DISTILLERY PROFILE
Raasay revisited
Raasay distillery holds a special place in my heart. Not only is it a beautiful little island, the distillery has the best view in Scotland, across to the Cuillin mountains on Skye. It’s also the last place I visited with the Society before the coronavirus saw us forced into lockdown from March 2020. This month sees the Society’s first release of single cask whisky from Raasay, so I thought it was time to dust down this feature from Unfiltered issue 47, which landed in May 2020
WORDS: RICHARD GOSLAN
PHOTOS: PETER SANDGROUND
ADDITIONAL PHOTOS COURTESY OF RAASAY DISTILLERY
AD
I’m standing beneath a blanket of stars on the Isle of Raasay with Alasdair Day, co-founder of the distillery behind us. We gaze at the constellations glittering across the night sky, clutching a dram of his ‘While We Wait’, a rosy-tinted single malt that he created in anticipation of the distillery’s first release later this year. It’s the perfect spot to raise our glasses and toast both the distillery and the island’s future prosperity. It might feel like a moment of arrival, but as Alasdair says: “We’ve only just begun.”.
If Raasay’s future as a whisky-making island has only just begun, it’s been a long time reaching this point. You could trace it as far back as the late 19th century, when Alasdair Day’s great-great grandfather was working a world away from here, as a whisky blender at J&A Davidson in Coldstream in the Scottish Borders.
Having joined as an office boy, he ended up taking over the business in 1923, changing the name at the time to Richard Day. And it was his treasured cellar book full of his recipes for blended whiskies that was handed down through the family until it finally reached Alasdair.
“In 2009 my dad said to me: ‘You can have the book, but you've got to do something with it’. So I went through it and realised that I could probably get all the different whiskies I needed to recreate my great-grandfather’s Tweeddale blend, nine whiskies in total. I went out and bought nine casks, put the blend back together, and in May 2010 I sold my first bottle of Tweeddale.
“By about 2012 it was getting harder and harder to buy mature whisky to blend, and I thought if I was going to do this full time it would need serious investment. But when I worked out what it would cost to buy and mature new fillings for a long-term blending business, it was about the same amount of money I needed to build a small distillery.”
ABOVE: Isle of Raasay distillery co-founder Alasdair Day
PICTURED: The best view from any stillroom in Scotland?
ABOVE: The distillery has brought a new source of employment alongside Raasay’s traditional industries such as fishing
CUPID STRIKES
Enter Bill Dobbie, serial entrepreneur and founder of the online dating and matchmaking website Cupid. Bill had sold part of the business in 2013 and was looking for something more tangible to invest in than algorithms. His best pal, Iain Hector Ross, had an idea.
“Bill and I were friends from going to school together in Glasgow, and we still go on holiday every year,” says Iain. “We were on holiday talking about possible investments while drinking a malt whisky.” Bill has a passion for wine, and combining Scotch whisky with his interest in wineries and chateaux was a natural progression.
That’s when the match was made between Bill the investor and Alasdair the blender.
“My wife Marion is from Raasay,” Iain says. “A lightbulb went off in my head and I thought: ‘If you’re going to go down the line of building a distillery, I might have the very place for you – how about an island distillery?’ You’ll tap into a fantastic island community, your ‘next door neighbour’ on Skye is Talisker, so whisky infrastructure and trade links are heading for this part of the world anyway. The island itself has fantastic historical stories, its geology is world renowned. And by the way, here’s a picture of the view.”
That view was from the exact same spot where I’m sipping a dram with Alasdair, outside what was Borodale Hotel. It had been designed as the factor’s house in 1877 by Alexander Ross – the Inverness-based architect who was also responsible for Glenmohr, Glenalbyn and Dalmore distilleries – and had gone through various incarnations and stages of neglect over the years.
“Bill went to visit the Isle of Raasay with his wife and two kids in February 2014, and stood here in front of what looked like a house from a Hitchcock movie,” remembers Iain. “Bill stood out front in a hailstorm and declared:
‘This is where the 10-year-old Isle of Raasay single malt is going to be produced!’ Here we are, six years down the line, and we’re looking forward to the launch of the first Isle of Raasay single malt in history later this year!”
ABOVE: The abandoned homestead of Hallaig on Raasay is commemorated in a celebrated poem by Raasay-born Gaelic poet, Sorley MacLean
ABOVE: The pier at Raasay looking back across to the mountains of Skye
TAKING SHAPE
Bill and Alasdair set about creating a distillery on an island with no legal history of whisky-making, gaining planning permission in early 2016, breaking ground in mid-2016 and running spirit for the first time in September 2017.
The distillery was designed by local architect Olli Blair, who has kept the renovated Borodale House at the heart of the complex, with the compact still room looking out across the Sound of Raasay to Skye’s Red Cuillin mountains. The building also subtly incorporates different aspects of Raasay’s landscape, from gently sloped roof forms that mimic the island’s highest point, Dun Caan, to an impressive dry stone feature wall in the ‘Gathering Room’, representing different types of rock from the island along with discarded stone and lintels from nearby Raasay House.
Inside the distillery, the stars of the show are the pair of Frilli stills, a long way from their Tuscan origins. They have been designed with the optional use of a cooling jacket on the lyne arm of the wash still when running peated spirit through the stills. This provides additional reflux to feed the vapours back into the still, to build up some of the heavier characteristics desired in Raasay’s peated spirit. The spirit still also has a small purifier that can be turned on or off to concentrate the desired fruity and blackcurrant flavours from an unpeated spirit run.
Frilli’s spirit safes are also a talking point – two separate cylindrical safes, where the difference between the wash still and the spirit still can be clearly seen both in the clarity of the spirit and in the colour of the copper, from the darkened copper of the wash still to the vivid verdigris of the spirit still, like an Art Deco installation.
A BLENDER’S VISION
The 10-year-old bottling that Bill Dobbie envisaged is still some way off, but Raasay is already looking forward to its inaugural release later this year of a single malt whisky, distilled and matured on the island. It will be a lightly peated spirit, distilled with barley peated at 40 ppm but taken from a narrow cut from the spirit run, matured in bourbon casks for two years and then transferred into Bordeaux red wine casks.
The distillery’s core release is due to follow in 2021, showcasing Alasdair’s background in blending to create a spirit that combines both peated and unpeated expressions drawn from three different cask types: virgin chinkapin oak, bourbon with a high rye content and Bordeaux red wine.
“With our peated and unpeated spirit maturing in three different casks, we’re creating six flavour profiles which we’ll then blend back together, and that’s how you get complexity and depth into a young whisky,” says Alasdair.
“You can't change the ageing process, but what you can do is introduce different flavours in a different way. Our virgin casks made with the quercus muehlenbergii, or chinkapin species of oak, have a high char, high toast, giving colour really early on but with a softer sweeter character than quercus alba virgin oak. The style of whisky we want to make is lightly peated with dark fruits, cherries and blackcurrants, which the chinkapin gives you. Then our rye casks give a much more peppery note, but they’re still quercus alba so you get those vanilla notes, butterscotch, flavours like that coming through as well. And then the Bordeaux red wine casks contribute dark fruit flavours.
“It takes me right back to the vision we started out with when we designed the distillery, to create a smoky, lightly peated whisky with a dark fruit flavour, perhaps like some of the older Bowmore styles – it’s a style of whisky that people talk about but it isn't really out there. Yes, there’s peaty whisky and there's fruity whisky, but most fruity whisky tends to be more apples and pears whereas we're more about cherries and blackcurrant.”
PICTURED: Raasay distillery is joined on to the historic Borodale House, now fully restored and which includes the distillery’s own hotel
BORN AND RAISED ON RAASAY
A sense of place is also key to Raasay’s vision, with as much of the whisky’s creation and maturation reliant on what the island provides as possible. Water comes from a 60-metre borehole behind the distillery, known as Tobar na Ba Bàine or the ‘well of the pale cow’ (there’s even now a white cow in the field across the road from the distillery). The water is rich in minerals and is used in every stage of production, from distillation to cask and bottle dilution.
Raasay is also experimenting with different strains of barley grown on the island, looking beyond the usual commercial varieties – which can’t cope with conditions here – towards varieties from inside the Arctic Circle that can thrive with the damp conditions and the short growing season. So far, the Norwegian variety Brage, Kannas from Sweden and the Icelandic Iskria have proven successful, although a field only provides one tonne of malt – enough for the equivalent of one batch, or three rye casks full of whisky.
There are plans to expand the amount of barley being sown and harvested across the island, as well as to use local peat to dry it. But whatever Raasay produces will be matured on the island, with two new warehouses completed in October 2019. One is being used for dunnage and the other for palletised cask maturation, with capacity available for the next six or seven years of production.
MORE THAN WHISKY
On an island of only around 160 people, it’s hard to overstate the importance of a venture such as a new distillery, which now employs 21 staff as well as extra tour guides and hotel staff over the summer. It has also enticed some of the island’s former residents back home, with the promise of that most elusive of prospects on a remote Scottish island – a full-time job.
Calum Gillies was born and raised on Raasay and is now back on the island, working as a guide within the distillery, providing photographs and videos for the website and social media, and even jumping behind the wheel of the Raasay distillery Land Rover to drive guests across the island, show off some of his favourite views and bring its fascinating history to life.
“It’s hard to appreciate what Raasay was like five years ago, how down in the dumps it felt,” he says. “I left here to work at sea, then moved to Orkney, but now I’m back home, five minutes from work, in a salaried position – it's unbelievable, I didn't expect to be able to live on Raasay again.”
Operations director Norman Gillies is another returnee to Raasay, where among his overall role in running the distillery he’s able to keep his father Cuddy supplied with draff from the mash tuns for his sheep. Head distiller Iain Robertson, meanwhile, relocated from Livingstone three years ago when he answered the call for one of the remotest distilling jobs available – and it’s clearly worked out. Iain has married a local girl on Raasay and they are expecting their first child in July.
“To not only see young people coming back to the island, and having a future and a career, and also the likes of Iain moving here and bringing new life to Raasay is fantastic, it really is,” says Alasdair. The notion of whisky as uisge beatha, or the water of life, has never felt so appropriate, and one more reason to raise our glasses to the night sky. Raasay may have only just begun – but it’s already come a long way.
*Job titles and information were correct as of time of writing in 2020 but may have changed
ABOVE: Drawing samples inside Raasay’s warehouse
ABOVE: Operations director Norman Gillies is a returnee to Raasay
WHISKY TALK
Hear the story of Raasay’s distillery, and some island history, by tuning into our Whisky Talk podcast, available on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts and Stitcher.
SEE RAASAY FOR YOURSELF
Take a tour of Raasay in the Society’s video from our visit in 2020