It’s almost four years since Rob Allanson, editor of Whisky Magazine, Ken Hamilton, archaeologist and Morris dancer, and myself made an attempt, by motorcycle, to blend the ultimate Scotch whisky. With a great deal of help from former Edrington Group master blender John Ramsay, and the proprietors of the most northerly, southerly, westerly, easterly and most central (arguably) distilleries in Scotland. We succeeded, too.
The first edition of the little book that resulted from this not unpleasant endeavour was given away, for the most part, with the whisky we made – a limited edition which cost around £300 a bottle. If you have an iPad you can download it here. I have just, after much brain-racking and digital angst, uploaded it to the Kindle store on Amazon. Yours for just over a quid. A TV series was made as well, which can still be seen on YouTube.
Our westernmost distillery, Islay’s Kilchoman, is no longer the most western. Abhainn Dearg in Lewis now has that honour. I have been there and sampled its product. It is a wonderful, characterful place, and well worth a visit.
To make the experience interactive, you will need the following whiskies, in this order:
Highland Park, Kilchoman, Bladnoch, Garioch and Glenturret.
Leave some for a shot at blending when you reach the end. I’m afraid that tracking down a bottle of the actual Journey’s Blend will be difficult. And very expensive. Oh, and you should download the book, obviously. It has some quite nice pictures and each of the participants – Ken, Rob and myself – get to tell their own story of what the trip was like. Meanwhile, here’s a wee taste:
From Journey’s Blend: Tom Morton’s Tale
We need stories. Life is about stories; life IS a story. We make sense of things by telling each other, and ourselves, tales. In our heads, around campfires, over dinner, drinks, cigarettes and Earl Grey tea. Politics is a story, religion is the big story, feathering down into millions of little tales. There are true stories, there are more-or-less untrue ones, and there’s fiction. And there are the lies, of course.
A lot of the time, in the current climate of obsessive love for malts, the stories are not those of the whiskies themselves, 
but illustrations of the professional tasters-and-sniffers’ descriptive and imaginative powers. The stories being told are of ego and so-called connoisseurship, of performance and, essentially, showbiz. And those attributes are gladly accepted and taken on board by an audience eager to enter into a freemasonry of arcane knowledge, of bizarre descriptions and tastes ordinary people either cannot recognise or, in their ignorance, hate and despise. To belong. To collect. To know secrets.
But each whisky has a story beyond that, a tale told not inside the head of a performer, but in the place, the people, the materials that go to construct each distinctive dram. Particular combinations of land and sea, water, peat and oak. Histories in stone, flesh, blood and money. Economics and politics. Crime and punishment, love and betrayal.
Most of all, whisky is about Scotland. Whisk(e)y may be about America, Ireland or elsewhere, but Scotch Whisky is Scottish. In many ways it is Scotland. You cannot understand it without travelling the roads, swaying aboard the ferries, touching the casks, smelling the dank thrill of a warehouse, shaking the hands of craftsmen and women who manoeuvre grains, yeasts, liquids, wood and glass to make tales that taste like nothing else on earth. Nowhere else.
And it’s about alcohol. It’s all too easy to forget that the life in the water, the beatha in the uisge, the enlivening bit, is about ethanol. And in Scotland, that’s about death as much as life. As such, it doesn’t mix with motorcycling at all. At least, not before and during. Jancis Robinson once told me she wished wine was non-alcoholic, as then she could taste that much more it without her sensory processes becoming stewed. But alcohol is key to the appreciation of both wine and whisky; just as it is the perfect mode of transference for perfume, it carries flavour, aroma and tang to the palates and nostrils of imbibers.
This is not the history of five whiskies. That would be a much longer book. It is the story of three men, frequently five, and their journey towards making five whiskies one. It’s about motorcycles. It’s about a journey to touch, smell, feel, taste and talk about uisge beatha, the water of life. The liquid narrative of our lives. It’s about Scotland.
But it’s not the whole story. And for me, it started in Glasgow. And not well…
Journey’s Blend, by Tom Morton, Ken Hamilton and Rob Allanson, is available to purchase from the Kindle store.