Return of the likely 'Laddie

Bad news, I think we'd all agree, has been in plentiful supply these past six months. Even in the drinks world, the barometer has been plummeting. A tidal wave of dull New World wine is sloshing through our supermarkets, the high-street wine merchant looks doomed, dozens of hopeful wine dotcoms have bombed and it's harder than ever to find a great pint in the Newt and Nightmare world of the modern pub chain. So, to cheer us all up, here is a good news story.

As all whisky drinkers know, Islay is the place. This rain-sodden westerly island is home to seven of Scotland's grandest distilleries. Sadly, one of them has been in a coma for some years. It had been deliberately anaesthetised by its multinational owner for reasons I won't even pretend to understand; those sort of people do that kind of thing. Its name is Bruichladdich - pronounced, more or less, Brookladdie.

Mark Reynier, chiefly known to Londoners for his wine shops like La Reserve on Walton Street, dreamed of getting hold of Bruichladdich. He knew whisky well, since he also runs a bottling company called Murray McDavid, and with colleagues Simon Coughlin and Gordon Wright, set about raising the £6.5 million needed to buy and restore the distillery. It took 12 months and a year ago they had got the money together. Just as importantly, they had managed to entice Jim McEwan, Islay's greatest modern distiller, ambassador and poet, across the loch from Bowmore where he had spent his career.

Islay has a whisky festival in May and the plan was to get the place ready by then. Working 18-hour days, they succeeded and, on 29 May, McEwan found himself by the spirit safe, testing. And testing. And testing.

Distilling: lesson one. What runs off whisky stills at the beginning of operations (foreshots) and the end (feints) is undrinkable; you're after the heart. You test for the heart by adding water to the spirit. If it turns cloudy, discard; the break point comes when you add water and the spirit remains clear. "I couldn't find it," McEwan confesses. "It just wasn't happening. The webcams were running, and I couldn't find it. So I went to wash my face at the sink. As I did so, I offered up a prayer, a big deal for the Big Man. Then I went back, and after about 10 minutes, boom! There it was.

Clear as a burn on a Thursday morning. I handed the sample to a colleague. None of us spoke. To speak would have been to cry; we all found a hole in the floor to look at. The distillery had come back to life again; we had found its pulse."

Is it the same as before? The answer to that depends on which "before" you mean. From 1961, Bruichladdich has produced very lightly-peated spirit: only three parts per million of phenols (ppm). When it was built in 1881, by contrast, it was heavily peated, as all Islay whiskies were - there was no other fuel on the island.

Reynier and McEwan have done a very clever thing. They teased Bruichladdich up a little in the peat stakes, to a tantalising 10ppm - but they've also decided to produce a more emphatically peaty spirit at 40ppm, which they've christened Port Charlotte. I've nosed both, and they're extremely promising: the Bruichladdich smells like a salty malt extract, while the Port Charlotte smells darker, more bluff and oystery, with a whiff of engine oil.

You can buy McEwan's three superb blends of existing (3ppm) Bruichladdich stocks in Oddbins for £24.99 for the 10 Year Old, £29.99 for the 15 Year Old and £52.99 for the 20 Year Old, all bottled at 46 per cent abv without chill filtering or added caramel colouring. The 10 Year Old, all bounce and honeysuckle charm, fits McEwan's aim of trying to recreate the sense of being on Islay on a sunny day in May. The 15 Year Old is darker, more raisiny, a mist-on-the-water dram; while the 20 Year Old is a pure-spirited essay in salty, lemon-oil grace.

And if you want the new Bruichladdich or Port Charlotte? Whisky can't be bottled before it's three years old but you can buy a cask of it under the Inaugural Distillations scheme. Unlike the hopeless "investment" offers in whisky I first wrote about in this newspaper in 1995, this excellent scheme will bring you great spirit at a great price - and help you to be part of the most heartening whisky news I can remember. Prices vary between £775 for a refill bourbon barrel and £2,195 for a fresh sherry butt; contact the distillery (01496 850221) for a brochure and application form.