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THE PROFESSOR
Ronnie Martin is the creator of our new Loch Fyne blend of Scotch Whisky. It’s not a science, it’s your own nose and palate that decides what’s right in the end. A well known character in the industry says that to make up a blend there can be no one single whisky predominating, and I agree, it’s a good starting-off point. There’s an strong argument for having a good spread of malts, it can’t be done with just a few. The rest is trial and error. The “Pope’s telephone number” — VAT 69 — was created when William Sanderson made up 100 vattings and chose which one he and his chums liked best. I think he was quite right to do that. The blender for VAT 69 used to halve hogsheads. He’d make up a 20,000 gallon vat and actually split a hoggie of one malt to get the ratio right. To create a blend decide on your first highlands, your second highlands, third highlands, then lowlands and Islays—but be careful with the Islays. We do a practical at the University in which we give my students a vatted malt, a vatted grain and some Islay whiskies and it can be very quickly demonstrated that you can kill a blend dead with too much Islay. There are a lot of blends without any Islay malt. Keep the Islays under control. Next decide how much malt and how much grain. Then wood selection, the type of cask— Sherry, bourbon, new, refilled, refilled wine treated, de-charred, re-charred, there are many categories and the permutations are almost endless. Then how old? There has been an argument for some time between the non-aged deluxe and the 12 year olds. The virtue of having no age on the label is that you can put a wee bit of youth in to ginger it up a bit rather than just having it all 12 years and over. Our whisky is a ‘standard’, as opposed to a secondary or deluxe. The youngest is five years and the oldest is over ten with a spectrum of age, a good scatter across the range. I believe this range of ages give us a top quality product, particularly when compared with other standard brands. Finally we put much reliance on a good dollop of top dressing; it brings the whole thing up. I consider this critical and I’m very pleased with mine. The quality of this top dressing is an important factor in the creation of The Loch Fyne, giving you a unique whisky. LFW: What are you doing now? I set up this company in 1991 after I retired as Production Director from United Distillers. Our company is called Inverarity Vaults and was created with my son Hamish who had been working in the wine trade in London where he gained his wine & spirits diploma. He then joined me at Inverarity in 1992. Inverarity was my Grandmother’s name and it struck me as a good name for our venture. There are not many Inveraritys about. We’ve been marketing a blend and a single malt under that name for the last four years. When you’re starting off, it is an extremely slow business so we’ve got other irons in the fire apart from whisky. We are the sole agency in Scotland for Ruinart Champagne, the oldest Champagne house in the world and also some excellent wines including De Loach from California. Champagne, wine and whisky, our three balancing elements! Hamish is 28 now and has a further 40 years to achieve our aims and ambitions. Brand building takes time. LFW: What are those aims? A return on the capital invested! To promote the quality image of our Scotch Whisky. I was the chairman of the Scotch Whisky definition committee and very much involved with the quality aspects of the industry . I’m very keen that what we put into the Inverarity bottles is a good representation of quality. I want the best ‘standard’ blend in blind tastings against any other standard blend. Likewise our malt, a single Speyside, which in my judgement can stand comparison with any other malt. We’re very much concerned with quality. LFW: Why did you choose Aultmore as your malt? As managing director of 45 distilleries, you visit each one every two or three years and get to know them individually and Aultmore was my favourite. It is something of a co-incidence that my predecessor had the same favourite. I trained as a chemical engineer and my first whisky job, as long ago as 1958, was designing a drier at Aultmore to convert the waste to animal feed. I stayed in a caravan there. I remember the distillery when it had a water wheel, the tun was belt driven and barley came in 1 cwt sacks, taken on backs up stairs to the malting floor, steeped & spread. It was called Aultmore-Glenlivet which I think was a bit of licence—it must be over 20 miles from the Livet! LFW: You must have experienced the DCL take-over battle from the front line. Yes I did, but it is all history now. You have to remember that the original proposal submitted to and recommended by the board to the shareholders was for an overall holding company based in Scotland whilst retaining the individual boards of both The Distillers Company Ltd and Guinness. For a number of reasons this never came to pass. The result is United Distillers in its present form which is proving very successful and I’m not saying this because I’m a pensioner of theirs! Their products are good. I had a tasting the other day of the new Johnnie Walker Gold 18yo. That and the Blue label are superb products. A lot of good effort has gone into the Classic Six. We were slow into malts and had only Cardhu until Guinness came along. Malts are now up to 10% of total Scotch Whisky sales LFW: When did you become Director of Production? I became Managing Director of Scottish Malt Distillers in 1979 and Production Director of SMD’s parent, DCL, in 1982—a difficult time. When I took over as Production Director we had 45 malt distilleries and closed 21 of them. Carsebridge grain distillery was closed, and many bonds. Every year we used to buy 200,000 shook bundles, that is dismantled casks, and we went from manual to mechanical raising of barrels which unfortunately put a lot of coopers out of work. In the early 70s we were filling casks for a projected 8% compound growth in sales, up to 8 or 12 years ahead. We were building eight new warehouses a year, each of 66,000 hogsheads. LFW: What went wrong? With hindsight, I don’t think any product in the world can keep on growing at the rate predicted. It wasn’t a drop in consumption that caused the whisky loch but the loss of growth. LFW: Now the industry is looking lean and fit. A lot of changes had to take place over the last twenty years. On the sherry cask side we required 10,000 home-emptied sherry casks a year, travelling casks they were called, tatty old bodega casks. When they stopped coming in we set up the DCL bodega at Carsebridge, bringing in thousands of gallons of sherry. We’d do a wood trial to identify between American and European oak, fill it with sweet sherry and hold it for six months and then disgorge it for re-use—which I have to tell you made a fantastic product! LFW: Is six months adequate? In this case yes. Very seldom do the Spaniards use sweetened wine whereas the UK is very much a sweet market. So the home emptied sherry casks are not typical of the Spanish production. You are really talking of oloroso filled casks as opposed to fino. LFW: How did you get to be so concerned about quality? I was Chairman of the Scotch Whisky Definition Committee, which produced the Scotch Whisky Act. The 1990 Act enlarged on the original definition of Scotch which was that it had to be produced in Scotland, matured in wood for three years and contain malted barley. There were three things that I was very keen to make sure were included. One was the minimum strength of 40% alcohol by volume, (there was a very strong lobby from the marketing side at the time for 37.5% as other spirits were all 37.5%). With the help of the DCL/UD research facility at Glenochil we were able to show, (with easy to understand coloured graphs!), the enormity of the fall-off of the flavour giving congeners between 40% and 37.5%. A lot of flavor congeners are flung out at 37.5%. It really is quite extraordinary that our forefathers, without the aid of high pressure liquid chromatographs and other gadgetry, knew what was absolutely right, quite often as well. At levels of below 40% you lose a lot of character. I was also very keen that the enzymes for producing the sugars for fermentation should be purely and simply from malted barley and not from any other source as can be done with other types of whiskey. Scotch Whisky is a noble spirit and it should be made purely. For the same reason we fought for the use of whole grains only, otherwise a large proportion of Scotch Whisky could have been made from the by-products of a cereal factory! There was considerable opposition to that. LFW: Who were you fighting? Cost driven arguments! We also decided that the definition of Scotch Whisky is all embracing. You can have 100% grain whisky, 100% malt, that is Scotch Whisky. We do not have separate definitions for grain, malt or blend, be it 1% or 99% malt. The reason is that you are not saying that grain is a secondary product to malt. The definition, rightly or wrongly, and I think rightly, is that there is no reference to the amount of malt in a blend. The Act succeeded due very much to the services of Bill Walker MP, and Bill Brewsher, the then Director General of the Scotch Whisky Association. There were two angles to it; one was getting political support and eventually it got all party support. I was in charge of the technical considerations; now that we had the chance, I had to make sure that it was absolutely right. LFW: For this work you were awarded the OBE for services to Scotch Whisky. I was very fortunate, but in terms of honours I like to think of the original whisky barons—Dewar, Buchanan, ‘Restless’ Peter Mackie, Walker and Haig; it is they who created the industry. I’m Visiting Professor of Distilling at the International Centre of Brewing and Distilling at Heriot-Watt University, here in Edinburgh which I became involved with in the late 1980s. The University wanted some financial input and involvement from the brewing and distilling industries. They wanted to put in a pilot plant brewery and we gave them the small stills from Glenochil. They’ve got a first-class lauter tun for preparing mashes that they can play every tune on you can imagine—depth, rotation, everything! They now have the definitive pilot production plant. With my opposite number at Scottish & Newcastle Brewers, we obtained support from the brewing industry and the Scotch Whisky Association to put up a direct injection of cash. I don’t want to be immodest about it, but it really has taken off. Demand well exceeds places and last year every graduate got a job. A great success. Now the Scottish Whisky Research Institute is going to be set up next to the ICBD in the research park. The SWRI is financed by the main Whisky companies so it really will be the research arm of the industry. Both share some of the same directors, for example Alan Rutherford of UD, is on both boards. LFW: If you were allowed one whisky on your desert island... One whisky? It would be a blend. LFW: Why a blend? It’s difficult to describe. Consider the congeners; there are many more in malt than grain. In a blend you’re cutting the congener levels by the addition of grain. If you are a serious whisky drinker, then you are a blend man. Talk to anyone in the trade and I think you will find a preference for blends. A malt is fine but I enjoy a blend. It goes down easier! I’d take my own blend or Black Label. A lot is to do with what you’ve drunk in the past and I know what goes into it and how much care has gone into it. I suppose I should say The Loch Fyne, that would do just fine! LFW: Thank you Professor Martin, full marks!
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