I got called sentimental recently. It was a charge levelled in good humour by friends and it was in relation to the post I wrote about saying goodbye to my friend Rupert. About sharing some Old Pulteney 12yo with him during the moto ride to the bus station. You can judge for yourselves here. On reflection I think I probably am prone to sentimentality. It is hard not to be in the wake of such emotional circumstance. So these thoughts are very much in my mind this week since I left Pisco Sin Fronteras this Tuesday. I can’t promise I won’t be sentimental about it.

Thays and Laura, two of the hardest working friends I met at PSF.

I’ve often alluded to the difficulty in trying to sum up feelings about something like PSF. It is a life changing experience to spend time somewhere like that. At the moment it is still so raw and close that objectivity remains a struggle. I don’t know how my attitude towards it all will flesh out in the coming months and years, what will come to stand out and signify that overflowing four and a half months. A Tardisesque spec of time, with its hidden depths and corners stuffed so full of experience that it seems now scarcely real. The feeling of having awoken from a dream floats around me as I’m stuck here in Puno, waiting for a bus to take me the rest of the way to La Paz.

Maartje and Tim at the 'Ultimate Ninja' tournament.

However there are images, spectres in those dreamy visions that spring to mind. When I think of PSF I think of cement dust, I think of the shattering whine of circular saws. I think of warm beer and standing in line for dinner. I think of an old woman and her disabled daughter. I think of electric shocks in the shower. I think of impact drivers and run down batteries. I think of people crying under the weight of emotion. I think of maddened laughter and drunkenness. I think of sweat. I think of sunburn. I think of goodbyes. I think of a desert with many faces. I think of a young girl called Georgette, sent back to her mother in Lima without a goodbye. I think of wood. I think of wood reconstructed in a myriad of new forms. I think of modular panels and I think of earthbags. I think of hunger and of money. I think of my own family far away. I think of Stephen, Rupert, Laura, Alex, Thays, Maartje, Carson, Andrew, Frank, Lucy, Suzanne, Lisa, Dylan, Kathryn, Pete, Jimmy, Lynn, Robin, Christian, Anna, Brodie, Sabrina, Amanda, Tim, Ariel, Jack, Jen, David, Leo, Bevan, Mel, Kareen, Nessa, Coleen, Naveen, Heather, Patrick, Natasha, Kent, Leen, Will, Shannon, Alec, Quentin, Brian, Jaffa, Beccy, North, Eileen, Imran, Magnus, Kitty, Liam, Ross, Marley, Dakota, Claudi and many more.

Georgette, a young girl who lived on our project site for a while. She was seemingly allergic to good behavior.

When I left I gave into my own sentimentality and shared, yet again, a whisky in the back seat of a mototaxi with another truly great friend, Alex. It went down well over the fading sting of the previous nights Climax session (see here). Myself and fellow long termer Laura left at the same time and were accompanied by Alex and Thays to the bus station. I’ve known Alex for the full four and a half months I’ve been at PSF. He is Scottish and we shared much common experience of Glasgow and its University. We were the only two Scots there for most of the time and made short work of expressing this through endless thematic banter. However we only just discovered in the last two days that we shared a mutual best friend and had met on several occasions over the past few years. Especially when we went paintballing together and attended the same ‘silly hat party’. We both agreed that it is indeed ‘a small world’.

Alex, my fellow Scottish compadre. Shown here in one of his better moods.

I shared a small bottle of the Springbank 10yo ‘100 Proof’ that I was saving for this week’s Campbeltown tastings. Like the Old Pulteney last time it seemed perfect, potent, raw and intruding across all senses. Maybe it’s just something about coastal whiskies. It also made me think of how people that truly love whisky use it as punctuation to life’s deeper moments. Whisky has a real power to articulate and score situations like these, to underline and hammer home the emotion and significance of what goes on outside the glass. I loved every drop of that Springbank as we drank it, to the point that you may well question the validity of the notes I am about to write for it. I saved some to write about but the proximity of my last experience with it may well cloud my judgement. I don’t know if it will or not. You may have to take my notes with a pinch of salt. I think sometimes writers are allowed some leeway to be a little biased though. And what’s more…. I couldn’t care less.

Springbank 10yo. ‘100 Proof’. OB. Bottled 2009. 57%. 70cl.

Colour: Pale white wine

Nose: Wet, punchy and coastal at first. Brimming with wet rocks, minerals, lemon juice, oysters, peppered mackerel and citrusy, oily phenols. Has something quite Longrowesque about it, like the two spirits met somewhere along the line and shook hands. It’s brimming with expressive coastal aromas, even at full strength with big notes of salty black olives, seaweed, kelp, brine, something faintly medicinal and fresh lime juice. With water: big grassiness now, green, fruity and herbaceous, delicate garden fruits and still more coastal character but with more overt complexity now. Becomes more salty, gristy and mentholated with time.

Palate: Neat it’s a powerhouse with alcohol talking much louder than on the nose. It’s gristy and oily, like old boilers with plenty raw, clean cereal notes behind the pepperiness. Has a lot of youthfulness but the flavours do all the talking and it is remarkably well poised between youthful power and controlled maturity. Pine resin, petrol, spearmint and creosote all appear with still more intensity. Probably needs water: has some farmy elements now like old hay, horse stables and coal. Becomes quite sooty and those gentle peaty phenols become drier and smokier. Some kippery notes emerge as well along with notes of thyme and rosemary. Saltier still, this is epically coastal whisky.

Finish: Long, limey, lemony, zingy, fresh, salty, coastal and oily. Really sticks to the gums this one.

Comments: I love this whisky. I remember trying it when it was first released, I went and bough a bottle of it and I found it quite hard going. I took a long time to finish it. I think it is a good indication of how your tastes can change, I love these old school, difficult whiskies now. I find this an infinitely more challenging dram than many of the Islay peat monsters. This has real old school character to it, probably more so than any other modern Scottish distillate. I wish they hadn’t discontinued it, I don’t think the new 12yo is nearly as good as this baby. For my money this is the best thing Springbank has released in a long time, naked distillery character, well matured, expressive and fantastically focused whisky. I imagine this will be utterly stunning after twenty more years in the bottle.

Score: 90/100

Praise indeed but I still think my score is fair, despite any emotional ‘attachment issues’.

Lets hope there is more of this kind of whisky floating around the warehouses at Springbank.

I don’t know how I’ll come to measure PSF in the future, but this much I know for certain. I made the best friends I ever knew there and it was the best thing I did in my life so far. Bad things can only be undone and changed in inches, and with the help of many people better than me, I helped to change a few more inches. I hope the process continues beyond the borders of PSF, I hope the feeling of PSF is an infection that spreads, one that I’ll never shake as I continue that endless journey they call ‘growing up’. Maybe that’s sentimental, but I find myself without the presence of mind to worry about such things these days.

Well I’m back, which in itself is good news considering the questionable nature of my existence a couple of weeks ago, I even managed to avoid any major sunburn. We had some rather sticky issues at the Ecuador/Peru border at 1 in the morning, overslept and ended up much further into Ecuador than intended and I was seduced by the charms of a ridiculously oversized Alpaca hat in Lima much to the pain of my finances. Still, a wonderful, thrilling and often life affirming time was had. There are too many shreds of overlapping experience to begin talking about here but I will say a few things of interest/note.

1: Ecuador is fucking hot! I stepped out of a very comfortable, air conditioned bus into an oppressive weight of smothering, tropical heat that felt like being wrapped up in moist, recently microwaved, blankets.

2: Placing your body at the unfamiliar heights of 5000 meters above sea level is akin to having lengths of rope slowly tightening round your chest and head while someone pumps anorexic air into your brain with a large pair of fire bellows. It affected me so greatly that by the time we reached our destination of Lake 69 I was scarcely able to behold its otherworldly blueness (see below). Let alone make pointless and inappropriate jokes about its obvious sexual connotations (a missed opportunity that is most unlike me).

Lake 69. This photo is, believe it or not, completely unedited, the water really did look like that.

3: To be on a boat again after so long, winding lazily through a dark river beset by jungle, is something with true power to remove any weight from your shoulders.

4: A bottle of Johnnie Walker Green Label costs around 200 Soles (£45), Blue Label costs about 800 Soles (£175) and a bottle of Dom Ruinart Champagne costs in the region of 400 Soles (£88) while Dom Perignon will set you back at least 1000 Soles (£220). If there are any bottles of single malt whisky to be found in South America then I’m looking in the wrong places so far.

5: The best Ceviche is served in Lima.

6: Alpaca slippers are comfortably within the top five most wonderful things you will ever put your feet into.

7: Good cheese is more addictive than heroin and is technically classed as pornography when displayed in full colour A4 photographic form.

8: Macdonalds still tastes like shit on other continents.

9: I’d probably be dead if it wasn’t for the help, kind heart and multi-lingual might of Maartje Koelemij.

10: There is certainly not enough time in even the longest lifetime to fully explore and understand the vastness that is South America and its many incredible cultures and peoples.

Anyway that’s enough holiday notes for now. I was going to make my first new post a tasting note or two seeing as I have been fortuitously furnished with a fresh set of tasting samples. However, in light of recent musical developments, I have decided to do something I haven’t done on these pages for a while, a whisky and music pairing.

I think the second or third post I did on this blog was concerning my love for the music of Paul Simon, I said I would write again about his music and, true to my word, here we are. Simon released a new album in April, ‘So Beautiful Or So What’, new Paul Simon albums are rare thus making them special by any standards but this one came in a kind of perfect storm of happenstance. I was about to travel as it was released, this meant long silent night busses to spend alone with the music, to become deeply acquainted with every flicker of melody and couplet of lyric, to know the darker corners and hidden shades of the album as a whole. It was also at a point where I have recently been learning many of Simon’s songs on guitar simply to force myself to improve my simplistic abilities, this has lent me a whole new understanding of his songs and his staggering fluency as a musician, not to mention an even deeper respect for the man. Finally this album is actually brilliant, which helps a great deal. All too often with your most cherished artists you find yourself listening to a new album and subconsciously making excuses for them, politely pretending to yourself that this is still good stuff they’re doing. Here there is none of that, the album is the best he has done since ‘The Rhythm Of The Saints’ twenty years ago, it is comfortably the equal of that great album (if not quite as majestic as 1986′s ‘Graceland’).

Through the years Simon has strived to explore new musical territories, many of them rhythmic in nature as his songwriting has for a long time been based from the rhythm upwards. Here he seems to offer a musical landscape populated by the hallmarks of his past and yet still somehow new. The elegant melody of his folk derived sounds is in rich abundance, but like on all his albums the melodies are never obvious enough to drift into predictability or trite prettiness. Instead they are woven through a textured fabric of world class musicianship that is not about grandstanding or solos but about the service of the song. Simon has, over the years carefully surrounded himself with some of the most intuitive, sensitive and brilliant session players in the world and this album seems to showcase this achievement almost more than any other. The impression upon listening is that everyone cares deeply about ‘the song’, the musicianship is bereft of ego or vulgarity, the guitar lines are sparse and beautiful, focused in such a way that only intensifies the power of the music and channels your attention deeper into the innards of each song. There are the Latin and African influences that are a career mainstay since ‘Graceland’ only here they are a balanced, if essential, component of a larger whole. Those flickering rhythms and beds of percussion percolate the whole album in a way that gives it a ‘sound’ yet still allows each song its individuality. Simon has stated that this album was an experiment to some extent with the idea of the album as a piece of work in its own right. In this age of downloads, randomly mixed Ipods and instant playlists, is the album a dead artform? The answer is obviously no but the album is very much an ‘album’, perhaps the most thematically cohesive work Simon has produced since his eponymous solo debut in 1972. Nowhere is this in better evidence than in Simon’s lyrics. Most songwriters seem to lean in strength either towards musicality (ie McCartney) or lyricism (ie Dylan) in their songwriting skills. Simon however seems to be one of the few who truly balance the gap with equal ability on both sides of the songwriting coin. The answer is probably in the fact that he releases an album so infrequently, his style is one of a slow and playful craftsman, a deeply intuitive ability with music but a methodical and disciplined will to take the right time to perfectly craft the songs. This natural method hasn’t always worked but when it does, as with this album, the results are almost unbeatable. He displays levels of songmanship and musical craft that leave most other contemporary songwriters miles behind in the shallow waters of distant memory. Songs like ‘The Afterlife’ (see above) set the thematic tone for the album with a deep rooted yearning for spiritual comfort but channeled through a fabric of humour, wit, warmth and cold honesty in his social and self assessment. The journalistic nature of the song reveals a recently deceased man waiting in line for the afterlife where in equal measure he is lost against the incomprehensibility of God and the universe…

After you climb, up the ladder of time, the Lord God is here.
Face to face, in the vastness of space, your words disappear.
And you feel like swimming in an ocean of love, and the current is strong.
But all that remains when you try to explain is a fragment of song…

… and yet, while he waits in line he tries to chat up a girl…

Woah, there’s a girl over there, with the sunshiny hair, like a homecomin’ queen.
I said, “Hey, what you say? It’s a glorious day, by the way how long you been dead?”
Maybe you, maybe me, maybe baby makes three, but she just shook her head…

His ability as a lyricist is showcased on this album almost better than on any other, although they lack the bite of earlier works they compensate with riveting honesty and depth. His ruminations on love and God that are the emotive driving forces of the album are typically melancholy but inescapably truthful and bereft of cliche or sentimentality. The power is compounded by the warmth and truthful intimacy of his voice. For a man pushing 70 his voice is in remarkably unchanged condition, slightly darker in timbre here and there but otherwise his levels of expression and freshness remain startling. The overall impression is that the extra years have served to impart a wisdom to his voice that has come naturally in place of some his earlier more powerful vocal passion. In all this album is a beautifully crafted and thematically precise collection of songs that seem effortless yet offer haunting and humorous speculations on loss, life, love and God. Without a doubt one of Simon’s best albums and a perfect example to shatter the idiotic myth that songwriting is a young man’s game. These songs are seething with experience and sound just like the thoughts wrung from a mind startled by the immense pain and joy that a lifetime can bring in equal measure. If you are at all interested in songwriting and the art and craft of the song as a means of communication then listen to Paul Simon, most others pale in comparison.

So, as is tradition on this blog, lets pick a whisky to drink while listening to this album. This, I am realising as I type is a much greater challenge when considering a whole album, a work full of twists and turns, quirks of melody and lyric that offset various moods and themes against each other, jumping over and between different feelings and ideas and often returning to but equally abandoning these same contemplations. Tricky in other words and the only thing that comes to mind is a whisky that keeps developing, a dram that evolves in complexity and depth over time but returns upon itself to central flavours and aromas, a whisky that has an obvious structure but with a myriad of adorning and overlapping complexities that add flesh and personality to its bones. It is tempting to just say ‘fuck it lets have an old Ardbeg or Brora‘ but this is a cop out I feel. Besides I don’t really feel compelled to wrestle with such a beast while listening to this music, the two forces need to be complimentary not competitive. A whisky in this situation should be a liquid conductor that helps to fuse the music to your mind and soul.

Oban is an often overlooked or underrated spirit. This is probably due to the fact that most people try the 14yo and quite like it but never get any further because the whisky world is virtually bereft of independent or aged examples. They do exist and most are actually fantastic, the majority of the more obscure expressions you can try range from good to utterly stunning. Like Paul Simon with his rare album releases, he never really wrote a bad song or made a bad record, some are just better than others. I’ve been fortunate enough to try this old seventies era bottling a couple of times and it is a wonderful dram, an example of west coast highland whisky that is not made any more, except perhaps at Springbank (and arguably Oban but lets not get into that). Salty, coastal, powerful and fruity with a gentle complexity that keeps it interesting and evolving all the time. Like the best Obans it is deeply evocative of the place it was made, of the west coast of Scotland and all the weather and memory that those words entail but it is also a mentally nourishing dram. Not overtly peated, not boisterous, just confidently full bodied and potent in its flavours and intensity of personality. I love Oban and, like the music of Mr Simon, I wish there was more available but I suppose the rarity is part of the charm, that’s what makes it special, when one comes along, you can bet it will be worth waiting for.

Next time we’re going to Campbeltown, until then, have a joyful time of it and try and listen to ‘So Beautiful Or So What’, ideally with a big dollop of Oban in a glass.

Well actually we’re not, well maybe you are, I don’t know, if you are I hope you have a great time, although I probably won’t be thinking about you too much because I’ll be having a great time myself on my well deserved break. It’s official, the creative part of Whisky Online is taking a break until May 10th. During this time I will be traveling through various northern chunks of Peru with the possibility of a whistle stop tour of Ecuador and a smattering of Brazilian Jungle.

While modern vaccinations against such things as yellow fever and rabies have proven to be very effective in protecting travelers from all walks of life against the various infections and diseases to be found in the more vegetated parts of South America, I suspect that it may take more than those simple shots to protect my fragile Scottish interior. I anticipate being exposed to levels of heat and humidity I have hitherto only experienced through the safe medium of David Attenborough documentaries. Not to mention the vast quantities of creepy crawlies that exist in the more foral climbes of Peru, I fully expect that this time next week I will be in some kind of ‘Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom’ style scenario. I am also understandably dismayed by the fact that I have not been able to consume sufficient quantities of whisky to help repel foreign anomalies entering my system. Usually I would be able to rely on my blood sitting at a rather healthy 80% Proof, however during the last few months in Pisco it seems that I have become dangerously low on vital ‘Scottish Antibodies’. And I don’t think climax (see previous blog post) is a suitable alternative to whisky.

So with this in mind and the distinct possibility that I will perish on route before I return to the (relative) safety of Pisco, whisky is very much on my mind this month. In fact, as I am duty bound to keep an eye on the regularly changing product lineup on Whisky Online’s main website and often provide product details, I have begun to formulate a sort of whisky wish list. There has been a great deal more rare and obscure bottlings going up for sale lately and it has been a great source of frustration to look at them from afar, they may as well be velociraptor eggs or signed copies of the Turin shroud for all their availability to me. So while I am away here is a short list of some of the whiskies that will be invading my dreams and percolating their way through my fantasies.

The Springbank Millennium Collection is a pretty serious piece of kit, I’m counting it as one bottle which is obscene cheating but I don’t care. I’ve always wanted to taste these whiskies and seeing as I adore aged Springbank I suspect at least as few if not all of them, are fantastic. I’ve heard mostly good things from those that have been fortunate enough to try them already, although also a few negative reports, it all just intrigues me all the more.

This Glenmorangie is a very recent addition to the site, it’s one that I’ve never seen before, a single cask (number 4318) distilled in 1980 and bottled 1990 at 60% vol. This hails from before the days of wild wood experimentation and designer casks at Glenmorangie, if the standard 10yo from this era is anything to go by this should be a completely different beast from modern Glenmorangie. I find this kind of Glenmorangie irresistible, its so hard to find more naked examples from this distillery these days. And such beautiful presentation to boot.

Wayne seems to have gone on a bit of a Macallan bonanza lately and put up a shedload of stunning old examples that remind us just what made this distillery so utterly great. This is an old 10yo bottled in the early seventies by trailblazing Elgin based bottlers Campbell, Hope & King. They were the first bottlers to start bottling whisky at 80 degrees proof and they were also reputed to have the best Macallans because they would put small quantities of fine aged Brandies into the casks, legend or fact… who knows? What is certain all these years later is that some of the greatest Macallans are indeed the Campbell Hope & King bottlings and this one, an example I’ve not seen before, should be utterly stunning. In fact I may have to put some kind of drool guard on my keyboard.

Not all things need be rare and expensive. Above all else, for some reason, I’d probably nurture an international incident and swallow a cauldron of fermented hobo socks to get my hands on a bottle of Lagavulin 12yo right now.

So that’s what I’ll be pining for over the course of the next two weeks. I’m sure I will encounter more interesting alcohol on my travels, stories of which I will dutifully share with you upon my return. Until then have a wonderful pair of weeks, eat, drink, love and be merry.