Friends, I know the white-bearded, chimney-loving sky-rider will have called by now, but those with Amazon vouchers looking for stimulating redemption or hard cash to burn might like to consider Whiskey and Philosophy: A Small Batch of Spirited Ideas, edited by Fritz Allhof and Marcus Adams, and available now both from www.amazon.com and www.amazon.co.uk, as well as the discerning bookshops even more deserving of our support. I’ve contributed the opening essay in this engagingly catholic collection.

Contributor with collectionThere’s little tough professional philosophy in the book, so don’t be dissuaded from a look even if you can’t cope with ding an sich and the Tractatus. Many of the essays begin with a single philosophical concept (such as the form in relation to its parts, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle or the impermanence which is the cornerstone of Buddhist philosophy) and apply that, jocularly enough, to whisky/whiskey. Some of the texts are narrative; some even whimsical; most good-humoured. Lots on bourbon and Japanese whisky also.

Mine might even be the most boringly written and po-faced essay of the lot. In fact I’m still a little shocked by the iconoclasm of what I’ve written, and many of those who know Peat Smoke and Spirit may be, too. Let me explain.

The brief was to provide something of an introductory overview to the topic, and also to address the structure of Scotch whisky production.

Yet writing for a book whose intent was avowedly philosophical was an opportunity to think about whisky in a more coolly analytical way than is customary for a ‘whisky writer’ (a professionally fervid breed). Objectivity is hardly possible whenever words are involved, but the aim was to set aside subjectivity as far as I could.

My Islay book was an attempt to explore both a place and its most celebrated product. Naturally that involved some scrutiny of the relationship between place and flavour, which is my main research interest in the wine field.

In wine, the impact of place on flavour is clear, even if the tracery of mechanisms by which this unfolds is complex.

In whisky, the matter is less straightforward, as my essay shows. Indeed it seems that the fundamental elements of flavour in malt whisky are not related to place. Or, to quote my essay, “the impact of origin in the creation of malt whisky flavour is ... largely chimerical.”

Horror!

Well ... not wholly chimerical. Water is a very minor flavour in whisky creation, but I’ve been up to the lochs from which Lagavulin and Laphroaig draw their water, and that bog-brown H2O does have a softly vegetable taste which the mains water in the Ibis hotel in Glasgow’s West Regent St doesn’t.

The maltings in Port Ellen doesn’t always use Islay peat, but it customarily does, and Islay peat will be differently constituted (in certain obscure and subtle ways) to the peat used at other, mainland maltings. The smoke which lovingly suffocates the malted grains in Port Ellen, before blowing out over the washing lines and drying bed linen of the small township, will therefore be unique of its kind.

And any Islay malt stored for its entire maturation cycle on the storm-lashed island (a tiny proportion of Islay’s total production, alas) will experience and respond to a very different quality of air to that held in mainland storage.

But that’s it. And it’s fractional. Wherever flavour exists, it will leave its trace, but my objective contention is that these are liable to be minor traces. Precious, but minor.

‘The taste of Islay’ as popularly conceived is in fact the taste of a traditional island approach to malt whisky distilling. This approach, though, can be substantially duplicated elsewhere, as will become increasingly evident when the new, peaty whiskies produced at malt distilleries all over Scotland eventually mature and reach the market.

Other moments of iconoclasm? Well, I suggest that Scotch whisky production is indeed industrial, albeit an industrial process which takes place (as the generation of nuclear power often does) in remote and picturesque locations; that conglomerate-domination within it is inevitable, and that conglomerates have done a good job in “steering and satisfying the global demand for Scotch whisky astutely”. Oh, and that the differences between most Scotch whisky blends are slight (“feathery emphases”) compared to the differences one finds in the wine and beer worlds. I also suggest that most whisky drinkers probably don’t even like the taste of whisky.

Shocking, no? But that’s what happens when you change hats.