Following His Nose

The whisky expert on evaluating a good malt and avoiding curry.

- Mary Miers

THERE’S no better-loved authority on the amber nectar than Master of the Quaich, author, whisky consultant, noser and taster extraordinaire Charles MacLean. In many ways, this Conan Doyle-like figure personifies uisge beatha (water of life in Gaelic).

Clubbable, entertaining, with a mellifluous lilt, he’s a familiar bon viveur in Edinburgh circles, but also famous as far as Beijing, where the first of 12 Charles’ Whisky Bars opened last year, with his trademark moustache and monocle on its logo. He’s steeped in his Hebridean heritage, too, and can trace his forebears back into the mists of time, rolling a litany of Gaelic patronymics over his tongue like a draught of mature malt.

A flat in the New Town, with Georgian windows drinking in sunlight over a cobbled street, is a distillation of Charlie’s world: a suite of atmospheric rooms filled with books, Scottish prints and paintings and the tools of his trade. In the study, Alfred Barnard’s The Whisky Distilleries of the United Kingdom (1887) and Emmanuel Dron’s massive Collecting Scotch Whisky (2017) rub shoulders with numerous bottles, a cut-glass tumbler and ashtray beneath the inevitable invitation to his friend Sandy McCall Smith’s latest book launch.

The sitting room, looking out to the Fife hills across Fettes College and Stockbridge, resembles a smoking room, with a big leather sofa and mahogany bookcases. Beyond the hall’s caphung antler, a packet of Brodies Fine Teas sits on the kitchen table, awaiting the next visitor.

It’s the dining room, however, that defines the connoisseur, for here he’s created his own whisky-tasting sanctum, complete with floor-to-ceiling library—‘one of the largest collections of whisky books in the world, I’d have thought’—and bottles of malt with names such as Steel Bonnets, Man O’Sword and GlenDronach.