Churchill's Whisky

Advice from Scotland for an America in peril.

Single malt Scotch whisky is made with three things: barley, water, and yeast. Whatever character it gains in its development from those foundations has to come from time and handling, the passage of smoke over the grains or the years the liquid spends in barrels, soaking in the flavors of the wood.

To establish a style that’s distinctive enough to be identifiable, but variable enough to be interesting, you need a small number of unyielding rules that set boundaries on an otherwise unrestricted field of play. There’s an old Christian prescription for defining the requirements of church membership: “in essentials, unity. In open questions, liberty. In all things, love.” You could say the same of Scotch.

The parsimony and exactitude of this system makes it disastrous to lose even one of the essentials. So when World War II made barley scarce in Britain, whisky production was effectively shut down. Rationing tightened the flow of grain to all legal distilleries, then choked it off entirely as the war escalated to its desperate conclusion.

Winston Churchill, who loved whisky so much he used a doctor’s note to get around Prohibition when he traveled to America, must have imposed this wartime austerity measure with extreme regret. The year the war ended, he issued a firm directive to protect the barley supply chain against further interference:

On no account reduce the barley for whisky. This takes years to mature and is an invaluable export and dollar producer…. Having regard to all our other difficulties about export, it would be most improvident not to preserve this characteristic British element of ascendancy.

It’s the last line that gets me, because of what it says about the nature and purpose of a nation. Whisky was and is a valuable export, of course, worth producing for the economy’s sake alone. But it was also a “characteristic element of British ascendancy.” If Churchill could have achieved the same profits by starting up a chain of car parts factories throughout the Highlands, I doubt he would have.

It was more than money that made whisky important: it was the character of the thing, the venerable and unmistakable Scottishness of it. Churchill didn’t want Britain to come out of the war physically intact, but stripped of its cultural essence. That would almost have been like surviving in name only.

You can raise the melancholy question whether, in the last assessment, Europe actually did suffer exactly that fate, its spirit slowly draining from it in the aftermath of the 20th century’s harrowing trials. But at least Churchill was determined not just to keep living so much as to live a British life. Otherwise what would have been the point of keeping the old borders cinched in place around a featureless terrain, indistinguishable from any other tract of land?

Aristotle observed that a city is a city not just because it occupies a particular region in space, but because it passes down its customs over time and keeps a certain form of life intact. Things that might seem frivolous in isolation—sports rivalries, music festivals, rules for making liquor—take on load-bearing significance as part of this cultural profile. You could probably lose any one of them and remain the same people. But how many have to go before the country you knew is gone?

I’ve just been in Edinburgh, sitting an exam in whisky. When people find out there is such a thing, their first instinct is to make some joke about how fun it must be to learn by getting drunk. But actually we did most of our drinking on our own time. The majority of the test was about history and culture and craft—the laws and parameters that make Scotch what it is.

Now I’m flying back to a country that has crossed an ominous threshold in its own history, prosecuting and then convicting a presidential frontrunner with extreme prejudice. It’s obvious to me that a bright line has been crossed. But how many small things had to fall into disrepair before we got here—how many minor features have to change before you don’t recognize your own face?

I don’t think this is the end of the line for America by any means. And it’s my hope that our customs of ordered liberty can be restored, if not exactly as they were then in revitalized form. But that will require absolutely obsessive attention to small matters again, and relentless insistence on things that seem to a certain cast of mind like trivialities—borders, culture, civic participation, grade school education. Like barley, water, and yeast, there are some basics you need before you start experimenting. In unity, essentials. In open questions, liberty. And in all things, most needful and most rare of all, love.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer

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