Just how Scottish is Scotch whisky?
WITH FOREIGN-OWNED DISTILLERIES AND THE SPIRIT BEING PRODUCED AS FAR AWAY AS JAPAN, IS OUR NATIONAL DRINK IN DANGER OF LOSING ITS IDENTITY? DANIEL GRAY – WRITER OF A NEW TV DOCUMENTARY SERIES ON THE AMBER NECTAR – INVESTIGATES
It is hard to think of another spirit which so vividly calls a country to mind. Little wonder modern marketers look out to the world: over 90 per cent of Scotch whisky is sold beyond this country. The French drink more than twice as much blended whisky as do the British. Our Auld Alliance has taken a new turn
ASMILE trickles across Joe Brandie’s face as he recounts a tale he has told many times. “They hired a hearse and put all the whisky into the coffin,” says the 86-year-old. “When they passed Customs and Excise, they took off their bunnets and got straight through.”
“They” were some of the many wily moonshiners sneaking their wares around Scotland. There is another story about customs officers dressing as tramps to catch out crofters selling whisky from their homes. The plan was, they would turn up at an illicit distiller’s door, begging for a taste of the good stuff. But more often than not, the officials failed ... or at least in folklore they did. Time passes and distorts truth.
Truth sometimes feels unimportant where Scotch whisky is concerned. Myth, magic, legend and lore form a woolly cloud that neatly obscures the certainties that underpin modern Scotch: big money, sophisticated science and dazzling marketing. From somewhere within emerges an unstinting tenet of Scottish identity. There is pride in this drink.
Brandie continues to work from home every day, just like he has since 1959. Home is the Fiddichside Inn in Craigellachie, the pub his late wife’s family bought in 1919. Built in 1840, it once served thirsty ghillies and passengers awaiting trains from a long-gone station on the opposite bank of the River Fiddich.
Today, the Fiddich swirls and birls. In a certain light, its water has the amber tint of whisky. Brandie’s eyes swim with yarns and wisdom. His bar serves no food. Music comes from the lyrical lilts of regulars recounting the flotsam and jetsam of their days. The bar is unchanged since a refit early in Brandie’s tenure, all beige wooden panels, photographs in gilded frames, toilet signs in swinging 1960s fonts. The outside walls are stocky and whitewashed. A beer garden, verdant and loved, rests between building and water.
Each year they come, the Fiddichside Inn’s returning visitors. There are the Scotch-obsessed of Nagasaki, the whisky maniacs of Dresden, the single malt pilgrims of Memphis. They push the door, amble over and choose from 20 or so bottles.
This is a sainted mousehole within Speyside, and Speyside is the sacred whisky republic. It is difficult to look in any direction and fail to see a distillery. There are 50 in all, each built in its own, often eccentric fashion. Here is Tormore, resembling the Scrumptious Sweet factory in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and there is Glenfarclas, a whisky hamlet of ashy grey dwellings. These places mean work, whether serving in bars, monitoring mash tuns or running tours. On Speyside, whisky is everything.
That has not always been a good thing. Walls whisper of hidden alcoholism, at least in times gone, of rampant drinking on the job: radio aerials snapped off and adapted by distillery workers for the purpose of sipping straight from casks, and thrice-daily “healthy” measures of white spirit for strength and morale. Whisky hangs in the air like a contagious perfume.
Today, there are 118 whisky distilleries in Scotland. The Scotch Whisky Association reports that the drink adds £5 billion of value to the UK economy. Sales contribute £1bn to the UK Exchequer; the Government long ago got wise to coffins and other ruses. Those distilleries are often owned by multinational companies, many of them from outside of the UK.
The largest owner, Diageo, is British – the company owns 28 distilleries. Chivas Brothers runs 15 and is owned by Pernod Ricard – some corners of Scottish fields are forever French. Bermudan-registered Bacardi owns five, as does Japanese Beam Suntory; Thai and Philippine corporations also own the same number. Some group owners do remain Scottish-based: Edrington (custodian of The Famous Grouse and The Macallan among others) and William Grant have four apiece. In Campbeltown, once known as The Whisky Metropolis, J&A Mitchell’s Springbank and Glengyle thrive. The overwhelming trend remains, however, towards foreign ownership.
There is a caveat to this. A craft distillery movement has stirred in Scotland, offering a modern take on small-scale, homely whisky-making. It bristles with possibility, though whether investors have enough clout to see the process through – whisky, after all, takes years to mature – remains to be seen. In any light, the craft movement offers an alternative
narrative, even if it ends up being a minor subplot. For if the drink is simple, the industry is not. It could be said that in buying up distilleries – 18 and counting – the French are taking back what they lost 145 years ago. In 1871, the phylloxera virus savaged French vineyards. For the next 25 years, they would be barren. That robbed cognac drinkers, including middle-class Brits, of their beloved tipple. Enter blended whiskies from Scotland and Ireland. Just as the virus hit, technological advances were allowing for mass production of grain whisky. Grain was then combined with single malts to produce blends. At the same time, there flowered in Scotland a generation of grocers who began blending whisky just as they had tea. Men like Johnnie Walker’s son, Alexander, in Kilmarnock, or George Ballantine in Glasgow, or the Chivas Brothers in Aberdeen. They and their agents were ambitious. They had their eyes on the markets of the Empire and of North and South America. Off they travelled, plying the world with blended whisky and single malts. They were selling a drink plush with images and words of exotic, romantic Scotland, from bottle labels through to printed adverts and eventual screen versions. In 1898, Dewars of Perth made the world’s first filmed commercial for any product. Like so much whisky advertising, kilts and bagpipes were involved. They were selling whisky. They were selling Scotland. Little has changed in the branding of Scotch today. Even when the glamorous young are used as exponent drinkers, they are dressed in classy tartans and expensive kilts, and pictured by a castle jutting out next to a loch. The product is always hooked back to the dress and land of its origins, even if many a Speyside or Highland malt is made on site from broughtin ingredients and then hauled off to mature in central belt warehouses. Perhaps, in fact, foreign or mass owners overcompensate, emphasising more than ever all that is stereotypically Caledonian. Brands came to be made for foreign markets. Some we drank here too, some were tailor-made. Cutty Sark was created in 1923 to meet sweeter American tastes. (It helped that when Al Capone’s men came a-calling, Scots were only too happy for their whisky to find its way to the Prohibition-era USA via a third party. The Irish said no.) There exist even now whiskies like Buchanan’s, which hardly trip off the tongue in Scotland, never mind grace the tastebuds, and yet in Latin America they are synonymous with Scotland.
It is hard to think of another spirit which so vividly calls a country to mind. Little wonder modern marketers look out to the world: over 90 per cent of Scotch whisky is sold beyond this country. The French drink more than twice as much blended whisky as do the British. Our Auld Alliance has taken a new turn. Of course, they are making their own now too. Indeed, more than 20 other countries make whisky, including Japan, India and Germany.
SOME are influenced by a Scots-Japanese romance of a century ago. In 1918, 24-yearold Masataka Taketsuru left Japan for Scotland. He was to study the chemistry and production of Scotch whisky with the aim of replicating it in his homeland. Masataka served apprenticeships at a number of Scottish distilleries, learning every craft of the trade. He fell in love with whisky, but also with a Scottish girl – Rita Cowan from Kirkintilloch. Rita and Masataka toured Scotland picking up more secrets of the Scotch trade. When they arrived back in Japan in 1920, it was to set up home as husband and wife. Together, in 1934, they put their expertise into practice and founded Yoichi Distillery, choosing its elegant surroundings for their echoes of the Scottish Highlands. They were married for 41 years, until Rita’s death in 1961. Masataka was to become known as “the Father of Japanese whisky”.
This, then, has long been a story of people and place, and a global drink. For more than 150 years, an amber thread has embroidered the world. Simultaneously, it has defined how that world views Caledonia. The world obviously likes what it sees, from tourists flocking to Speyside, to Johnnie Walker-imbibing Bretons and Parisian financiers. Foreign ownership is a consequence of this internationalism.
But how Scottish is Scotch whisky, now that many distilleries are internationally owned? Does it matter that a suit in London or Paris or Tokyo, rather than one in Glasgow or Dufftown, makes decisions which affect a warehouseman on Islay or a Highland master blender?
After 10 months researching the BBC Two series Scotch: The Story Of Whisky, which begins on Tuesday, it seems to me that it does not. It may be distasteful, we may hanker for the days of village-run distilleries and wily moonshiners recalled by Joe Brandie, but we appear to have shrugged our shoulders and grudgingly accepted that, well, this is modern capitalism. The Dutch own our railways, the Germans and French our utilities.
There is, of course, a wider economic and political debate to be had – how much money made by workers in Scotland stays in Scotland? – but this living, breathing, vibrant industry in which I have spent the best part of a year seems content to be owned elsewhere. The key thing is that the makers are left alone to make. While the boss pays for the factory, the cunning alchemists can get on with what they know and do best: making whisky.
We can mourn something that possibly never existed – in my research, I failed to find one historical example of a distillery run as a workers’ collective; this has long been a top-down industry, no matter the accent of the owner. Or, we can celebrate a very Scottish success story. Here is a drink adapted from ancient distilling techniques, developed into a desirable product and sold to the world. Some 175 countries now import Scotch whisky.
And where there is noise there is money. At Abercrombie Coppersmiths’ factory in Alloa comes the shrill din of saws scything through copper, the clack and thwack of hammers, the rippling crackle of welding flames, the titanic whir of robotic cranes. Two young lads with sleeve tattoos kneel among it all, leather aprons curving beneath their knees. They are learning the trade, and have been for two years now; proper wages coming soon. This could be a job for life if they want it to be. There are others here for whom it has been just that. Lads who are now men and who, perhaps, were never meant for other paths, whose brains were in their hands. In other industries, opportunities have lessened with each generation, but not here, not here among elegant, regal, peacock-proud whisky stills.
It is the same in the Cambus cooperage in Clackmannanshire. Men with chests and shoulders like giant cornflake boxes batter wood and iron with skill, and fire and roll with panache. Machines assist them now, but even the computers know who is boss. Electronic aides aside, it is like looking at a better time, where skilled working-class jobs are the rule and not the exception. In a land still ravaged by the legacy of Thatcherism, and often among countryside pocked with rural poverty, to have such jobs, apprenticeships, career paths and good working conditions, people making, is a fine thing indeed.
Scotch whisky may seem to live by image and mystery. It may create wistful sighs and even bar-room rants about good old days. But beneath it all breathes a fiery, resplendent industry and, in 2016, that is something of a delight.
Scotch: The Story Of Whisky was written and researched by Daniel Gray. The three-part series begins on BBC Two this Tuesday at 9pm and continues on October 18 and 25