‘Our strategy has always been geared to making America one of our biggest markets in the world’

THE visitor centre at the Kilchoman Distillery is heaving. Café chef Sandra Stevenson is doing a roaring trade in tea and cake, salads and quiches. “We did 68 customers on Monday, 99 yesterday, and 122 today,” she says.

Despite the throng around the displays offering whisky soap at £6.50 a slab, jars of marmalade and, of course, a range of premium single malts, Anthony Wills, the founder of the distillery, is a worried man.

From today, the bottles he exports to his biggest overseas market have been slapped with a punitive tariff of 25 per cent.

Kilchoman whisky has been caught in the crossfire of a trade war between the US and the EU over subsidies granted to European planemaking giant Airbus, and everyone is waiting anxiously to see whether the wounds are life-threatening.

Washington claims the EU decision harms the interests of its national aviation champion Boeing. As a result, the trigger-happy Donald Trump has imposed $7.5billion (£5.8billion) of tariffs on EU imports.

The inclusion of single malt Scotch whisky – alongside items such as Stilton cheese, and textile and pork products – spells trouble for an industry that last year exported 137 million bottles of Scotch to the US – more than four bottles per second. Of this £1billion bonanza, about £350million was due to the sale of single malts.

AND nowhere will feel the pain more than Islay, home to no fewer than nine distilleries making premium single malts in an area just 15 miles from north to south and 25 miles wide.

This represents the greatest concentration of Scotch whisky-makers anywhere in Scotland, all drawn by the island’s heritage as a barleygrowing centre and its plentiful supply of pure spring water with a distinctive peaty taste.

So just how big a problem is Trump’s latest tantrum? “It’s huge,” says Wills, a tall, bespectacled, greyhaired man who founded Kilchoman in 2005, making it the first new distillery on Islay in 124 years. He took the precaution of ramping up deliveries to his US importer in the run-up to the introduction of tariffs today and will not see any impact on his bottom line until after Christmas.

He expects to sell 40-45,000 bottles in the US this year, compared with 55,000 in the UK. But he cannot afford to raise his prices if he is to continue increasing sales across the pond. “We will discount our price to soak up the tariff of 25 per cent with our importer,” he says.

This will do nothing for his bottom line and he admits the impact of the tariff could even result in redundancies if it remains in place for a significant period of time.

“We employ 34 local people,” he says. “Of course the tariff will have an effect if it goes on long-term. We can get through until Christmas and then in the New Year it’ll kick in, then six months down the road we’ll have a better idea of where it’s going.”

Meanwhile, he is looking to the east for some relief from the trouble