Matuse In Whiskeyland

Photos: Michael Kew

“Don’t you know Islay offers more than whiskey, Michael?”

She was a red-eyed coffee drinker, a kombucha brewer, an organic juice squeezer, a rare Scottish hippie—possibly an ex-drug addict—working the reception desk of my Port Charlotte hostel. She was pale, Meryl Streep-ish, about 35, wearing a purply tie-dyed T-shirt, brown leather sandals, a long blonde ponytail, no bra, no makeup, jangly earrings, tight black jeans, and large oval eyeglasses that telescoped the center of her face. I was a whiskey pilgrim ferry-fresh from mainland Scotland via Kennacraig, onto the Hebridean isle of Islay to taste its single-malts and tour some distilleries—Laphroaig, especially—after my surfy outing in Orkney and a jaunt across the mystic panoramas of Shetland.

“Bloody strange that people will travel all the way here just to drink whiskey,” she said. “It’s like going to England just to drink tea.” I told Heather that, for me, Islay’s whiskey was cerebral, not mere drink, and Laphroaig’s aroma and palatal complexity—iodine, peat, salt, ocean, seaweed, smoke—flung my psyche afar.

-Michael Kew