THERE IS a moment of truth during whisky making, as the spirit starts to flow and the stillman tests it with distilled water, using his highly developed sense of smell and taste to select what’s known as the “middle cut” – the heart and soul of the distillation that goes on to become whisky.
On 29 May 2001, the staff of Islay’s Bruichladdich distillery looked on anxiously as the stillman pored over the spirit safe, attending the r
ebirth of a very distinguished single malt. The once-great distillery had closed down in 1995, a victim of the doldrums in which the whisky market was then wallowing. But, five years after its closure, salvation came along in a most unexpected form. Two English wine merchants, Mark Reynier and Simon Coughlin, undertook an extraordinary venture and raised the money to buy and reopen the closed distillery.
Reynier may seem an unlikely player in the resurrection of a malt whisky – he is a third-generation scion of an established firm of London vintners, steeped in the wine business. He grew up in Sussex, but his mother was Scots and the family regularly holidayed on the west coast.
Now 46, he says his first encounter with Bruichladdich was a Damascene conversion. At the London Wine Fair in 1985, he won a £1,000 bottle of whisky in a raffle.
“When I collected it, it was suggested that I try some other cask samples,” he tells me. “As a wine man, I had every suspicion of whisky, which to me was an industrially produced product, but out of politeness I tried them.” One of them was a Bruichladdich. He says now: “I’ve had long experience of how to taste, applying everything my father had taught me about balance and harmony, and that is what I encountered with this whisky, in a way I hadn’t thought possible.”
Converted, Reynier started selling Bruichladdich from his London base. After several years of doing so he realised that, unlike all the wines he sold, he had never visited the source of this one delectable spirit.
Reynier therefore decided to include in his holiday plans a west-coast cycling tour, so that he might finally visit the distillery. Little did he know what scene would greet him and how big an impact it would have. When he arrived, he says: “I found the gate rusted and a placard stating, ‘Plant closed. No visitors.’”
The inauspiciousness of the encounter was underpinned when he asked a bystander if there was any chance of a tour and was told to f*** off. This only fuelled his determination to buy the plant.
“I’ve cycled the west coast, sailed it, walked it, and I’d often thought, ‘What kind of job could I do that would allow me to live here?’” he says. However, his decision to try for the distillery was born partly out of disgust at the corporate ownership of so much of the whisky industry: “Eighty-five per cent of the whisky in Scotland is produced by six companies. That’s not so in the wine world, where you deal with many small one-man bands.”
With Simon Coughlin, his old schoolfriend and co-founder of the La Reserve wine and spirit business, Reynier approached the distillery’s owners and some potential backers. Getting a foot in the door was not easy, however: repeated approaches to Bruichladdich’s successive owners proved unsuccessful, until the American group Fortune finally agreed to sell it – with the proviso that all of the £4 million required should be in the bank by midday on Friday 19 December 2000. The last of the money was deposited at five minutes to 12 precisely. The distillery was theirs.
As suggested in tonight’s BBC2 documentary, The Whisky Dream, the creation of a new generation of Bruichladdich single malt was a white-knuckle ride for all concerned – not least master distiller and the production director, Jim McEwan. Just as he was approaching retirement after 40 years as distillery manager for another great Islay malt, Bowmore, McEwan quit to join what seemed to many in the industry a hare-brained scheme. People just didn’t buy up redundant distilleries and crank them back into action – and certainly not English wine merchants.
Production of the new Bruichladdich’s first batch was fraught. “We’d all worked so hard to get this going again and I couldn’t find the middle cut,” recalls McEwan. “We were all exhausted; the boys had gathered round and it was like scene from a maternity ward, but with a dozen fathers. I was thinking, ‘Jesus, we’ve just spent £7 million to make this whisky.’ It was such a huge expectation for so many people, particularly those of the island, and [the distillation] just wouldn’t clear.
“I remember offering up a wee silent prayer. I kept trying – and about ten minutes later it suddenly cleared, like mist coming off a loch. It was probably the most emotional moment I’ve had in over 40 years in this business.”
One of a surviving clutch of renowned single-malt distilleries on “whisky island”, Bruichladdich, based on the Rhinns of Islay, was built in 1881 by the Harvey Brothers, part of a noted whisky dynasty. Reynier now lives on Islay with his own family – his son was born just half an hour after they purchased the distillery.
Reflecting the grip of multinational ownership on the Scottish whisky industry, Bruichladdich had been owned by Invergordon distilleries, which was bought out by Whyte & Mackay, who were in turn absorbed by the American Jim Beam group, and finally Fortune. Despite its reputation as a single malt of distinction, Bruichladdich was closed down in 1995 as “surplus to requirements”.
MacEwan recalls walking through the run-down distillery and wondering what the hell he had let himself in for. However, the new owners enlisted many of the plant’s former staff, including “mechanical genius” Duncan MacGillivray, now the distillery manager. There were financial panics – Reynier had to go back to his shareholders, many of whom were estate owners on Islay – and at one point they made three people redundant, including one of their initial partners.
The new owners finally turned a profit in 2004 and have invested heavily in the plant, since, also buying up the contents of a small, forgotten distillery, Inverleven, based at Dumbarton. It was being demolished and so Reynier and Coughlin bought it and sailed it on a barge up to Islay.
Embarking on their eighth year in business, Reynier reveals they have increased sales by 35 per cent and expect to have increased post-tax profits by 30 per cent to around £700,000. “All of that goes straight back in,” he explains.
Whisky means many things to many people. To Jim McEwan, a single malt is “a mirror of the people who made it”. He describes Bruichladdich as “a very biddable spirit… just as sometimes you meet people who have a class and a sensitivity about them.”
But, he reckons, “Bruichladdich has always been a Cinderella distillery.” Now, however, it seems well on its way to the ball, producing 12 different varieties, or “expressions”. Some of them are moderately or strongly peated, as are many Islay malts, but Bruichladdich was non-peated from the 1960s onward.
“I’m making some peaty stuff now,” McEwan says, “but the Bruichladdich as we know it is non-peated – just American oak, so you get all the characteristics coming through. We’re not selling to blenders. We’re not in a hurry.”
McEwan is also experimenting with some fairly esoteric caskings, including triple and quadruple distillations, inspired by the legendary potent spirits recorded by the historian Martin Martin at the beginning of the 18th century. Last year he tried a quadruple distillation: “It was fantastic. At one point I honestly believed the still was going to go through the roof and end up in Antrim, with me hanging on to it.”
With an alcohol content between 88 per cent and 91 per cent, would they bottle it? “Oh yes. The high intensity of the alcohol drives deep into the oak of the cask, pulls out the tannins and the natural sweetness of the oak. I could give you a quadruple-distilled whisky from the cask that’s four months old and you’d swear it was eight years.”
Charles MacLean, the respected whisky consultant and writer, has had the heady pleasure of tasting some of this potent stuff: “I must say it’s splendid, and I’m still alive.”
MacLean describes the rescue of Bruichladdich as “a very, very bold enterprise; they’ve done a fantastic job in restoring the distillery … and come up with up with some extremely good bottlings.”
MacLean also observes that Reynier hasn’t always endeared himself to the industry: “He’s always been vociferously against the big boys. That’s not really necessary, because everybody helps everybody else, especially on Islay.”
Reynier, however, cheerfully agrees he can be bolshie in railing against what he sees as the self-interest of the multinationals: “I get criticised by the industry for sticking my oar in, but I do it out of genuine passion and interest, not to be a troublemaker.”
He seems hugely appreciative of those who were prepared to throw their lot in with “some nutter from down south”. But as Bruichladdich’s liquid gold starts to flow, his commitment is shared. “Whisky making is a huge leap of faith,” remarks McEwan, “but we have the faith.”
&149 The Whisky Dream is on BBC2 Scotland tonight, at 10pm. For further information: w
ww.bruichladdich.com
A FLAVOUR OF ISLAND LIFETHE triple- and quadruple-distilled whiskies with which Jim McEwan has been experimenting at Bruichladdich were inspired, he says, by a famous chronicle of island life, A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, published in 1703 by Martin Martin.
A Skye native and Gaelic speaker, Martin travelled from the Inner Hebrides and Clyde estuary to the remote fastness of St Kilda.
Today regarded as a classic of its kind, the book provides an invaluable picture of life in the Inner and Outer Hebrides and Northern isles as they were at the end of the 17th century. It became essential reading for some subsequent notable travellers, such as Thomas Pennant, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson.
In his section on Lewis, Martin, as he did with each island, recorded everything from folklore to agriculture, and noted the plentiful cultivation of corn. This, he wrote, encouraged the distilling of numerous spirits, some of which were so strong as to be life-endangering.
The first was ordinary usquebaugh, but another was trestarig, id est, aquavitæ, three times distilled, which is strong and hot. A third sort is four times distilled, and this, by the natives, is called usquebaugh-baul, id est, usquebaugh, below, which at first taste affects all the members of the body.
Two spoonfuls of this last liquor is a sufficient dose; and if any man exceed this, it would presently stop his breath, and endanger his life.”
The full article contains 1855 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
