By Kelefa Sanneh - The New Yorker
One day in 1989, a man on a bicycle arrived at the gates of a whisky distillery called Bruichladdich. The distillery sits across the road from the North Atlantic Ocean, on a wild and blustery Scottish island called Islay. The man was Mark Reynier, a third-generation wine dealer from London, who was on vacation with his brother. Their primary objective would have been clear to any passing driver: each bicycle had, strapped to its handlebars, a bundle of golf clubs. At the distillery, Reynier was hoping to achieve his secondary objective. He had grown obsessed with Bruichladdich whisky, an unheralded product known, to those who knew about it, for its unusual delicacy and complexity.
He says, “It had the elegance, balance, finesse, harmony—everything I’d been brought up to look for in a great wine, and there it was in a spirit.”
In his London wine shops, Reynier persuaded customers to take a chance on a distillery whose name they probably didn’t recognise, and surely couldn’t pronounce. (The locals say, more or less, “Brook-laddy.” Also, “Eye-lah.”)
Reynier was hoping to have a vineyardesque experience: a friendly proprietor, an extended tour, and plenty of opportunities for first-hand research. Instead, he was greeted by a padlocked gate, a welter of hazardous-chemicals warnings, and a sign with a brusque message: “plant closed. no visitors.” He saw a worker in the courtyard and made his plea. “Look,” he said. “I’m your best customer, I’ve come from London—I’ve come all this way, and I’d love to have a look around.”
Reynier understood his mistake: he wasn’t a guest at a vineyard; he was a trespasser at a factory. He went back to London and set about getting rid of his last bottles of Bruichladdich. “The illusion was gone,” he says.
Unable to visit Bruichladdich—unable, anymore, even to enjoy its whisky—Reynier devised a modest plan to save his favourite spirit: he would buy the distillery. Every year, he wrote to the parent company, and every year he was told that it wasn’t for sale. In 1994, the distillery was shut down—the industry term is “mothballed”—but the answer didn’t change until 2000. By then, Bruichladdich belonged to Jim Beam Brands, which was willing to violate the Scottish taboo against inviting outsiders into the whisky business. Reynier put together fifty investors, who paid six and a half million pounds for a remote distillery that was almost defunct. On December 19, 2000, Reynier became the chief executive officer.
Having finally penetrated the industry, Reynier embraced the role of gadfly. “The whisky industry, being Scottish, is desperately serious—up its own backside,” he says. The new Bruichladdich was cheeky, and it often promoted itself by disparaging the competition—for instance, lampooning the cartoonish imagery that whisky companies often use to make their Scotch seem Scottish. “No massive publicity budget expounding on the ‘tartan and bagpipes,’ ” the company promised. “No faux heritage or ‘where the eagle soars,’ ‘monarch of the glen’ bollocks.”
Scotland is the undisputed whisky capital of the world, producing nearly two-thirds of the global supply, and Islay is the highly disputed capital of Scottish whisky. The island has thirty-five hundred residents and eight working distilleries; there is surely no place that produces more great whisky per capita, and possibly no place that produces more great whisky, full stop. To rebuild Bruichladdich, Reynier recruited a native Ileach: Jim McEwan, a whisky celebrity who had spent his career at Bowmore, a venerable distillery that faces Bruichladdich from across a coastal inlet. Bowmore makes whisky that bears smoky traces of burning peat, which was once Islay’s main fuel source and is now the signature flavour of Islay whisky. The island’s best-known distillery is probably Laphroaig, whose flagship dram is pungently smoky and startlingly medicinal, with a flavour that is sometimes compared to TCP, a European antiseptic. In reasonable doses and proper circumstances, Laphroaig can be delicious, but its popularity is a mixed blessing for the industry, because whisky neophytes who try Laphroaig and hate it may never return.
Bruichladdich is nearly smoke-free, which is a big reason that Reynier fell for it. “Coming from a wine background, peat is an alien flavour,” he says. As far as anyone can tell, the distillery stopped peating its whisky in the nineteen-sixties, in an effort to expand into peat-averse territories like America. Unlike Reynier, McEwan loves peat, but he also loved the challenge of changing Bruichladdich’s reputation. “Bruichladdich was the most misunderstood distillery on Islay,” he says. “It was regarded as some kind of outcast distillery: you’re not a true Islay, you’re not making peated whisky.” McEwan had worked for Bowmore for thirty-eight years, which meant that he was two years away from retirement, and a comfortable pension. He saw his decision to come to Bruichladdich as an act of conscience. “It’s like the story of the Good Samaritan,” McEwan says. “The guy’s lying in the ditch, and everybody walks past him. But he’s still alive.”
By the time Reynier and McEwan were able to inspect the premises, in early 2001, the distillery had been mothballed for seven years. Even if all the old machinery coöperated, the spirit they made would need time to mature in wooden casks: the standard minimum age for a fine Scottish whisky is ten years. A revivified and independent Bruichladdich would have a new version of its ten-year-old whisky sometime in 2011—but only if it survived that long. And it might not have if Reynier and McEwan hadn’t figured out something to sell in the meantime.
Although Islay is devoted to Scotch, the island has a complicated relationship with Scotland. Islay was settled by the Gaels and then the Norse, who ceded the “islands of the Sodors”—now known as the Hebrides—to Scotland only as recently as 1266. Even then, Islay still wasn’t quite Scottish: it became the seat of the Lordship of the Isles, a semi-autonomous archipelago that was reabsorbed into Scotland in the fifteenth century. Officially, there is a Lord of the Isles today, but he doesn’t seem likely to cause much trouble: his name is Charles, and his mother is the Queen.
Islay is one of the southernmost Scottish islands: it sits about twenty miles from Ireland, whence the practice of distilling malted barley may have spread. (The word “whisky” comes from the Gaelic uisge, which means “water”; in Scotland, unlike most other places, it is spelt without an “e.”) For modern distillers, Islay’s inaccessibility may seem like a drawback, but for their eighteenth-century ancestors, it was an advantage. According to local lore, tax collectors from the mainland were easily spotted and easily repelled. In 1794, a minister named Archibald Robertson wrote, “We have not an excise officer in the whole island. The quantity therefore of whisky made here is very great; and the evil, that follows drinking to excess of this liquor, is very visible.”
Eventually, Islay’s distillers were forced to pay tax, and whisky became a key export, producing more for mainlanders than for locals. But the island’s isolation helped the industry in a different way. With the rise of railroads, in the nineteenth century, most distillers found it cheaper to power their plants with coal; Islay stuck with peat, which is how the local whisky developed its reputation for smokiness, as well as for excellence. According to a report from 1863, Glasgow taverns often divided their whisky into four categories of ascending quality, priced accordingly: “middling,” “good,” “Islay,” and “undiluted Islay.”
Most Islay distilleries, though, didn’t sell their own whisky; they were factories, producing alcohol for others to blend and sell. By the end of the nineteenth century, the industry was dominated by three blending companies: Johnnie Walker, Dewar’s, and Buchanan’s. Then as now, the mass-market blends were mixtures of two different products: relatively expensive malt whisky, made from malted barley, and absolutely inexpensive grain whisky, made from whatever grain happened to be cheapest. (In America, whiskey generally means bourbon, a term reserved for an aged spirit whose main ingredient is corn.) Connoisseurs of fine Scottish whisky often call their drink malt, not whisky, to distinguish it from the bland but effective blended brown liquid that is generally meant to be mixed or guzzled.
When McEwan was growing up, in the nineteen-fifties, the island’s main export was impossible to ignore. “You could smell the peat smoke coming from the distillery if you opened your window in the morning,” he says. “And it was every kid’s ambition to get a job in a distillery—that was where you wanted to be.” He began by sweeping the floors at Bowmore, and was eventually promoted to cooper, and to cellar master, in charge of storing and monitoring casks; then, in 1973, at the age of twenty-five, he was dispatched to Glasgow, where he learned how to blend. Bowmore swapped stocks of malt whisky with other distilleries, and McEwan’s job was to sample them all and combine them with grain whisky to create consistent and accessible blends; he worked on an American blend called Duggan’s Dew, and another, popular in South Africa, called Three Ships. By the time he was recalled to Islay, to run Bowmore, he was well acquainted with just about every whisky in Scotland.
Even cheap whisky needs time to mature: by law, whisky can’t be sold in the United Kingdom until it has been aged for three years. This means that distilleries often find themselves selling spirit in circumstances that have changed since the spirit was distilled. In the British recession of the mid-nineteen-seventies, a number of distilleries were mothballed; there was a similar slump a decade later. As a result, a lot of great whiskies were orphaned, and scrappy companies known as independent bottlers bought some of it, to resell to connoisseurs, usually in small editions and at high prices. The spirit they sold was known as single-malt whisky, meaning whisky from a single distillery.
Before Reynier came to Bruichladdich, he co-founded an independent bottling company called Murray McDavid (named for two of his Scottish grandparents), which aimed to improve upon the distilleries’ own products, sometimes by re-maturing the whisky in higher-quality casks. One of his first offerings was a bottling of whisky from Laphroaig, meant to highlight its infamous piquancy, which Reynier thought was missing from the distillery’s recent bottlings. Laphroaig filed suit, arguing that Murray McDavid’s description of the product—“Islay single malt Scotch whisky from the Laphroaig Distillery”—constituted trademark infringement. Reynier won the suit but decided to rethink his packaging anyway. He created new labels, which read, “Owing to recent litigation, we are unable to reveal the name of this distillery.” It wasn’t hard to guess, though: Murray McDavid called its product Leapfrog, which prompted another lawsuit.
If Reynier sees his career in whisky as one long fight against dim corporations and bland drams, McEwan is more conciliatory. “Blends are extremely important because they provide the flight path for the malt drinkers of the future,” he says. Single malt accounts for about ten per cent of the Scotch-whisky market. “Nobody comes to malt direct. Or very, very few. They’ll come in with a good blend, and then they will be intrigued, and they will move up: ‘Oh, I’ve got to try a malt sometime.’ ” Newcomers often start with an agreeable, widely available malt like Macallan or Glenlivet, and then branch out into more esoteric fare. McEwan loves great whisky, but he loves Islay more, which means that he isn’t inclined to disparage the industry that keeps it alive. “This is a very fragile economy,” he says. “I mean, if it wasn’t for whisky, this island would be a bird sanctuary.”
Bruichladdich was a state-of-the-art distillery when it opened, in 1881. Its original owners were three brothers, the Harveys, whose family also owned a pair of industrial distilleries on the mainland. Many island distilleries were converted barns; Bruichladdich was built for the purpose of turning malted barley into ethanol and constructed from modern concrete. (The Harveys’ contractor, based in Glasgow, held the local patent.) Bruichladdich still looks much the same, with whitewashed two-story buildings surrounding a stone courtyard, which is now used as a parking lot. The new Bruichladdich chose aquamarine as its signature colour, because it evoked the way the ocean looked on sunny days. Even on an entirely cloudy Sunday this past autumn, Bruichladdich seemed like a cheerful place—nothing like the forbidding factory of 1989. Islay is only about seventy miles west of Glasgow, but getting there by car requires a three-hour drive and a two-hour ferry ride. (It also has a small airport.) More than ten thousand customers make the trip every year, driving vigilantly along narrow island roads that they must sometimes share with stray sheep. Whisky tourism creates nearly as many jobs on Islay as whisky production, and on this day the distillery was closed but the gift shop was full of visitors, who seemed to be sampling rashly and buying carefully.
In a cramped and creaky second-floor office, Reynier was dressed in work clothes: olive army jacket, brown army shirt, and unhemmed trousers, reinforced at the knees. He is fifty-one, and the culture shock he felt when he first moved to Islay has never quite subsided. “I’m everything that this island isn’t: privately educated, Roman Catholic upbringing, London, wine trade, and businessman,” he said. “Here it’s state-controlled, socialist, Protestant.” He speaks at length and in bursts, with a fidgety impatience that can convey irritation or enthusiasm or, more often, a bit of both. And while some islanders never quite warmed to him (one described him as “aloof”), they immediately appreciated that his venture would create jobs if it succeeded.
Bruichladdich’s ten-year problem was partly a marketing problem: malt drinkers have come to view age as a proxy for quality, and the industry has played along, using age statements to justify high prices. In Reynier’s view, this constrains distillers and misleads consumers. “Age doesn’t matter,” he said. “Who the fuck thinks that a ten-year-old is better than a nine-and-a-half, or inferior to an eleven-and-three-quarters? It’s totally arbitrary!” Generally speaking, ageing in wood makes whisky richer and mellower, but age is only one of many variables to consider. (Once it has been bottled, whisky should remain more or less stable.) In any case, Bruichladdich couldn’t afford to indulge in age snobbery, because the last of the old regime’s spirit was turning ten in 2004. So Reynier and McEwan found ingenious ways to make young whisky delicious—and to sell it for old-whisky prices.
In 2006, Bruichladdich started releasing a wide variety of limited-edition whisky experiments, many of them bottled at six years old, or even younger. McEwan launched a new line, Port Charlotte, devoted to peated whisky, in the Islay tradition; then he launched another, Octomore, which claimed to be “the world’s peatiest whisky.” In 2009, the distillery began producing a line of gin called the Botanist, using local herbs and flowers. This was a particularly canny decision because gin doesn’t need time to mature. “Instant cash,” McEwan says. “You make it today, you sell it one week from today.” Most Scottish distilleries age their spirit in used bourbon casks, but Bruichladdich often supplements these with wine casks, which impart flavour, colour, and cachet. McEwan mixed and matched spirits to create new expressions like Laddie Classic, a mid-priced introductory Scotch, and Black Art, a mysterious and expensive multi-vintage release. Not long after Bruichladdich was reborn, Whisky Magazine named McEwan its distiller of the year. And, partly because Bruichladdich released so many different whiskies, it became a fixture in the review sections of whisky magazines and blogs. Some reviewers grumbled about the profusion but most applauded the company’s curiosity, and some bigger companies began expanding their ranges, too.
McEwan is sixty-four, and for much of his career, he has been, in addition to a master distiller, a global whisky ambassador. His speaking voice is warm and resonant, and he rolls his “r”s with a craftsman’s precision. Where Reynier is ironic and astringent, McEwan is theatrical and sometimes ostentatious. “I’m still chasing rainbows,” he says, by way of explaining his open-ended quest to discover exactly how delicious a whisky can be.
One Monday, McEwan was seated at his desk, dressed in high-end business casual: sharply creased grey wool slacks, crisply ironed shirt, blue tie with matching cufflinks. The walls were tiled with awards and citations, and next to his computer sat a tatty thesaurus, which he uses to write the digressive essays that form the basis for the company’s official tasting notes. One Bruichladdich whisky—the “classic” twenty-two-year-old expression—promises to deliver a dizzying chain of sensations: “sweet yellow fruits, drizzled with honey and crushed almonds”; “freshly picked summer flowers”; “custard cream and toasted barley”; “banana bread and vanilla fudge”; “marzipan”; “Abernethy biscuit”; “marine citrus meringue.” To enjoy a dram of Bruichladdich, sip it neat, and then add a splash or more of mineral water, which helps release volatile compounds that bring out notes of fruit and spice. (Adding ice can dull the taste, and may also make the whisky taste like whatever is in your freezer.) It’s a simple process, but consumers hoping to reproduce McEwan’s results at home will find, no doubt, that some variant of the uncertainty principle applies: the more research you conduct, the less reliable your data become.
That afternoon, McEwan led a tour, starting with the warehouse, where different vintages of whisky were maturing in thirty-five thousand wooden casks, some of which bore the names of the wines they once held: d’Yquem, Pétrus, Le Pin. Adam Hannett, the young warehouse manager, scrambled up to a cask in the third row from the bottom, popped out the bung, and dropped in a long metal tube, called a valinch, which he used to transfer a pint of copper-coloured liquid into a glass pitcher. “Eighteen years in a bourbon cask,” McEwan said. “Four years in Château Latour.”
In the damp and often chilly Bruichladdich warehouse, the alcohol evaporates more quickly than water, which means that the whisky gets less potent as it ages. This one brought to mind some of the characteristics of a cognac: it had a warm, round sweetness, with hints of cinnamon toast and marshmallow and possibly grape jelly. Or possibly not. Luckily, McEwan wasn’t in the mood to conduct a pop quiz. He sipped, and his face took on an expression of great gravity. “This,” he said, “is what you’d describe as a very, very sexy whisky.”
No one knows why Bruichladdich whisky tastes the way it does, but plenty of people think they do. In Reynier’s view, the distillery’s proximity to a shallow bay makes a difference. (Bruichladdich is Gaelic for “raised beach.”) When the tide goes out, across the road, algae are exposed to the air, which influences the spirit as it matures, giving it a maritime tang.
Officially, the company also credits its distinctive tall, narrow pot stills, the oldest of which has been in use since 1881. But McEwan differs sharply. “The shape of the pot is not significant, in terms of flavour—this is a kind of fairy story,” he says. “It’s the artisanal skills of the whisky-maker.”
Whisky begins with barley that has been malted—soaked in warm water, so that the grain begins to germinate, producing enzymes, and then dried with hot air so that the germination stops. At Bruichladdich, the malted barley is mixed with water from Bruichladdich loch, up the hill, and heated in huge cast-iron vessels known as mash tuns. The heat and the enzymes convert the barley’s starch into sugar, resulting in a sweet, slightly grainy liquid known as wort. In a set of wooden vessels, the wort is mixed with yeast and left to ferment into a honey-coloured ale, known as wash, which has an alcohol content of about seven per cent. Finally, the wash is piped into the stillhouse, where one of Bruichladdich’s stillmen is always posted. The senior Stillman is Duncan MacFadyen, known as Budgie, who has worked at Bruichladdich since around the time Reynier visited on his bicycle. (During the six years that the distillery was closed, MacFadyen served as a night watchman.) The stillhouse, with its two-story copper stills and gleaming pipes, is the highlight of every distillery tour. It was nearly lunchtime, and MacFadyen was trying to finish a container of strawberry yoghurt before the next group arrived.
Alcohol—that is, ethanol—boils at a hundred and seventy-three degrees Fahrenheit, which means that if you apply heat to a mildly alcoholic solution the alcohol will turn to vapour before the water does. As the onion-shaped belly of the still heats up, alcohol vapour travels up the thin neck, slowed by the microscopic striations on the surface of the copper. Then the vapour wafts through a gently descending pipe known as a lyne arm, and through a series of cooling condensers, which turn the vapour back into liquid. MacFadyen was flanked by four stills, two of which were distilling wash into what’s known as low wine (about forty per cent alcohol) and two of which were redistilling low wine into clear spirit, which is essentially moonshine. One of his most important jobs is to monitor this second distillation, ensuring that only the most desirable spirit, known as the middle cut, winds up in the barrel, at between sixty-five and seventy per cent alcohol. The first part of the distillate, known as the foreshot, contains methanol, which can be toxic in large quantities—although the same could be said of whisky. The last part, known as the feints, contains all sorts of volatile and unappetizing compounds. The feints have a distinctive odour, which MacFadyen compared to a smelly sneaker. Part of a Stillman’s job is to determine how wide the middle cut should be—how close to get to that sneakerlike funk.
To help him decide, MacFadyen had a set of small glass hydrometers that measure density; by indexing density and temperature, using a crumbling reference book from 1978, he could identify the percentage of alcohol in a sample. He opened a brass case marked “spirit safe,” inside of which there was a constant stream of spirit, pouring from a metal spout. He dipped a glass into the stream. What he caught didn’t taste like whisky at all—it was slightly smoky and sweet, with a faintly unpleasant sharpness, like fermented NutraSweet. It would be inaccurate to call this clear spirit undrinkable; up until the nineteen-seventies, distillery workers were customarily given drams of clear spirit before, after, and sometimes during their shifts.
Many whiskeys are purer than Scottish malts. Irish whiskey is customarily distilled three times, instead of two; grain whisky, like vodka and gin, is often produced using a reflux still, which can turn wash into a distillate that is about ninety-five per cent alcohol. But impurity is what gives the whisky its flavour: all sorts of chemicals, known as congeners, survive the still. “Malted barley, distilled, is the most complex spirit in the world,” Reynier says. “It’s got too much flavour.” Whereas American bourbon, by law, must age in new oak casks, Scotch distillers prefer used casks (typically bourbon), partly because they are less reactive—vanillin and other oaky compounds don’t overpower the spirit. The purpose of maturing Scotch is to enhance the strong flavours that remain after its relatively tolerant distillation process and tame them, too. Even Reynier agrees that some taming is required; he just doesn’t believe that tamer is always better.
In 1703, a Scottish writer named Martin Martin published “A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland.” In his discussion of Lewis and Harris, the northernmost island in the Hebrides, he made tantalizing reference to a whisky-like beverage, made from oats and quadruple-distilled, which he called usquebaugh-baul: “usquebaugh” means “water of life,” or “eau de vie”; “baul” may have referred to its potency. Martin concluded his description with a firm prescription: “Two spoonfuls of this last Liquor is a sufficient Dose; and if any Man exceeds this, it would presently stop his Breath, and endanger his Life.” To Reynier and McEwan, Martin’s prescription seemed like a dare, and they set out to create their own version of usquebaugh-baul, a name they translated as “the perilous whisky.” Bruichladdich put out a press release announcing the “most alcoholic single malt ever made”—the unmatured spirit was about ninety per cent alcohol. Within a few days, the story of the death-defying whisky was in newspapers around the world. The Scotch Whisky Association—a powerful trade group, which Reynier refused to join—issued a statement saying, “Undue emphasis on high alcohol content is irresponsible and should not be used as the principal basis of any product’s appeal to the consumer.” Bruichladdich’s Web site defiantly reminded visitors of the S.W.A.’s verdict: “irresponsible.” Oz Clarke, the wine critic, tasted the unmatured spirit on a BBC program. He delivered his verdict with eyes closed and shoulders hunched: “Oh! Oh.” James May, from the beloved automobile show “Top Gear,” used it to fuel a racing car. By the time the spirit had matured, it wasn’t quite so radical: Bruichladdich aged it in bourbon casks for three years, and then sold a few thousand bottles, at a strength of sixty-three and a half per cent alcohol—not quite perilous but still strong.
Throughout the aughts, Bruichladdich was both more and less old-fashioned than its competitors. It refused to artificially colour its whisky, or to chill-filter it; chill-filtration removes oils that can cause cloudiness but which also impart flavour. As part of its program to emphasize ingredients over age, it released a series of barley-specific whiskies: one was made solely from organic barley; another was made from bere, an ancient cultivar that could have been brought to Scotland by Vikings in the first millennium. The distillery persuaded some local farmers to start growing barley, so that, for the first time since the First World War, consumers could buy Islay whisky made from Islay barley. Bruichladdich never figured out a cost-effective way to malt barley on the island—all its barley is sent to a huge malting plant in Inverness, in the Scottish Highlands, which returns malt imbued with a specified amount of peat smoke. (McEwan says, “You’d need malt barns the size of Terminal 5, Heathrow Airport, to supply a modern distillery.”) But just about everything else is as local as possible. The distillery even runs its own bottling hall: all year long, bottles are shipped in by ferry from the Kintyre Peninsula, filled and labelled, and then shipped back out.
All this localism has helped make a rather small distillery the biggest private employer on the island: out of Islay’s thirty-five hundred residents, about fifty of them work for Bruichladdich. The island is an appealing place to vacation; its part-time residents include Sir John Mactaggart, the Scottish real-estate mogul, and Bruno Schroder, the banking billionaire. (Both of them invested in Bruichladdich.) But the trickle of retirees from the mainland has not kept pace with the exodus of islanders looking for work; the population is barely half what it was fifty years ago. Most farmers on the island supplement their earnings with government subsidies, paid to follow various environmental strictures or merely to maintain farms in such an inaccessible place.
One of Bruichladdich’s most valuable local assets is a burly and charismatic gadabout named James Brown, widely known as Farmer Brown. He is sixty years old and vigorous: an ex-lighthouse keeper, a former special constable, a passable bagpiper, and, by all accounts, a pretty good tosser of hammers. His farm, a few miles down the road, sits on the site of a long-gone distillery called Octomore, for which Bruichladdich’s ultra-peated whisky is named. Some of Bruichladdich’s barley comes from Brown’s farms, and although, like most islanders, he is no connoisseur, he has amassed an impressive collection of Bruichladdich whisky—unopened bottles accrue in his house, shoved in filing cabinets and stacked precariously in corners. “If we’re drinking whisky up here,” he says, “we take the cork off the bottle, and it’s—pfft. And get another bottle. None of that nonsense of wee sips.”
Brown is also the de-facto administrator of Dirty Dotty’s spring, the source of the water that Bruichladdich uses to bring its whisky down from cask strength to bottling strength, which is generally forty-six per cent alcohol. Brown remembers the day when Reynier and a few other Bruichladdich executives arrived on his property with wine glasses, to evaluate the water from his spring. They liked it, and asked for six barrels, leaving Brown to figure out how to get it to the distillery.
One autumn morning, Brown was preparing his weekly delivery. The weather was typical: about forty-five degrees and almost raining. “Couldn’t be nicer, eh?” Brown said. He had driven his tractor half a mile up a dirt road; from where he parked, you could see his Highland cows grazing on the sloping fields and, beyond that, the grey stucco of the North Atlantic. Brown grabbed one end of a hose and scrambled down the hill toward a tiny shack, recently built from unpainted pine, that stood next to a stream. “That water there is black,” he said, pointing to the stream. Then he opened a trapdoor in the floor of the shack and lowered a cup on a string; when he brought it back up, it was full of clear water that bore no trace of peat or salt. “That water there comes out of the ground,” he said. “The second-oldest rocks in Europe.” Jerking hard on a starter cord, he coaxed a gas-powered pump to life; it takes him about an hour to fill a thousand-litre plastic tank, and Bruichladdich was expecting six of them.
It’s not clear whether even the most refined palate could correctly judge the age of gneiss rock by sampling the spring water that flows through it, but Bruichladdich isn’t inclined to let any superlative go to waste. One of the company’s most popular whiskies is its cheapest, Bruichladdich Rocks, which promises to let consumers commune with “the oldest rocks in the whisky world!” Bruichladdich Rocks doesn’t carry an age statement, but it is about six years old, and it spends its final few months of maturation in red-wine casks, which give the spirit a sprightly, pleasantly acidic taste. McEwan speaks fondly of it, but he doesn’t deny its purpose. “Rocks—that was just a young, non-aged whisky that we put on the market, that was kind of taking the heat off the older stocks,” he says. “People said, ‘Ah, Bruichladdich are doing so many different things.’ Yeah, well, we had to! If we didn’t, we’d have been sitting there starving—the company would never, ever have got off the ground.”
In 2011, the new Bruichladdich turned ten, and so did the oldest batch of new whisky in the warehouse. The distillery finally had a flagship ten-year-old, which it called the Laddie Ten: a definitive name for a definitive dram. Bruichladdich even allowed itself to gloat, with a slogan: “The first ten years are the toughest!” Reviews were generally enthusiastic. Whisky Advocate named the Laddie Ten the year’s best Islay whisky, above bottles that sell for more than ten times the price. (In the U.S., a bottle of the Laddie Ten costs about fifty-five dollars.) And, for the first time, Bruichladdich appeared on the shelves of duty-free shops in airports worldwide.
The success of the Laddie Ten seemed to mark Bruichladdich’s transformation from a scrappy upstart into a successful mainstay, and the impression was confirmed last summer when the company made a startling announcement: it was selling out to Rémy Cointreau, the French liquor conglomerate, whose products include Rémy Martin cognac and Cointreau liqueur. (The price was fifty-eight million pounds, including ten million pounds of assumed debt.) Out of Bruichladdich’s eight board members, only one voted against the sale: Reynier. Once the deal was struck, Reynier was asked to leave and was replaced by his longtime business partner Simon Coughlin. Reynier announced his departure on Twitter: “Over & out.” In his next post, he filled in a few details: “(it’s) over & (I’m) out (of here).”
Reynier now lives in Edinburgh, where his son goes to school, but this fall he was back on Islay for a few days. In his old office, he seemed slightly disoriented—he still thinks the sale came too soon, and he hasn’t shed his habit of talking about Bruichladdich in the first-person plural. “Just being in this office is strange,” he said. “This is where I’ve lived for the last eleven years.” All around the distillery, nothing had changed, with one small exception. On the antique Ford pickup truck in the courtyard, a wooden sign above the windshield read “1881 Bruichladdich 1881.” In recent months, someone had added a new wooden sign, above the old one: “2012 Rémy Martin 2012.”
Simon Coughlin, the new chief, says that Rémy is an ideal parent company because it allows subsidiaries to operate with relative independence. “We’re the experts about Bruichladdich,” he says. “And they’re bloody good listeners.” During Bruichladdich’s first decade, it didn’t have the marketing budget or the distribution power to find a place in any but the most ambitious bars; it had to rely on its bright-coloured tins and daunting variety to stand out on liquor-store shelves. Now the company will have access to Rémy’s international distribution network; in the U.S., Rémy distributes Macallan, which is ubiquitous. With money from Rémy, Bruichladdich plans to add an overnight shift, and double production, to one and a half million litres a year.
Coughlin wants to streamline Bruichladdich’s offerings, but not in the way many industry observers would have predicted. He now describes the grand celebration of the Laddie Ten as, in some ways, a distraction from the company’s true strength. “I think that we got drawn, a little bit against our true feelings, into age statements,” he says. “So there’s going to be less emphasis on age statement. And there’s going to be more emphasis on the barley than there’s ever been.” In other words, the new new Bruichladdich will be much like the old new Bruichladdich—only more so.
Anyone considering the future of whisky on Islay should visit Caol Ila (“Cull-ee-lah”), which produces six million litres of liquor per year—more than any other Islay distillery—with only eleven full-time employees. At the depopulated stillhouse, in a preposterously scenic spot on the coast, the gift shop sells bottles of twelve-year-old Caol Ila, described as a “secret malt,” produced “in a remote cove.” The only hint of the distillery’s true identity can be found on the tote bags for sale, which include its e-mail address: caolila.distillery@diageo.com. Diageo is the dominant player in the Scotch industry: it owns twenty-eight distilleries and makes dozens of blended whiskies. The most important of these is Johnnie Walker, which accounts for about twenty-two per cent of the whisky sold worldwide. The main reason that Caol Ila remains “secret” is that most of what it produces ends up in Johnnie Walker and other blends; less than five per cent is sold as single malt.
In an economic sense, Caol Ila’s picturesque location is mostly wasted, especially since its whisky is shipped back to the mainland to mature. Malted barley can be distilled anywhere: Japan has a thriving single-malt industry, and a number of distillers in the U.S. are making Scottish-style whisky. Distillers in Japan and America can’t call their products Scotch, but there’s nothing stopping a company like Diageo from closing down its Islay operations and moving them to Glasgow or some other, more convenient location. (Just about any location would be more convenient than Islay.) In 2010, Diageo opened a large-scale distillery called Roseisle, in northern Scotland, which produces about ten million litres of alcohol per year, all of it for blend.
Reynier thinks he knows where this is leading. He imagines an accountant at a big liquor conglomerate suddenly wondering, “Why do we have distilleries on these remote Hebridean islands?” The Scotch Whisky Association recognizes five kinds of Scotch, one of which is “blended malt”—that is, a blend of malt whiskies from two or more distilleries. To Reynier, this seems intended to make it easier for big companies to do away with small distilleries, while still claiming to sell malt. “The distilleries that are left will be façades—for marketing,” Reynier says. “And the actual spirit will all be distilled somewhere else. No doubt.”
McEwan is less worried; he thinks that rising demand, particularly from Asia, will only make great malt more valuable. “I can rest easy in my chair,” he says, “knowing that I have helped to provide a secure future for generations, possibly.” Because single-malt whisky is a luxury product, its makers can afford to ignore some of the demands of efficiency—in fact, Bruichladdich has proved that some whisky drinkers will pay a premium for whisky made in unusually inefficient ways. For the purpose of keeping far-flung distilleries afloat, Bruichladdich’s business model might be the only one that makes sense. By making the Islay terroir a central part of its brand, Bruichladdich has made itself essentially immovable.
Already, there are signs in the industry that Bruichladdich has been influential—or, at the very least, prescient. More companies now sell whisky that is uncoloured and un-chill-filtered, and some now offer whisky aged in a variety of casks. Demand is rising faster than distillers had predicted; as aged stocks deplete, a growing number of distilleries are promoting whisky with no age attached. Last year, Macallan announced that all its malt younger than eighteen years old would be sold not by age but according to a four-colour system, ranging from gold to ruby. By law, age statements must reflect the age of the youngest spirit in the bottle; forgoing them gives distillers more flexibility, allowing them to combine malts of different vintages, some of which might be recent. This approach also demands a certain amount of faith from consumers, who have learned to be sceptical of vague claims on whisky bottles. But, then, for anyone who loves malt, there is no alternative to faith: if you don’t trust the distiller, nothing written on the bottle will guarantee you a great dram.
It was late afternoon in the Bruichladdich gift shop, and McEwan was waxing ambassadorial. Some guests were in town from Japan—bar and restaurant owners, all current or potential customers—and tables had been set up for a formal tasting: white tablecloths, rows of glasses, and a handsomely bound book of tasting notes.
Few of the guests spoke English, so McEwan had to pause between phrases for the translator, which made him sound even more theatrical than usual. Assistants poured out small drams of the Laddie Sixteen, which was made from spirit distilled by the previous regime. McEwan said, “If I was asked, ‘What was the last whisky in the world, before you die, which one would you have?’ ” He slapped his hands together. “Sixteen.” As the guests sipped, he supplied some real-time tasting notes. “It’s a little bit spicy,” he said. “If you add a little bit of water, then you get the apricot, the peach, the pear—maybe a little bit of gooseberry.” There was some stammering from the translator as she tried to summon the Japanese word for “gooseberry.”
When he introduced a recent bottling of peaty Octomore, he mentioned that it had matured in Château d’Yquem casks. The visitors, being beverage professionals, nodded sagely, and one murmured, “Sauternes.” McEwan also wanted to emphasize the connection between the whisky and the place. “Very distinctive minty note,” he said. “You’re getting the heather fields of Islay—the flavour of wild plants. And there’s a lovely oily flavour, from the seas.”
He saved the most important whisky for last: the Laddie Ten. “We’ve been waiting a long time,” he said. “So, please—I won’t say anything. Just enjoy it.”
The Laddie Ten, marketed as the definitive Bruichladdich, is actually something of an anomaly. It is classified as unpeated, but all of Bruichladdich’s “unpeated” whisky is made from lightly peated barley, with phenols—a rough proxy for smokiness—measured at about three to five parts per million. (Laphroaig and Bruichladdich’s Port Charlotte line are made from barley with phenol levels around forty p.p.m.) During its first reopened year, in 2001, Bruichladdich used barley with a phenol level closer to ten p.p.m. So the first release of the Laddie Ten has a mild but distinct smokiness, alongside the expected floral flavours and the breakfast-cereal sweetness. This characteristic has been conspicuously absent from the official tasting notes, and, perhaps as a consequence, absent from most of the reviews, too. (Serious malt drinkers have remarkable palates, but that doesn’t mean they’re not suggestible.) Later this year, when the second version of the Laddie Ten arrives, the smoke will be muted, and the definitive Bruichladdich will be redefined. Of course, no malt is ever quite definitive: while distillers promise consistency, their product is always changing. And part of what Bruichladdich proved is that customers don’t necessarily mind an unpredictable malt, so long as they feel as if they know what’s going on.
McEwan didn’t explain the peatiness, but he did do plenty of explaining—he had broken his vow of silence not long after making it. He was almost shouting now: “It’s made by Islay people, and not goddam computers, you understand?” He paused and took a breath; this was shtick, though the visitors may not have realized it. “If I sound a little passionate, that’s just the way we are,” he said.
“We are Celtic people—we’re not Scottish. We’re different.”
