THE ALCHEMIST There is a longer version of this interview here This edition’s victim is Gordon Wright. LFW: You are known as a salesman. What skills do you think you have? I love to create things, start things from new, to be involved in the creation of new products and bring them to market; that’s what I’m doing at present with The Alchemist. LFW: Woa! Slow down, we’ll come to that; the GW story first. I started in Scotch whisky in the late 80s, when I became a director of Springbank Distillery; my uncle Hedley wanted a vacant directorship to go to somebody in the family to say ‘aye’ at the appropriate times. At that time I was landscape gardening in Ayrshire but immediately my interest became more involved; I got figures from the distillery and asked questions. My uncle was delighted about this. I suspect he had never wanted to be involved in whisky; his father had died early and he was charged with looking after the distillery until a manager could be secured. He never got away. I moved to Campbeltown in January 1990. As both a shareholder and a director of the company I was the highest ranking person on site! I imagined that I would get some hands-on experience for a year but at the same time we lost the export manager and there were a lot of customers looking for whisky. So I slipped into that, the deep end but very simple–an inventory, whisky to sell and some customers. The only time Springbank distilled in the 1980s was ’85 and ’87, (which was filling for one customer); in ’89 we started distilling for ourselves and there was a huge increase in awareness of single malt and good sales around the world. Springbank was one of the top three distilleries in terms of quality, so it was an easy sale. I had a great product, an aptitude for conversation and the energy to go out and explain what it is all about. LFW: Why is the quality so? The quality dates back to the 20s and 30s when Campbeltown whisky almost died because of a lack of attention to quality. Times had been so good owners became absent and each worker was charged to produce as much alcohol per ton of malt. Springbank realised they had to make the finest whisky they could with the smallest middle cut, distilled in a unique two-and-a-half or three-times distillation that improves the finesse of the spirit. In the sixties they produced truly exceptional whiskies and I think that was because of the sherry casks that had been in the solera system for sixty-odd years before we got them. The Spanish sent over what they thought was a tired cask but was in fa ct so chock-full of sherry than it gave us beautiful flavours and melody. Nowadays you’re lucky if a sherry cask gets a couple of seasons with sherry in it. LFW: As you say an easy sale. The fact that it is a Campbeltown whisky helps. If you went to a shop with a good selection of single malts and asked ‘where is your Campbeltown section?’ With 100 Highlands on the shelf, getting one Campbeltown sold was very simple. When I joined Springbank export sales were about £300,000; when I left six years later it was £1.5m, purely from going out, visiting and talking, building a relationship with customers. LFW: I note Springbank ran out. I sold the lot! More seriously, the first thing I did was to study the inventory. I realised that if it was evaporating at 2% per year, we were losing the best part of £1m in potential sales every year! The blessing (and also the problem) at Springbank was a large quantity of very old whisky. Old is difficult to sell in large quantities—particularly if you want to get a good price. It was a question of utilising that old stock by creating a range of vintage dates, also vatting old with young whisky to improve the quality beyond the stated (youngest) age. The other problem was that there were large gaps in production. With a small distillery you can only finance the making of more whisky on money made from the sale of mature whisky and we weren’t making enough whisky. I came up with the idea of selling casks of new Springbank to the public via my friends Mark Reynier and Simon Coughlin who had La Reserve, five prestigious wine shops in London. When they sold one cask of Springbank we made enough money to make two casks for ourselves so production was increased. LFW: Why did you move? It became apparent after 3 or 4 years that my Uncle wanted me to move out of the way, which (eventually) I did. Luckily I had a plan B—Murray McDavid—a company that I had set up a year earlier with Mark and Simon as a secondary business and as an escape plan if things didn’t go well. We launched as an independent bottler with my full participation in the autumn of 1996 with six single malts from a considered range of distilleries. With Hedley owning Cadenhead, I had had some experience of selling independent bottlings. I don’t like cask strength whisky, it is interesting but a limited quantity so frustrating for both the producer and the consumer who wants to repeat what he has enjoyed. There was also a Cadenhead attitude of ‘let the customer decide if it is good or not’. I would hold tastings with a local distributor who had picked some Cadenhead bottlings and I would think, well, some of them were awful! I think that the drinker should really have had the stuff vetted for him. LFW: Why bottle at 46%? Like Springbank, Murray McDavid bottle at 46%, do not chill-filter and do not colour with spirit caramel. We also vat a few casks together to retain consistency. It’s the lowest strength you can safely bottle a single malt without it throwing a cloudy haze when cold. My uncle discovered it when he decided to start bottling in the late sixties; he was too cheap to buy a chill-filtering plant so he worked out the lowest strength—46%. The usual practice of chill filtering removes some oils and most importantly flavours. I realised this was a unique selling point; here’s something different and something better! The difference is huge. The texture in the mouth is more pleasurable. After a big meal 40% just doesn’t cut through. LFW: McDavid became your career. Yes, travelling, presentations, talking about it with a new distributor network; I built up sales very nicely. Reliable and consistent—quality, that’s our intention. LFW: Who wrote the witty label notes on McDavid bottles? Mark and I. Some were deliberately cheeky and close to the bone, but meant to be informative and entertaining. Some people can be very prissy about Scotch but it’s only a drink to make you happy and we wanted to lower the tone and make it more human. We felt we had a duty to poke fun where fun needed to be poked. LFW: And other projects? During that time, when he wasn’t doing his wine business, Mark devoted himself to trying to buy a distillery, first Ardbeg for which we put in a bid—but £2m less than Glenmorangie—we’re glad that we didn’t get it because we didn’t have the money required to make it work. So we turned our attention to Bruichladdich which seemed in a similar state of neglect, or inactivity and lack of attention anyway. While I was selling McDavid bottlings I also raised equity for Bruichladdich but it was Mark’s stubbornness to get the distillery that won it. We have some great investors; about half are Islay related, 25% from my network of people in North America and we founders have 15% from adding McDavid to the business. We took control on the 19th December 2001—I remember we all stopped off in Inveraray on our first trip as owners of the distillery [see cover SWR15]. LFW: And your job? My remit was to create the new product, the new package and to build up sales. I felt that we had to give people a variety of styles. Macallan only filled sherry casks; they had a 10, 12, 15, 18, 25, 30yo and a Gran Reserva. It seems a lot but the same style from the same wood—the same thing. The question is; how deep do you want to dig into your pocket? Very boring because you can create so much more to offer, to create different styles by using different casks and produce what we call cuvées. Visually we had to have something that would make a dramatic impact. The eye-catching aquamarine label colour was my proposal and Mark liked it a lot—no one else liked it, they thought it pouffy and effeminate but we felt it was the colour of Bruichladdich in terms of flavour, location and style. It is a gaudy colour for Scotch and LFW’s inspiration for a silver tin showed our attitude—stripped down, bare bones, no ‘smoke and mirrors’. LFW: Eye-catching like the fluorescent-orange McDavid box! The McDavid box is mine too; it’s a direct copy of the Hermes colour. I like the strength of the colour and the impact it makes—but lots of people don’t. Having got away with using that obnoxious orange, Bruichladdich-blue was a lot easier. I must be on a mission to brighten up whisky shop shelves! LFW: How much attention do you give to the whisky ‘anoraks’? We take them very seriously. They are aware of what is happening with other companies, in chat-rooms discussing what matters to them and their input is very valuable—but! We have to remember that we don’t have to take everything literally; they have their informed opinions but they are not running our company. We have to realise that most of the people who buy Bruichladdich don’t care about how it is bottled; most drink it, enjoy it and buy another. You and I have witnessed, or I could say, created the eruption in whisky interest but also encouraged its present partial demise. A lot of companies have created an awful lot of contrived products, finishes in particular, and now realise that while there are some true winners, many are duds and so have returned to core expressions. LFW: Aren’t you a main culprit? At Bruichladdich we have a large debt to service and we have tried to get as many versions of Bruichladdich out to appeal to as many people as possible, but not to the same people. We have to utilise every age we have and create a reason why someone wants to buy it. That’s a commercial necessity. Had we more money we may not have diversified as much as we have. LFW: And odd wood finishes? I like the idea—if they work. Some do not work, some just raise the question—why? A highland whisky in an Islay cask? Why not just buy an Islay? This all comes down to each producer trying to win as much shelf space in a shop or bar as possible. The wood thing is over-played and it’s just tiring people out. LFW: You’ve contradicted yourself! I know, yes, no, yes! Isn’t that inevitable when discussing whisky? Maybe that’s why we are all so fascinated about it. With the make up of the company we have a lot of experience and a lot of ideas and are very experimental. The recent ‘pink’ 20yo, finished in a Mourvedre cask, is a good example, a great story and a great whisky. It was a great whisky before without the finish and now it’s different. What we are saying is; this is a rarity—so try it. LFW: But the first edition 20yo was perfect, why fix it? The whisky was different from the first batch. Someone looking for a repetition of the first edition would have been disappointed as it was quite distinctly different—but of equal quality. If we didn’t make it obviously different then they could expect it to be the same, and it was not. LFW: And now you are away again. I am still a major shareholder but no longer employed or on the board of Bruichladdich. Since the end of 2004 I have moved on to start a new project for myself. After touring around selling whisky for weeks and weeks, talking and tasting it all day, the last thing you want to drink in the evening is yet more whisky. I’ve been incredibly lucky to find myself in places with fine selections of wines and spirits and I’ve always looked to try different things outside whisky. I reckon the malt whisky drinking population are the most informed consumers of spirits but tend to be loyal to their category mainly because other spirits have not been presented to them in the same fashion. So I’m creating a small range of spirits where the malt drinker will be able to see similar things, starting with two single malts, one Calvados and one Armagnac. LFW: So more education to do. Yes. I’m underpinning the range with two substantial malts so I can sit down with people and talk them on to introducing the finest Calvados I can find. I’m not expecting the occasional malt drinker to jump ship but there are a lot of experienced drinkers who will give other spirits some time if presented in the right way. My idea is to present them in natural form with information about the producer, so that they get the malt whisky experience. As a one-man enterprise I don’t need to sell a huge amount. I’ll set out to build a reputation of delivering spirits of the highest quality—possibly you won’t like the style but you can’t deny that the quality is good. That’s what I’m trying to do with The Alchemist Beverage Co. LFW: Which malts? The whiskies are in the final stage of choosing. I think one will be a Macallan, of about 15 years. In fact all the spirits will be at about the 15 year mark. Any younger and Calvados can be very different from a malt whisky—at the right age it starts to get very harmonious. All have a similar smoothness and mellowness but retain the character of where they came from. I’m going for something like Macallan or Highland Park; it is not the job of Alchemist to find esoteric whiskies but to show classic examples of single malts and spirits. LFW: Tell us more about these other spirits, oh great wise one. Calvados is produced in a specific area of northern France. It is made from apples and/or pears, which are fermented into cider, distilled, then aged in oak barrels. The Calvados I have chosen comes from the Pays d'Auge region and is made entirely from apples. Armagnac is distilled wine from specific grapes, like Cognac, but a single distillation. My Armagnac is from a small independent producer in the Bas Armagnac region where everything is done on site from growing the grapes, distillation and maturation—similar to Bruichladdich! Both are the finest examples of their category. LFW: Share with us the GW principle of selling. Get out there and get people to taste it; get people to understand what you are trying to do, build in them the faith in you to come up with the goods, at a fair price and exemplary quality. LFW: Your desert island dram? Springbanks and Bruichladdichs—so many that to pick one requires too much thought. So a 1981 Lochside bottled by Murray McDavid. Totally unique, we called it the Springbank of the east; huge amounts of fruit—stewed plums and a briny finish. Like drinking two different things at once. LFW: Thank you, and good luck! This is a considerably shortened version of our conversation; the full text can be read here.