Whisky, sir?
David Whitley fills himself up on Scottish delicacies – and historic titbits – on Eat Walk Edinburgh’s tour.
The Hotel du Vin in Edinburgh wasn’t always this posh. As we tuck into a pan-fried herring covered in oatmeal, Alan Chalmers tells as about the building’s grim past as a lunatic asylum.
It was briefly the home of an “uncontrollable” young poet called Robert Ferguson, who died there and was buried in a pauper’s grave. But his poems inspired a rather more famous poet – Robert Burns – who paid for Ferguson to have a headstone in the churchyard of Canongate Kirk.
It’s stories like this that make Eat Walk Edinburgh’s Old and New Town tour more than an excuse to pig out on the city’s finest food and drink. There’s a genuine sense of history too. We’re eating herring, for example, because it was once one of Scotland’s major exports. Back in 1907, two-and-a-half millions of barrels of herring were shipped every year – and the women handling them could gut 20 fish a minute.
The tour moves on to Victoria Street, the home of Demijohn, an experimental drinker’s heaven. Stored in hand-blown Italian glass containers are all manner of weird concoctions, sourced from small suppliers all over the country. These include organic rhubarb vodka, an apricot brandy liqueur, a Seville Orange gin and a tremendous Morello cherry brandy.
It gets boozier as we head down into the New Town, away from all the kilt shops and bagpipers of the Old Town’s well-worn tourist trail.
As wine bars go, Le Di-Vin is pretty impressive. Wooden shelves stacked with bottles of wine climb the walls, while a mural on the wall offers a cheeky take on the Last Supper. On one side, the ‘disciples’ are famous Frenchmen, and on the other, they’re Scots. Billy Connolly, Sean Connery and William Wallace all make an appearance.
While we devour a cold meats and cheese platter, Alan reveals that the cheekily religious theme of the painting is fitting for the venue. “This was once a Polish Catholic Church,” he says. Edinburgh, it seems, likes reinventing its old buildings.
Another excellent place for wine in the New Town is found down one of the most unlikely back lanes. Calistoga is a Californian restaurant that offers tasting sessions of Californian wines before the meal. We’ve not got time to work our way through the list, but the cod dish we’re served up is superb. It’s exactly the sort of place you want to find in a city you don’t know – something a little different, serving excellent food at surprisingly reasonable prices.
The highlight of the tour, however, is a visit to the Scotch Malt Whisky Society. It’s a private club that buys limited edition single malts from distilleries around Scotland, and the selection process is hugely competitive.
On the walls are small tubes. They look, unfortunately, like urine samples. But they’re full of whisky. Every month, the distilleries send small measures to the Society’s tasting panel – names are pulled out of a hat to see which lucky members get to be on it. The whiskies deemed to be best are then bottled up and put on sale. The labels have no branding – just code numbers. The aim is to get people to experiment rather than pick their favourites, and judge the quality on taste rather than reputation. It’s like wine – no two batches should taste the same as each other.
Whilst sipping the scotch, we get a rather dolled up version of another Scottish classic – haggis, neeps and tatties. It’s rather like a shepherd’s pie, with a potato layer on top, meaty stuffing and swedes inside. And it’s approximately a million times more delicious than it sounds.
The jaunt through the New Town continues through the grand stone houses in Charlotte Square, and Alan points out architectural features from previous eras. By the steps to the houses are foot scrapers – they were originally put there so people could clean their shoes after walking through horse muck-splattered streets. There are also horns that people would put flaming torches into so the fire went out.
We finish, as all good extended meals should, with pudding. It’s a take on an Eton Mess inside the Ghillie Dhu, a pub where a sign reads: “For a lend of an instrument, ask at bar.”
This is a clue to the last big surprise. We head upstairs to a stunning medieval banqueting hall, which in the evening plays host to big ceilidhs. Alas, I’m a bit too full and tipsy for dancing…
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The tours with Eat Walk Edinburgh cost £49.
Disclosure: This article was originally written for The Sun and David was a guest of Visit Scotland.