Whisky in the golden hour

The golden hour, the period of transition between day and night when the earth seems to pause and hold its breath, readying itself for the changes that come with the hours of darkness. The last rays of sun sneak underneath the cloud layer gilding the hill on the other side of Finlaggan, transforming a haze of rain into a rainbow.

At this moment, Rachel Newton gently plucks her harp’s strings and starts to sing, her notes gliding over the calmed loch. A song, Mo Thruaigh Leir Thu Ille Bhuidhe, about smuggling whisky from Ireland to Scotland in a boat ‘as watertight as a bottle of wine with a cork in it’. 

We sit transfixed, conversation stilled, drams resting in our hands, occasionally drawn to lips. Boundaries seem to shift, the whisky becomes part of the music, the music part of the whisky.

She’s singing in Gaelic, which few of us there understand, making the music about mood, the rhythm woozy like the currents dragging a boat over the swell (or a drunk weaving the width, as well as the length, of the road). Ille bhuidhe, she tells me later, means ‘blond-haired boy’, which refers to the whisky itself. 

The best traditional music is simultaneously ancient and new, sufficiently malleable to be open to change and reinterpretation, alive with an energy that allows it to inspire new developments. It isn’t preserved, or anchored to an era. That would be like putting it onto a mortuary slab to be poked and prodded by musicologists.

Old and new: Traditional music from artists like Rachel Newton has life and energy

Rather, it plays with time, altering it, stretching it, reminding you of its passing from the first version to now. It floats free of the linear, into this place, this moment, flooding out, touching hearts.

Whisky is also about time. In every sip we take as Rachel plays, we taste the vestigial memories in the liquid of barley, distillery, peat, wood and air. 

At its best it spins you back along the line of time, thinking of what has happened while it has been in the cask; to the world, to you, things lost, moments of joy, the bittersweet notion of time passing.

This effect is about complexity. Those flavours emerge only over time. You taste the metamorphosis of simple ingredients: seed, wood, vegetation, air and how they have worked with, and against, each other, weaving and obscuring, revealing and dying, rising and changing. The greater the complexity, the more it makes you stop and think ‘this is special’.  

It is a wholly emotional response. Yes, you can then spend time trying to find out why it is special, but really that’s missing the point. Surrender to the transfiguration.

‘But the whisky was incidental to this moment,’ you may say. ‘It was about the music.’ True enough, but many of the great whisky moments in life are not just about the bottle and the glass, but the people, the occasion; the lap of water on the hull of a boat, the dram at the top of the hill, in some late-night bar with friends.

Music and mood: Rachel Newton’s music, like great whisky, has the power to transport

That is whisky at its best, doing its job, supporting rather than leading, quietly shifting conversations and softening hearts, almost invisibly helping to create the moment. The complexity makes you pause, take notice, then it widens into the rest of the moment.

Music is transportive, it takes you into a different place. Your response is visceral, rather than intellectual. You could work out the chord structures and intervals and rhythmic progression, but it won’t tell you why there’s tears in our eyes, why we are smiling at each other, or someone is dancing spontaneously.

Yes, you can sit, as I do on a daily basis, and look at the glasses in as sterile a place as I can manage, but even then I know in my heart that the whisky will only show itself fully when it is out in the world and whether, in small sips, it can help to create moments like this. 

Our response to whisky is the same as to music. Equally, whisky making is a creative rather than technical act, so it needs to be viewed in the same way as the arts. It has the same effect as a piece of poetry, a line from a book, a film, or notes from voice and harp flying out over the water, into the golden light. 

To hear more of Rachel’s music, check out her Bandcamp page.