About us
We’re Pete and Mark. We’ve been friends for more than 25 years, which is long enough to have accumulated a great many stories — and to know which of them become better with every retelling.
Pete loves almost, correction: absolutely everything about whisky: where it comes from, how it is made, the history and lore surrounding it, and, naturally, what it tastes like. Mark loves to travel. Islay gave us both rather more than we had bargained for.
We came for five days on what we called our Islay Grand Tour: the ambitious journey around an island containing an improbable number of distilleries, some astonishingly beautiful landscapes and roads that make distances on a map largely theoretical.
The whisky was extraordinary. Of course it was. But it wasn’t only the whisky that stayed with us.
It was the wild race for the ferry, and the Spotify playlist that became the soundtrack to the trip — Sunshine on Leith earning its place amongst the otherwise pure rock as we drove through the wilderness. Cosy evenings in Port Ellen and a frantic invented game of darts at No. 1 Charlotte Street. An unexpectedly competitive game of boules on the beach. Swimming at Machir Bay, which was as beautiful as anywhere we have been, although the Atlantic made a persuasive case that we were definitely still in Scotland.
And then there were the quieter moments.
At Kildalton Cross and its old churchyard, both of us parents and husbands, we found ourselves reading gravestones belonging to people who had outlived not only their children, but their grandchildren. Two generations of one family, gone before them. Standing there, among centuries of island lives, we were grown men with tears on our cheeks.
That is the thing about Islay. A visit might begin with a list of distilleries, but the island has other plans for you. Its history is not safely packed away in a visitor attraction; it sits beside the road, in ruined churches and working harbours, in family names and old stones. Islay is not a whisky theme park. It is a living island that makes some of the world’s most remarkable whisky — and remains itself when the last visitor has caught the ferry home.
Those five days moved us enough to begin DramStory.
They also showed us how much harder the planning was than it needed to be. Pete did all of it, and it took the best part of a month: opening hours scattered across a dozen websites, half of them out of date, tours for July selling out in February.
So we built what we had wanted before we went. Not simply to tell you what to drink, but to help you work out where to go, how to get there and what might be worth stopping for along the way — across both Islay and Jura.
Tell it what matters to you — distilleries, beaches, walks, somewhere good to eat — and it lays the days out end to end.
That first journey led to others, and in turn to a book about whisky travel, now close to publication.
We hope DramStory helps you plan a proper trip. More than that, we hope the island gives you a few moments that become entirely your own — the kind you will still enjoy retelling in twenty-five years.
Pete & Mark
Founders of DramStory
Photo: Pete and Mark at Ardbeg, on the journey that started DramStory.