A friend of mine, Gary Mead, has just published his second book: The Good Soldier: The Biography of Douglas Haig (London: Atlantic Books, £30). Gary’s first book was The Doughboys: America and the First World War (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 2000).

You shouldn’t take a friend’s word for it, but both are excellent; fluid, authoritative and gripping. Hew Strachan, Chichele Professor of the History of War at Oxford, writes of Gary’s “important contribution with this admirably lucid and balanced book” on Haig: “the first proper biography of this most controversial of figures”. You can now make your own mind up as to whether he was a donkey or not.

Author, Book and Dram

“Few associate [Haig] with the Scotch whisky, whose famous slogan went ‘Don’t be vague, ask for Haig’, although he was the son of the founder of John Haig & Sons Distillers. If he is remembered at all, he is fixed in our minds as an incompetent Great War general …” writes Gary, on page 2. Few perhaps, but it’s just possible those few may pass this way at some point – hence this short whiskorical diversion.

According to Walter Schobert’s excellent Whisky Treasury, “No other family has proof that it was involved in distilling from such an early date: there are reports from as early as 1655 that Robert Haig was fined by the church for distilling whisky on a Sunday.” There were many distilling Haigs, but John Haig’s double significance is that he was the pioneer of grain whisky, via his Cameronbridge Distillery, and he was also the driving force behind the amalgamation of a number of Lowland distillers to form the legendary Distillers Company Ltd (later United Distillers, and today the even mightier Diageo).

Haig built Cameronbridge as a Lowland Malt distillery when he was just 21, in 1824; his cousin, Robert Stein, invented the continuous still three years later, and Haig immediately had one installed at Cameronbridge. He later replaced it with two of the improved and renamed ‘Coffey stills’ in the 1840s, and by the time he died in 1878, Cameronbridge was producing an astonishing 5.6 millions of litres of spirit per year. It was this that gave his son the private means so useful to him in his military career, as Gary’s book details.

I remember Haig Gold Label as an underage drinker back in the 1970s; indeed when Charlie MacLean wrote his admirable Scotch Whisky Pocket Guide for Mitchell Beazley in 1993 (pocket guides! Those were the days …), it was still the 13th most important blend in the UK.

Then what?

Still Life with Book and Dram“When Guinness merged with the DCL,” Nick Morgan of Diageo tells me, “part of the deal involved Diageo disposing of some secondary brands in Europe. Haig went to Whyte and Mackay — but came back to us after a few years, down to issues of global consistency.” It’s now what is described as `an independent brand for connoisseurs in Greece’ … and you can also buy it on the Canary Islands. I believe the deluxe Dimple Haig (which American whisky drinkers will know as Pinch) is more widely distributed.

The Greek arrangement explained why, when Gary and I were trying to get hold of some for the magnificent book-launch party he decided to throw on the eve of Remembrance Day, we didn’t have much luck. Very kindly, Diageo obviated the need to make an off-season round trip to Athens by diverting some directly from the blending hall to Mead Acres in Kent. The photographs above show the book, the dram and the author, in full Edwardian garb.

How does it taste?

On the night, of course, amid the palms, the perfumes, the necklaces, the candlelight and the cigars, it was rich and gratifying. For the sake of science, though, I decided to blind-taste it a few days later against another leading blend – in this case, Black Bottle.

Colour
Sample 1: light honey-gold
Sample 2: much darker, with a russet hue

Aroma
Sample 1: creamy, soft, gentle and nourishing, with crushed grain and heather-honey appeal: subtle, refined and classical
Sample 2: raisin, fruit and toffee. It was rich, juicy, less refined (a touch of hessian) but jolly

Flavour
Sample 1: soft, full, with intense grain weight. It had a creamy mid-palate, but dried out a little at the end, with lots of grassy sinew. Slightly featureless, in sum, but satisfying, complex and close-grained. I thought it might actually be a little stronger than sample 2, but no, it emerged later: they were both 40%.
Score (as a 40% blend): 15.5/20

Sample 2: exactly as the nose suggested, this was full, juicy, rich and broad. It was satisfying, warm and sweet-edged, but less complex and intense than Sample 1.
Score (as a 40% blend): 13.5/20

Both came from freshly opened bottles. Naturally enough, knowing that Black Bottle contains malt from all seven major Islay distilleries, I guessed that sample 2 was Black Bottle and sample 1 was Haig. Wrong: it was the other way around. From which I concluded that Black Bottle does indeed have some very good stuff in just now, but that those top-class raw materials are fairly juvenile; and that Haig … has perhaps been blended in recent times with the Greek whisky drinker in mind? (I’ve no idea what it tasted like back in 1973; I didn’t make tasting notes back then, but merely tried to keep the ferocious liquid down and simultanously stay upright on my bicycle on the all-too-undulating ride back from Kelling Heath. Does anyone remember what it tasted like back then? Does anyone even have an old bottle at home?)

Anyway, a big thank you to Diageo for their sporting contribution to a mature historical view of the famous, and for some infamous, son of one of their founding fathers. There could have been no fitter bottle with which to launch the book.