘the distillery on the farm’. It’s true, it is, and there was a bit of a farm feel to the buildings clustered around a tiny courtyard in which we met for the first time the true festival-goer. An eclectic mix of unexpected whisky fans, there were huge numbers of Germans with handlebar moustaches and either Harley Davidsons or campervans, Scandinavians with festival trophy T shirts, Chinese with selfie sticks and Americans with oversized Mercedes and BMWs rented (presumably) from Glasgow airport. This combination made the roads a little less relaxing in the afternoon, given that most of them had been drinking whisky in the sunshine while eating coronation chicken sandwiches, which appear to be an Islay speciality. Kilchoman won’t be troubling our Islay Top Ten whisky list but its distillery is a beautiful spot.
In order to get our money’s worth we felt compelled to cycle even more, which meant we ticked off Bruichladdich and Port Charlotte (the only distillery that remains closed) in short order before returning via Bowmore in search of ice cream rather than whisky. We were impressed by the café owner who could track the island’s only ice cream van on his phone, but disappointed to find it was an hour away upwind. By now it was so windy that we could more or less switch off the batteries and be blown home to Port Ellen.
And so to the crowning Islay experience. We all liked Ardbeg, which has historically been one of the smaller, lesser-known Islay whiskies, and I had spotted that their bay, just past Lagavulin, has not only the least rocks of all (still a terrifying amount) but also three buoys for visitors coming by yacht. Sold, we had booked onto a lunchtime tour the next day, so I finally lived the dream of sailing my own boat into a distillery bay and going ashore in the dinghy.
Better still, Ardbeg won lots of our other prizes too: it’s been bought by LVMH and spruced up without losing its charm; the guide was more knowledgeable and entertaining than any we had encountered before; and they sold their excellent whisky at less than the already very reasonable retail price, so we needed no further encouragement. Best of all, however, was being asked by the girl in the food truck where we were from: on hearing the word Medway she revealed that her mum came from Grain and on visits to Granny they went to Hoo (my home village and a complete dump) for days out.
And so we settled down to eat our coronation chicken with the best view of the boat – from within a distillery courtyard…
…or perhaps from the pier where the tour guide did the first tasting session…
…or perhaps from the still manager’s desk with the fabulous opening glass wall…
The magic was only slightly spoiled by the guide asking which was our boat and having to reply ‘the smallest one’. But I think I’d have taken this result 35 years ago.
PS I should point out before I am sued that the new distillery being built on the way to Laphroaig is not owned by them or their parent company Beam Suntory (ooh cat’s out); it’s actually owned by the guys that founded The Whisky Exchange and sold it for an eye watering sum. Quite a fun retirement project…
Blue Moon's trip around the UK 
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