The Whisky Barons by Allen Andrews

Author:Allen Andrews
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781906476557
Publisher: Neil Wilson Publishing
Published: 2011-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Sheriff of London, 1897

Courtesy of Dewar archive

CHAPTER FOUR

Alcohol is Purer but not Superior

THE FIERIEST OF ALL the pioneers of modern-blended Scotch whisky was Peter Mackie, the ‘father’ of White Horse. From the point of view of the traders, who were angrily divided before they reached a final harmony, Mackie was at times a dangerous propagandist. For he had a puritanism of thought which impelled him to pursue his logic to the end of the argument, even when it pained the more commercially minded of the patent-still grain distillers. He had a foot in both camps – owning one famous malt distillery and building another, but using the product of the large grain distilleries for his blend. Yet he attacked the ‘young, cheap, fiery whisky’ – by implication, immature grain products – ‘responsible for most of the riotous and obstreperous behaviour of drunks’, and prompted ferocious head-shaking among the company directors who disposed of it. The only explanation of his conduct – which even his enemies accepted – was his insistence on high quality, which is no disgraceful hobby-horse to ride. In the end, his uncompromising stand was of great benefit to the quality and reputation of Scotch whisky.

Peter Jeffrey Mackie, who gloried in his Highland blood, was born in 1855, which made him six years younger than James Buchanan and nine years older than Thomas Dewar. At the age of twenty-three he joined the partnership then run by his uncle, James Logan Mackie, which owned the Lagavulin Distillery on the island of Islay. He went to Islay immediately, to begin his education. Islay lies in the Atlantic, off the west coast of Scotland beyond Kintyre. Its whisky has always had the most pronounced flavour of all Scottish malts. It is generally described as ‘peaty’, but peat is used in the drying of the malted barley for all malt whisky, and Mackie always said that his water, which had run from two lochs over a hundred waterfalls before it reached his distillery, had passed over a bed of moss as well as peat, which gave it its distinctive flavour. At any rate, Lagavulin whisky was individual enough in its own right to be bottled and casked as a single malt whisky, and exported long before the whisky boom of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The flavour of Lagavulin, nowadays somewhat overridden to suit the more bland requirements of today’s consumers, can still be distinguished in White Horse.

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