HMS Blythe, Messrs Baker & Hastie and a certain yellow sub.

My favourite table in all the world - langoustines @ Loch 16

At the end of 26 hot and sunny miles: pain and sunburn

25th anniversary today of the first distillation we did at Bruichladdich, Feis Ile 2001.

At the start of the Edinburgh Marathon

80-year-old steamer rescues stranded CalMac ferry passengers heraldscotland.com/news/2612…

Randall Grahm’s terroir dream wine-searcher.com/m/2026/04/…

Enjoyed chatting terroir and whisky on a ‘No Holds Barred’ basis with Rob Draper last night. youtu.be/IuCgx6j2fwI?si=HF0Q…

In an hour at 1900 BST I’m chatting with Rob Draper of WhiskyTV about Bruichladdich and Waterford youtube.com/live/rl2K_Ipv3Ys…

Labour Loves the Countryside. It Just Hates the People Who Run It. A woman walks into a tailor's shop in Helmsley, North Yorkshire. She loves the heather hills, she says. The wooded dales. The purple moorland stretching to the horizon. What she cannot stand is the shooting that takes place on the Glorious Twelfth. Jeremy Shaw, the tailor, has heard this before. He considers whether to explain that the heather she travelled three hours to admire exists because of the grouse moor she despises. The gamekeepers who manage the land, suppress the bracken, and keep the moorland in the condition that makes it worth visiting. The cake, in other words, was baked by the baker she came to castigate. What is worrying is that the government shares her confusion. On March 18, Labour published its Land Use Framework. Half a million acres earmarked for solar panels. Nine percent of farmland committed to rewilding. And buried on page 45, a proposal to license game bird shooting, potentially restricting pheasant and partridge releases onto estates. The trail hunting ban came first. Licensing comes next. Each measure arrives with its own rationale. Together they form a programme. Licensing does not prohibit. Bureaucracy does not ban. Smaller shoots simply cannot absorb compliance costs, fold quietly, and nobody in Whitehall answers for the consequence. A Natural England case near Helmsley shows the method. A longstanding partridge shoot was barred from releasing birds until after the season had already started. Shoot days cancelled. Revenue gone. Natural England's hands formally clean. Helmsley bucks every trend in British retail. Four pubs in the town square. A Michelin-starred inn nearby. A tailor forty years in business in what a mentor once called a dying trade. Seventy-five percent of Shaw's revenue is shooting-related. The Pheasant hotel runs at sixty percent shooting occupancy through winter. The deli sells local cheese to Norwegian and German sportsmen. Shooting contributes £3.3 billion annually to the UK economy and supports nearly 147,000 jobs. Pull the shooting thread and the weave comes apart. One Helmsley pub changed hands a few years ago. The new owners decided they wanted nothing to do with shoot trade. They lost heavily, then went back to the estates cap in hand. The market delivered the verdict that policy is not yet ready to impose openly. Licensing achieves the same result without anyone having to take responsibility. The conservation argument collapses under scrutiny. Grouse moor owners have restored 217,000 acres of upland heath in the past 25 years. The almost-extinct curlew is four times more likely to fledge on a managed grouse moor than on unmanaged moorland. The landscape that Whitehall has identified as the problem is the reason the landscape exists in the form they claim to value. When asked what economic trade-offs it had actually modelled, the government was vague. Officials said they recognised shooting's cultural importance and would work with industry toward a sustainable relationship. Starmer has been invited to visit Helmsley and see how the economy functions. He has not replied. He should go. He should meet the gamekeeper loading double guns through winter to keep the household solvent. The beaters earning seventy pounds a day. The tailor measuring 24 keepers for tweed suits stitched with Essex lining and Yorkshire zips. What rural Britain is being offered instead is a licensing regime that will first eliminate smaller shoots, then larger ones, then the hotels and tailors and pubs, until the moorland reverts to bracken and the towns that shooting sustained join the dying high streets that apparently only the countryside had managed to avoid. The heather on the North York Moors, Jeremy Shaw at Carters Country Wear, and the market town of Helmsley. All three exist because of shooting. Labour's Land Use Framework puts all three at risk.

Mediterranean Murrayfield

Whisky's Greatest Myth: The 70% Rule open.substack.com/pub/spirit…

Sorry to hear of Pierre Trimbach’s death in a car crash. The winemaker responsible for such marvels as Clos St Hune, among others, will be missed greatly. “Forget everything the oenologues tell you: a good wine is, above all else, from good grapes.”

Well thank %^&* that’s over. Annus horribilis of licked wounds and self inspection. Though as this New Year dawns, its promise beckons, fired irons long brazed, by the grace of God may be ready to forge; we’ll see. Happy New Year.

25 years ago - the same day as The Laddie

The SWA were upset we seemed to be suggesting it was harmful to health - not realising that A. the bottling strength was never going to be the distillation strength; B. 'perilous whisky' was a translation of the Gaelic name of 1690! And C. we hadn’t even done it - then...

I only met Justin Boudeman, creator of longboardcoffees.com once, but felt we shared something. A fitting legacy, In To The Mist youtu.be/MLk-DhEwI98?si=ZlZj…