“If you suddenly start growing a thatch of thick hair, you know who to thank,” said Johnny, pouring me a glass of 2011 Moniack Castle medium-dry white silver birch wine.
“It’s meant to be a cure for baldness. Although Prince Albert might disagree.”
I sipped rather than shampooed. I drank rather than lathered.
“It tastes a little like Tio Pepe sherry,” I said, affecting the connoisseur.
My host smiled: “Silver birch wine has always tasted a bit woody to me.”
I was sampling the wares of the UK’s most northerly winery in Moniack Castle, seven miles from Inverness. It was my first degustation of some unique Scottish country wines.
Moniack means bog, so we are in the bog castle and you are drinking bog-standard wine
“Moniack means bog,” continued Johnny. “So we are in the bog castle and you are drinking bog-standard wine. The castle was built in 1580 by Clan Fraser and is of no strategic importance whatsoever. One of its previous occupants, the 13th Lord of Lovat, was the last peer to be executed for treason.”
I tried to listen but I was distracted, trying to sense if there was any activity on the top of my head yet. I had another glass.
We had visited the winery’s filtering and fermenting rooms and been to the bottling area in the castle’s old laundry room.
I had been introduced to the jelly-labelling lady. Moniack Castle also produces a range of jams and jellies, including hawthorn and sloeberry as well as juniper chutney, wild garlic sauce and a whisky and redcurrant haggis sauce.
Everything is hand-picked, hand-bottled and hand-labelled.
“Silver birch wine is our flagship brand and bestseller,” my tippling instructor said, letting me sample the castle’s excellent plum wine. “We produce 50,000 bottles a year. It won second prize in a competition in France when someone took off the label and entered it into a home-made wine section.
“Betula pendula wine has been made in Scotland for centuries and is still made in Russia, but not commercially. That’s why we are so unique. It’s mentioned in Queen Victoria’s diaries. She had it made for her at Balmoral. Wine made from the sap of silver birch was Prince Albert’s favourite tipple.”
Another cork popped: “ Our raspberry wine mixed with soda makes a great Scottish, summertime sangria.”
I was beginning to glow and felt my face taking on the hue of the Chisholm Hunting Chisholm tartan.
“We’ve had some glorious failures like gorse wine and meadowsweet. Our Laird’s mead is popular. An ancient drink made from fermented honey.”
It gave me an immediate buzz, but I had developed a taste for the birch.
Every March, in the woods near Cannick, the silver birch sap is tapped from the trees. A small, harmless hole is drilled into the bark and a clear plastic tube drains off the clear liquid into five-gallon drums.
One tree fills the drum in two or three days. Fifteen months or so later, the wine is available in Moniack Castle’s tasting room. Trees are tapped every two years and must have a diameter of over one foot.
Johnny enthused about Invernesshire, listing attractions such as visiting the battlefield at Culloden, playing golf at Royal Dornoch or Nairn, seeing lots of weaving exhibitions and factories as well as Britain’s most active earthquake zone at the Great Glen.
Glenmorangie offers tastings at its distillery in Tain, as does ‘the perilously drinkable’ Glen Ord whisky. But you go to Moniack to taste real history.
“Beautiful,” I slurred to myself, conscious that my complexion had passed to the traditional deep red colour of my hosts’ tartan.
My genial host gave me a bottle of Scottish Sloe Liqueur as a digestif with my dinner.
We shook hands and I promised to return to celebrate the castle’s second growth. And, hopefully, my own.