More than a drink.

AS LOVERS of Scotch abandon ordinary blends in favor of single-malt whiskies, they unwittingly display symptoms of a cosmic shift from Civilization to High Civilization. The process of Civilization consisted of progress from rough to smooth. Our savage ancestors gnawed raw meat off the bone; we delicately nibble pate de foie gras. Hair shirts gave way to velvety cottons, cold caves to central heat, and crude aggression to gentle manners. Yet human ingenuity, never extinguishable, now propels us toward High Civilization. Blandness is being superseded by "character," and homogeneity by diversity. That is why advanced thinkers are turning away from the dozen familiar brands of blended Scotch (all of which taste pretty much the same) to single malts, of which there are hundreds of varieties and vintages, each endowed with its distinctive character. Drinkers of single malts are thus the vanguard of a Great Leap Forward, as yet unrecognized by social scientists and politicians, but for which our descendants will be forever grateful.

A single malt is a pure malt whisky made by a single small distillery. Ordinary Scotch, on the other hand, is made by blending several single malts (so suppressing the distinctive character of each) and then adding "grain neutral spirit," a virtually tasteless distillate of unmalted barley (which dilutes the flavor down to a least common denominator). Drinking blended Scotch is a habit; tasting single malts is an adventure.

To make a single malt you start with barley. You dampen it and wait until the grains begin to sprout. Then you roast it in a kiln, and separate the grains by raking them out on the floor of a malting house. Next, perverse as it may seem, you wet the grains again, add yeast to the "mash," and after a while filter off the fermented liquid, which at this stage is a sort of low-alcohol beer. Now you run the so-called "wash" into large copper pots, where it is distilled to about 60 per cent alcohol content. Water is added to bring the distillate down to 40 per cent alcohol content, after which the whisky is matured in oak barrels for about ten years and exceptionally as much as fifty years. When the whisky is bottled, the work ends and pleasure begins.

Single malts derive their special character from the special way that each distillery handles each step in the process. There is, first of all, the great matter of water. Every distillery uses water that has seeped down through thick layers of peat (a sort of soft coal lying near the top of grassy bogs), being softened and purified by the carbon and absorbing traces of the peat's flavors. Every distillery is located at a place where the peat water emerges at the surface in the form of a spring, stream ("burn"), or lake ("1och"). But the water from each of those sources is subtly or sometimes sharply different from the rest.

Peat makes for another kind of difference. Distilleries use more or less of it when stoking the kilns that dry out the germinated barley, so giving their various malts a more or less markedly smoky "nose."

Strategies of distillation differ. Some makers distill a batch once, some follow the tradition of triple distilling. All else being equal, the more times you distill a batch, the blander it becomes.

Then again, a barrel is not just a barrel. All malts are matured in oak, usually charred, and the whisky absorbs some of the wood flavors. But some malts are matured in barrels previously used to store sherry, though this treatment suits only those malts (for instance, Coal Ila, pronounced koal eela) which, as the experts say, "sherry well."

All in all, these and other differences in the raw materials and processes produce great complexity in the end product. Chemists who recently analyzed Glenmorangie identified twenty compounds that make up its "nose," endowing it with the aromas among others of apples, chocolate, cinnamon, honey, mint, rose, vanilla, cedarwood, juniper, and lemon. Other malts have equally complex but different noses. They differ also in "taste," which poetic experts describe in terms such as fullness, fruitiness, finish, bite, depth, body, and character.

The tyro, bewildered by this endless variety, may take some comfort from the fact that almost all single malts belong to three basic regional groups, within each of which there are broad family resemblances. The groups are Lowlands (which lie south of the line from Edinburgh to Glasgow), Highlands (north of that line), and Islands (off the west coast of Scotland),

Lowlands malts, the least wellknown, tend to be light, soft, and relatively sweet--and are accordingly recommended as a stepping stone for beginners. Rosebank and Glenkinchie are two typical Lowland malts.

Island malts, especially those from the south coast of Islay, tend to be intense, peaty, oily, and dry; the most frequently encountered varieties are Laphroaig and Lagavulin. Highland malts, on the whole, are less intense than Islands and more intense than Lowlands, medium in weight, midway between sweet and dry, and not very peaty.

An important subdivision of Highland malts is those from Speyside, the area in the northeast that is dominated by the Rivers Spey and Lossic. The glens (narrow valleys) of Spey's tributaries--such as the Rivers Fiddich, Dullan, Livet, and their tributaries-are dotted with springs and therefore with distilleries, some fifty in all. From Speyside comes the whisky frequently cited as the ne plus ultra of single malts, The Glenlivet, as well as such noble neighbors as Glenfiddich, Glen Grant, Knockando, and The Macallan. All of these are relatively gentle. More particularly, for instance, Wallace Milroy, author of the Malt Whisky Annual, describes ten-year-old Macallan in these terms: "smooth aroma with a silky bouquet; full, delightful, and sherried [flavor] with a beautiful lingering aftertaste; masterpiece."

Who could, or would, want to pass up ambrosia like that? Who, having started with that one, could bridle the impatience to try its relatives? Given life enough, one might drink some or much of each and every single malt. What a glorious prospect!