Arran - A Gourmet Paradise

To Michelin starred chefs such as Andrew Fairlie and Tom Kitchin, Robin Gray is Scotland’s best kept gourmet secret. Gray’s ability to grow everything from white peaches to Japanese Mizuna on his smallholding on the inhospitable shores of the Isle of Arran have earned him the nickname Robinson Crusoe.

There are certainly worse people with whom to be marooned on a desert island.  Not only can he conjure the most unlikely fresh produce from the most hostile settings, but as a chef trained by Raymond Blanc, he can also turn it into award winning cuisine.

Twenty years ago, inspired by memories of his father’s vegetable patch on Arran, he started to cultivate the sloping, wild land on the shore at Whiting Bay. Initially he was just a squatter, but three years ago, he tracked down the owner, bought two acres of former wilderness, and erected his ploytunnels. Now he supplies the most exclusive kitchens in the country with 50 varieties of vegetables, leaves and herbs, including Scottish-grown sweetcorn, spinach and curly red kale.

‘A lot of the stuff I do is for the chefy market’ says Gray, pointing out the broad beans, leeks and elephant garlic as he tours his windswept site. ‘I’ve just harvested a tonne of pumpkins. One of the reasons the produce here tastes so good is that we don’t force anything. Everything is natural. We use seaweed as fertiliser. We wait till the rain has washed out the salt, then I just go down to the beach with the quad bike and gather it up. Because we do everything by hand, we haven’t had the same problems with the rain this summer as farmers who use mechanical cropping techniques.’

Gray and his wife Rosario spend their winters in her home country, Venezuela, growing coffee and pineapples on the slopes of Pico Bolivar, its highest mountain. What makes him different from all the other Scottish organic smallholders with vaguely hippy leanings, is that he is part of a highly commercial gourmet community on Arran that contributes more than £10m annually to the economy of the island.
Given that Arran has a permanent population of just over 5000, it’s a remarkably productive place and it could give food for thought to other sparsely populated island communities that have struggled to maintain their economies.

Gray, 45, is part of the Taste of Arran scheme, a unique collaborative business which markets and distributes produce from the islands 11 independent specialist food producers. The scheme is the brainchild of Alastair Dobson, who runs the award winning Arran Dairies
Intriguingly, given the current state of the economy, the germ of the idea was sown in the aftermath of the foot & mouth outbreak of 2001 that devastated many rural communities. Dobson was one of a number of islander’s whose livelihoods depend on tourism, who were worried about the potential impact of the disease. By joining forces to promote the island and its businesses they were able to turn around a potentially disastrous situation.

Taste of Arran, which is a wholly owned commercial business, rather than a co-operative, represents a varied range of products including luxury ice cream, jams, cheeses, oatcakes, preserves, smoked fish, fresh vegetables, beer and malt whisky.

For Gray, the benefits of belonging to a community of producers are obvious. Taste of Arran markets and distributes his fresh produce, which means his vegetables can go from soil to stove in less than 24 hours. Without it the logistics of distributing produce with a short shelf life from an island would be difficult for him.
But there are benefits even closer to home. This year, Gray stared supplying Arran Fine Foods, another Taste of Arran member, with fresh forono beetroot and elephant garlic for a new range of chutney’s and preserves manufactured on the island.

Taken from an article by Gillian Bowditch first published in the Times Nov 2008.