You may well struggle afterwards to remember this night – Continue reading
Tag Archives: distillery
Chivas Brothers cut whisky production as Diageo dumps 700 in Kilmarnock
This is a tale of two big – the biggest, but very different – Scotch whisky producers. Continue reading
Marks & Spencer store inspector gets the wrong island – and a dram
Today’s (15th January) Oban Times has a hilarious front page story on a hapless store inspector for Marks and Spencer who flew into Islay Airport en route to Blackrock to inspect the company store there in the tiny township on the shores of Lochindaal.
The Ileachs, choking back laughter when he asked his way to the store, did not prove particularly forthcoming and when rthe man phoned HQ for instructions, he discovered he should have been at Blackrock, outside Dublin – not in Islay but in Ireland.
OK. It was pretty embarrassing but Islay has its ways of dispensing with blushes – or replacing them with a flush of a different kind. The Oban Times reports that a visit to one of the island’s famous single malt whisky distilleries put a new cast on events.
And evidently Marks and Spencers’ online store locator responds to a search on ‘Blackrock’ with: ‘near Blackrock, Argyll and Bute, Isle of Islay’. So the inspector was a lot less daft than the company. And Ireland’s over crowded these days.
Black Bottle Islay Whisky Workshops in Celtic Connections programme
It’s a great combination – music and a dram – even in the imagination. The annual Celtic Connections music festival in Glasgow (keep an eye on the For Argyll Events Calendar for its torchlight launch parade on 15th January) has made a seductive addition to its programme.
It’s running a series of whisky tasting workshops in tribute to the official whisky of the festival – Argyll’s blended malt, 10 Year Old Black Bottle.
The tasting workshops will take you on tour through the glass, travelling the islands to get close to the secrets of the Bunnahabhain Islay Single Malt Scotch Whisky, and others of all seven Islay single malts that together make up 45% of Black Bottle. The other 55% is from the Aberdeen malts.
Workshop participants will also have the opportunity to experience the great new limited edition from Tobermory Distillery on Mull – the 15 year old Tobermory Island Single Malt Scotch Whisky.
Thereare three Whisky Workshops in the series – each at 4.00pm in City Halls Studio One – on 17th, 24th and 31st January 2009. Fees are £15 per person and booking can be done online.
The great Argyll website challenge
One of the best of Argyll’s community websites is the Islay one given in our Links directory above. It always carries fresh news and information. It covers a wide variety of subjects relevant to island life there. It has good photographic and video material. It has a real nose for what is interesting – the quirky, the insights into life, people and activities that attract attention. It regularly updating its ‘look’ and constantly adding to the sort of information and factual material it offers.
It’s currently carrying a story about Islay’s Bruichladdich distillery (bought out by management after closure and now a roaring success bringing innovation to the industry) buying most of its barley locally. It names the farms used, bringing the story properly home and – eyes wide open – it notes the marketing value of the move.
This is what community websites should aspire to – and it’s easily achievable, with consistent attention paid to doing it well. You don’t agree? Well this Islay site is run from the Netherlands. The editor is a regular visitor to Islay, with friends there who contribute and he plans to move to the island permanently – some day. If he can deliver a site like this by remote control for an entire and substantial island, why on earth can’t residents in other communities – and associations and sports clubs – create living sites that carry a sense of who they are, what their place is like – and what they’ve done today, not what they did three years ago.
For Argyll is doing its best to lead by example. We’re not perfect but we’re working to get there. We’re all volunteers. We have livings to earn and other responsibilities to carry at the same time. If we and Ron from the Islay blog can do what we do, let’s have an end of the dreadful ‘space junk’ websites we see too often.
For Argyll is carrying websites in our Links directory just now, to give communities, services and businesses a profile. But there will soon come a day when we dump sites that are not regularly refreshed.
We champion the immediacy of the web. It’s there to makes us raise our game. There is an absolute necessity for news in Argyll – and news has to be new. Otherwise it’s information. This has its historical value but denies the option to seize an opportunity while it’s there. If we are to be interested in each other, we need to give and take current as well as archival information.
If you’re reading this and you, your community or your club have a website – go and look at it. If you’re happy with it, email us and we’ll draw attention to it. If you’re not – get to it or dump it. A dead website is worse than no website. Think of your site as your daily or weekly broadcast – informing and entertaining – not something set in aspic for eternity.
If we can help in any way – email or call. Argyll needs all of us to make the energy crackle.