Gunn's book is a lively history of Scotch whisky with a passionate plea for single malts. It presented a vivid picture of the different malts with their distinctive qualities, and made me realise the variety and individuality of the products of the distilleries. From then on I searched out single malt whiskies, determined to sample and savour as many as I could.

In wartime Britain any kind of Scotch whisky was in very short supply, and it was some time after the end of the war before normal supplies became available. Single malts were hard to find. I think it was in 1946, when I was again back in Edinburgh, that I found in Muirhead's of George Street (retail wine and spirit merchant, long since disappeared, owned I believe by Macdonald and Muir, who had the Glenmorangie distillery) a bottle of Glenmorangie, a whisky I had never tasted before. It was then that I started my whisky scrapbook, in which I pasted the labels of each bottle of malt that I bought, with a note of its characteristics.

I think I was the first to trumpet the virtues of Glenmorangie. When some years later I became a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, I persuaded the college to buy Glenmorangie by the case from Muirhead's and it became a favourite of the Fellows. Other colleges in Cambridge heard of this and soon Glenmorangie became well known among the academics. I remember when Hugh MacDiarmid visited Cambridge to give a lecture there, he was delighted (having suffered from a surfeit of sherry) to find that I had a bottle of this whisky in my college rooms, where together we consumed a large quantity.

My involvement with Glenmorangie developed further when my son married a girl from Tain (where the distillery is) and on several visits to my son's parents-in-law I got to know the distillery well.

Meanwhile I was searching for other malts and sampling and writing up in my scrapbook as many as I could find. I would come across the odd bottle of a great prewar malt tucked away on the top shelf of a wine-merchant or licensed grocer, forgotten and unappreciated until I liberated it.

The next step on my whisky trail was when the publisher André Deutsch, who had published several of my books, visiting Edinburgh at Festival time in the mid 1960s, asked me to introduce him to real Scotch whiskies. So I took him a pub-crawl along Rose Street, and we drank single malts in pub after pub, beginning with Eastern malts at the Abbotsford and moving westwards we moved along the pubs in the street, ending with Islays at Ma Scott's. With each whisky I explained its characteristics, pointing out that here the water had come off peat through granite and there it had come off granite through peat. You taste the difference? I asked. (All this was pure invention on my part.) He nodded sagely.

This resulted in André asking me to write a book for him on Scotch whisky. By a happy coincidence I had arranged a term off from the University of Sussex where I was then teaching, and so was able to spend a wonderful October going round Scotland visiting distilleries, savouring different malts and talking to managers, maltmen, brewers and stillmen. It was a great and happy education, supplemented by my reading in Scotland's social and economic history. And so my book was written, and my education in malt whisky has been progressing ever since.

Professor David Daiches is a long-time supporter of the Society and a former member of the Tasting Panel.