the standout in this piece is the news that ardbeg is expanding its range with new products under the name of "uigeadail".
Water of life is back from the dead: Hebridean distilleries have escaped the bulldozers of the big blenders and now, says Andrew Jefford, their great peaty malts - and some new ones - can see a golden future
By ANDREW JEFFORD Financial Times (London) June 14, 2003
It was a fearsome admission. The beauty of the location, somehow, threw the words into still sharper relief. Outside the window, the waters of Laphroaig's tiny bay, where otters slither out of the seaweed and where seals haul themselves on to rocks to sunbathe, lapped soothingly near the warehouse walls. "My honest opinion," Laphroaig's former manager Iain Henderson had just said to me, "is that we should have put a bulldozer through it for commercial reasons."
"It" was Ardbeg, a malt distillery whose spirit would feature, with Laphroaig, in the pantheon of great whiskies. Both distilleries are on the Hebridean island of Islay, close to the west coast of Scotland, and both were owned, between 1982 and 1996, by the company now known as Allied Domecq. Managers felt there was only room for one Islay malt in its portfolio, and picked Laphroaig; Ardbeg, thus, lay empty, cold and silent.
But why, I asked Henderson, should Allied have preferred destruction to disposal? "Because (Ardbeg) would be major opposition. A good businessman would not sell a competitor something that's going to bite him on the behind in 10 years' time. That's what's going to happen. I want to see Laphroaig grow and Ardbeg will be a major barrier to that." Happily for those who enjoy a smoky malt, the bulldozers never arrived and Ardbeg was sold to Glenmorangie in 1997.
This is a story that has been oft repeated since. Most distilleries started as family farms; whisky was a winter sideline. As Scotch grew internationally during the 19th century, the distilleries grew with it, becoming large businesses and employers in their own right (Ardbeg employed 60 people in 1886). During the 20th century, the blending companies bought them up and then, when the markets dipped, closed them down. Of the island's seven surviving distilleries, three have been on death row for years: Ardbeg, Bruichladdich and Bunnahabhain.
So why the sudden optimism? The underbidder for Ardbeg was a consortium headed by wine merchant and whisky bottler Mark Reynier. Undaunted, Reynier's team later bought Bruichladdich and enticed the island's greatest native distiller, Jim McEwan, across Loch Indaal from Bowmore. Since then, Bruichladdich has become synonymous with innovation. Traditionally, Bruichladdich used almost unpeated malt, yet Islay is famous for whiskies that reek of the warmth of peat smoke. Why not distil a second spirit, and a third? That's exactly what Bruichladdich has done with Port Charlotte, using malt containing
40 parts per million phenols (this being the way the industry measures "peatiness") and now Octomore. The latter is set to be the peatiest whisky at 80.5ppm phenols. The company has just begun bottling its malt on the island, which no rival does, and bottling Islay spring water, too.If you want to buy a whole cask to be stored on the island, you can, whereas large blending companies go to great lengths to stop people getting hold of their spirit. Last year, indeed, Bruichladdich sold some malt in ex-Yquem wine casks. "What we've done is apply wine logic to making and selling malt whisky," said Mark Reynier. "This industry lacks imagination. All my professional life, I've been working with great wine producers like Leroy, Domaine de la Romanee-Conti or Domaine Rousseau. Everything these wine craftsmen do is for quality and artistry; my job is to explain and to convey that free-thinking spirit to wine drinkers. Why should great malt whisky be different?"
The lesson that distilleries do not have to be run with a dour lack of imagination is beginning to sink in elsewhere. Glenmorangie too has done a fine job in breathing life back into Ardbeg, with the island's best visitor centre and some exquisite blends (including the symphonic
25-year-old Lord of the Isles) using stocks the company inherited."We have some plans for Ardbeg, too", says the company's distillery chief Dr Bill Lumsden; look out for whiskies appearing under the name of the loch from which Ardbeg draws its water, Uigeadail.
On the mainland, meanwhile, tiny Edradour was sold last year by Pernod-Ricard to whisky bottling company Signatory (Iain Henderson, as it happened, abandoned retirement after one day to run it); it has just begun distilling a second, much peatier malt of its own (at 50ppm phenols), drawing on Henderson's Islay skills.
Another leading bottler, Gordon & MacPhail, acquired Benromach in 1993 and also intends to produce "a variety of styles," according to manager Keith Cruickshank. A distillery was built in 1995 on Arran; another is planned for Shetland. The latest news is that Bunnahabhain has been sold to CL World Brands, which owns Deanston and Tobermory on Mull.
There is one drawback to the story - no Scotch can be sold before its third birthday and a good malt needs a decade to come into its own. The great malts that have returned from the dead exist in cold warehouses, fingered by damp winds, but we won't get to taste them for a few years yet. When we do, the whisky world will become still more diverse than it is at present.