How the water of life poured back into Port Ellen
Nina Caplan travelled to Islay to witness the rebirth of one of the island’s most romantic and revered distilleries - and found a thriving culture where that distinctive whisky is flowing abundantly again
The plane coasts onto a small strip of runway on Islay, an island a hundred-odd miles west of Glasgow, and the window fills with pastureland, the odd sheep and perhaps the small town of Port Ellen, white houses cuddling the water. Dark rocks jut from the greenery and sand dunes fringe the golf course; a square lighthouse offers a warning to people arriving by more traditional methods. But the island’s most important attribute isn’t visible from the air. The grass is rooted in a type of decayed organic matter known as peat: barley toasted over that will produce a whisky that is distinctive, rich and earthy yet mineral, often with tropical overtones.
This is a flavour profile so instantly recognisable, and so beloved of its fans, that there are now ten distilleries on an island that is barely 230 square miles. That is not a stable number: fashions in whisky as elsewhere rise and fall. In the 19th century, by all accounts, there were as many as 15, while the current figure has only applied since last March, when Diageo reopened Port Ellen distillery.
Other megabrands with distilleries on this tiny scrap of turf include LVMH, Beam Suntory and Remy Cointreau and Sukhinder Singh, who founded The Whisky Exchange (now owned by Pernod Ricard), is building another, as is Pernod Ricard itself. Bucolic appearances notwithstanding, this is an island that makes good use of its airport. In fact, tucked away behind the sand dunes, there’s also a helipad.
The lights are back on at Port Ellen after decades in the darkness
That wasn’t idle either, during my visit in March 2024. Two groups of VIPs were being treated to a full tour of the new distillery, with its shiny copper phoenix stills and widescreen views of the bay, plus a gala dinner catered by Isaac McHale of London’s two Michelin-starred Clove Club restaurant. As befitted their lifestyle and spending power, certain members of one group were arriving by helicopter. We journalists were the other lot.
Not that we were slumming it. Diageo (or rather its precursor, DCL) closed Port Ellen in 1983, to much wailing and gnashing of teeth. The economy was in the doldrums and peat, for the drinking public, had lost its savour. The remaining barrels of Port Ellen whisky were carefully hoarded and wisely distributed in tiny, highly coveted releases. For four decades the building, just half a mile from the bay – even closer to town than Laphroaig, a mile and a half east – was shuttered. Ellen was a ghost.
‘This is a flavour profile so instantly recognisable, and so beloved of its fans, that there are now ten distilleries on an island that is barely 230 square miles’
Actually, there was already a phantom Ellen: Lady Ellinor (Ellenor) Campbell, wife of the Laird of Islay, Walter Frederick Campbell, who built the town in 1821 as part of his attempts to improve the lot of the inhabitants – attempts that would eventually bankrupt him. Port Ellen is named for her and when she died, aged just 36, in 1832, he built a lighthouse as a tribute – a rare, square-walled example, the only such in Scotland. On an unseasonably sunny day, we picked our way across the rocks for a look.
There’s no denying that a white pillar plonked on a rock is an odd token of undying love. There is a plaque, a screed of fine sentiments in purple Victorian prose, hymning both the dear departed and the inspiration she provided to save seaborne voyagers from the rocks. Although, given its peculiar positioning, a curious sailor would have to risk those rocks to read it.
Port Ellen’s distinctive square-walled Victorian lighthouse
I mean no disrespect. On such a balmy day, this would be an ideal place to haunt: the sea as clear as the Caribbean, lapping a tiny strip of sand bordered by cheerful daffodils. Sea trout play here and so, sometimes, do dolphins, seals, the occasional whale. Nonetheless the town across the bay feels more the kind of memorial I’d appreciate.
Port Ellen has stone houses, at a time when islanders would mostly have lived in turf huts. I have read about plenty of hard-headed lairds who threw their peasants off the land to make way for sheep. Walter Frederick is the first one I’ve encountered who prioritised the people, to his own detriment. He was a boon to the whisky industry, too, supporting the Johnstons who founded Laphroaig (now owned by Beam Suntory) and the Gardiners who started Ardenistle, which only lasted until 1866. He seems to have helped several other fledgling distillers too, as far back as 1821. Which is odd: distilling was only legalised in Scotland in 1823.
‘On such a balmy day, this would be an ideal place to haunt: the sea as clear as the Caribbean, lapping a tiny strip of sand bordered by cheerful daffodils’
The new Port Ellen distillery is gorgeous. No expense has been spared, from those giant stills to the elegant living room above the lobby, where the walls are adorned with an artistic depiction of whisky’s flavour profiles next to a giant installation in shades of amber intended, presumably, to do the same for the spirit’s palette.
Both the still room and living room have walls of windows giving onto the bay: the water of life, indeed. Everything here has been done to the highest spec, with productivity, quality and as much respect for the environment as is consonant with a potential output of 1.6 million litres a year. Control is the watchword. There are six rollers on the mill, allowing greater precision in the grind, and two experimental stills. The spirit safe is a masterly piece of fine-tuning apparatus, portioning the distillate into ten parts instead of three, a Ferrari instead of a tricycle.
Minimum fermentation time here is 98 hours, resulting in a much fruitier liquid than Lagavulin or Caol Ila, the company’s two other Islay distilleries, where the lower limit is around 55 hours. Port Ellen can recycle about 97% of its water and the intention is to be carbon neutral. It occurs to me, as I gaze out to sea past the shining pair of giant stills (replicas, as the originals vanished into the 1990s), that they too make a bright tribute of a kind, to the distillery that was. Another Ellen memorialised.
‘The spirit safe is a masterly piece of fine-tuning apparatus, portioning the distillate into ten parts instead of three, a Ferrari instead of a tricycle’
Port Ellen distillery was established in 1825, just four years after the town, and was very innovative for the time. Its fortunes have waxed and waned, however: 1983 wasn’t the first closure. The current incumbents say they want to reproduce the Port Ellen of 1967-1983, its last incarnation, but surely they mean that they want to keep the successful elements and lose whatever obliged the company to close down at the end of that stint. They want those tropical, mineral notes, the smoke, the peat – the magic. The untimely ending? That's the part they hope to jettison, like the feints.
I visited several distilleries during my short time on Islay – it’s not hard, with an island this small, even if some of the roads are more sheep track than megabrand superhighway. Despite their proximity, each has its personality. At Bowmore, there’s a traditional malting floor – a man with a rake, digging lines in the barley to aerate it, up and down like something from Walter Frederick’s era – while Caol Ila on the east coast looks across to the Isle of Jura as if wistful for a simpler past.
Alexander McDonald, distillery manager at Port Ellen
Ardbeg, which predates legalisation, has turned its former kiln into a visitor centre. Bruichladdich whisky ranges from unpeated to the ultimate peaty Octomore, which is a little like licking a clod of turf. All these distilleries offered something unique – usually in a small ‘driver’s dram’ bottle. I’m looking at the one that held Bowmore’s delicious 2021 Golden Ratio as I write, and wishing it were still full.
Port Ellen, despite its long history, is like a new-minted millionaire amid the landed gentry. Everything is shiny, not just those stills. Upstairs, rare Japanese teas are served to the privileged few, each intended to echo a note – smoke, honey, apricot – in Port Ellen whisky. I leave with a whole new whisky vocabulary, and I haven’t had to ingest a single unit of alcohol.
‘We have pancakes made from barley and stuffed with pork jowl: a Scottish taco – this is a monoculture reimagined, glamorised beyond any peasant’s recognition’
I do, though, when we return to that room, now transformed into a banquet hall, for the gala dinner. Isaac, asked to take inspiration from his surroundings, has clearly enjoyed the challenge. He has smoked trout over Port Ellen whisky-barrel staves, with almond cream and caviar, and set west-coast langoustine adrift in charcoal hollandaise and seaweed, followed by a soup from the shells and heads, with beremeal noodles. (Bere is an old variety of barley, and this bere is from Orkney, as is Isaac.) He has made pancakes from more barley and stuffed them with pork jowl: a Scottish taco. Even the ice cream is flavoured with peated barley: this is a monoculture reimagined, glamorised beyond any peasant’s recognition.
One of Port Ellen’s ‘Phoenix stills’, which are exact replicas of the original, long-lost copper pots
Here is the evolution of single malt whisky, from smugglers’ potion to premium product, on our plates. Wines not whisky accompany our feast: good ones, from Mayfair wine importers Justerini & Brooks, also owned by Diageo: Corton Charlemagne Grand Cru, Chateau Lynch Bages. Isaac likes matching his amazing dishes to beverages (he is opening Bar Valette, a casual dining venue with French and Spanish accents for “dinners fuelled by wine and sherry”, in London this month). The Phoenix stills are our backdrop, gleaming quietly across the courtyard.
‘The water of life ebbs and flows. Our ways of drinking whisky change and so does the whisky itself’
And the dinner culminates, of course, with Port Ellen whisky: the 15th release, from the last year of distillation, 32 years old at time of release, in 2015. Spice and smoke, Christmas notes of cinnamon and nutmeg: it’s a beautiful dram. It’s also a blend, despite being a single malt: of eras and ideas. Past meets present, a memorial becomes fuel for the future. The water of life ebbs and flows. Our ways of drinking whisky change and so does the whisky itself – Walter Frederick would probably find his lost love’s namesake startlingly unlike the drams he remembered. Yet it wouldn’t be entirely unfamiliar. Peat and barley, smoke and memory. The past retains its poignant tang.
