THE ALCHEMIST Extended version This edition’s victim is Gordon Wright. LFW: You are known as a salesman. What particular 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 history first. I started in Scotch whisky in the late 80s, when I became a director of Springbank Distillery; a case of nepotism, as shareholding is restricted to direct descendants of the original family that established Springbank in 1828. My father left his shares to mother and his kids. The company is primarily owned by Hedley Wright who is both the chairman and my uncle. He 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 and I thought, here’s an opportunity go get into something cosier—at least less wet! 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; he’s an academic, a geologist, but his father had died early and in 1960 he was charged with looking after the distillery until a general manager could be secured. He never got away. I moved to Campbeltown in January 1990. It was strange because I was both a shareholder and a director of the company and so 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 – we had an inventory, whisky to sell and some customers. The only time Springbank distilled in the 80s was 1985 and ’87, which was filling for one customer; in ’89 we started distilling for ourselves. When I joined the company was quite positive. Also exciting was the huge increase in awareness of single malt and good sales around the world. Springbank had a fantastic reputation even though it was not well known. It 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, to share passion. There was so much ammunition available, if someone said ‘I’ve never heard of it’, you could pull stacks of endorsements. LFW: Why is the quality so regarded? 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 while competing with other distilleries to get the best return. That’s not good, quality is all about the middle cut. Springbank realised that to survive 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. This attention to detail and the selection of casks gave it a solid reputation. 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 fact 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. The 21yo Springbank of old, that was such an amazingly complex spirit. LFW: As you say an easy sale. The fact that it is a Campbeltown whisky helps. Okay, people like Allied and UD had the whisky maps re-drawn so Campbeltown was excluded as a region but it was historically one of the major producing regions. 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. I’d be in a bar or restaurant with an owner who didn’t drink whisky, maybe he’d been put off it at an early age, and ask him to try this; ‘wow! I didn’t realise that Scotch could be so complex!’ I did a lot of legwork getting around these places. 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. I was described as being willing to go over Niagara in a barrel to spread the word—almost true! LFW: Were you tempted to get involved in distilling? No, for me selling is far more enjoyable. Whisky distillation is very repetitive. You hit a recipe that works and stick to it; barley is a stable raw material and if you keep the stills running at the same rates and repeating the last method—you’re set. Nowadays there is more experimentation, with quite a lot more being done on the distillation side. I met some eau-de-vie producers from Alsace. They discard their foreshots completely; it takes far too long to mature and they give the spirit a roughness, so they are only distilling the meatier, tastier part of the spirit. In Scotch foreshots are redistilled. Why not try without them here? Okay, it’s an economic cost—throwing away something you have created and the tax man would have a hairy fit! Why throw away alcohol? But that would be an interesting thing to try. Distillation remains more a science than an art. LFW: How were stocks; I note Springbank ran out a while ago. 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 that there 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. You can sell a 30yo for pennies but it brings down the whole credibility of old whisky, so it was a question of utilising that old stock by creating a range of vintage dates which worked in many markets. We also vatted old with young whisky to improve the quality beyond the stated (youngest) age. You could argue we were using up valuable stock but the old stuff would not have been sold otherwise—not at realistic prices anyway. The other problem was that there were large gaps in production—nothing between 1980 and ’85—and no saleable young whisky coming up. 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 Mark sold one cask of Springbank we made enough money to make two casks for ourselves so production was increased. So we could lay down a lot more stock for ourselves, stock which is being sold now plus some that we are buying back (for a reasonable return). LFW: Why did you finish at Springbank? It became apparent after 3 or 4 years that my Uncle wanted me to move on, 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 also as an escape plan if things didn’t go well. Murray McDavid (so named from Mark’s family tree) was launched as an independent bottler with my full participation in the autumn of 1996 with six single malts from a considered range of distilleries presented at 46% alcohol. With Hedley owning Cadenhead, I had had some experience of selling independent bottlings. Personally I don’t like cask strength whisky and while it is interesting, limited quantity, single cask whisky is frustrating for both the producer and the consumer who wants to repeat what he has enjoyed but cannot. 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! There was nothing good I could say about them, which was a shame because many of these were very old and cost a lot of money. I think that the drinker should really have had the stuff vetted for him. 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. Another problem can be with a big number of bottlings available, it makes it difficult for retailers to decide what to stock. So we decided to launch with just six including a Glenturret, Linkwood, Mortlach, and Laphroaig. They were very well received and many of my Springbank distributors took it on. LFW: Why 46%? 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%. When I joined Springbank it was all explained to me, that the usual practice of chill filtering remo ves some oils and most importantly flavours. I realised this was a unique selling point; here’s something different and something better! Now many more have realised this and there are a lot more unchillfiltered whiskies available. The difference is huge. The texture in the mouth is more pleasurable. After a big meal 40% just doesn’t cut through. LFW: So Murray McDavid became your career. Yes, travelling, presentations, talking about it with a new distributor network; I built up sales very nicely. The stock we bottled never came direct from distillers but from brokers or by buying back stocks La Reserve had sold to the public. Back then the range of casks available was quite considerable compared to now. We were fortunate in finding a lot of good stock and were able to taste and pick the very best. Over the years McDavid has bottled every Islay distillery and lots of choice old Macallan and Springbanks. The idea is to keep a concise range such that people would want all from the range rather than cherry-pick from it. Reliable and consistent—quality, that’s our intention. LFW: Who wrote the witty label notes on MM 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? During that time, when he wasn’t doing wine business, Mark devoted himself to trying to buy a distillery, first Ardbeg—he plagued Allied relentlessly and eventually they said they would sell. We put in a bid but £2m less than Glenmorangie. We are glad that we did not 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. To buy a highland distillery was less attractive as there is not so much that you can build on. Islay has a romantic premium; a more characterful whisky in a pretty location gives us something to build on. While I was busy selling McDavid bottlings I also raised about 25% of the 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]. We started in distilling in May 2002. Many people said we’d need huge amounts of money to get it going—a new mash tun and mill for sure. In fact it was generally well maintained. The previous owners had the large company mentality that if you have a hole in something, you replace it. We managed to fix things; with a cast iron mash tun from 1880 of battleship quality you can just weld more battleship bits onto it! LFW: When did Jim McEwan join you? When we started negotiating with the owners, Jim Beam Brands, we got a period of exclusivity. I recall meeting with Jim McEwan (who I had met many times before on the whisky tour circuit) and explaining what we planned to do and, if we did win Bruichladdich, did he want to join us? He had said ‘I’ll run it for you’. As it became a reality, we had let potential investors know we had lined up the great McEwan, top distiller from Bowmore. Bowmore were upset to lose him but I think he thought he had got as far as he could and was not in charge of his destiny—overused as an ambassador; the opportunity at Bruichladdich was to be back in charge of production and cask selection but also to continue his ministerial work in the colonies. LFW: And your job? My remit was to create the new product, the new package that Bruichladdich was to be sold in and to build up sales. Previously Bruichladdich was chillfiltered bottled at 40% and not very carefully selected. 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 Grand 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. Most of our thoughts of how we could create our new product was done by Mark and myself, to create different styles by using different casks and Jim’s task was to go and find these casks and produce what we call cuvees. Visually we had to have something that would make a dramatic impact. (One inspiration came from a couple of odd whisky merchants in Inveraray who had suggested the brushed tin!). 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 your silver tin showed our attitude—stripped down, bare bones, no ‘smoke and mirrors’. The bottle was a brand new shape and the guys who helped to design the package came up with new typefaces but it was our input that made the style—and the style of whisky. Jim and our sales chief Andrew Gray were not convinced but they went along with it because it was clearly a quality statement. 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, the Bruichladdich-blue was a lot easier. I must be on a mission to brighten up whisky shop shelves! To stand out and be noticed, alarming colours are very recognisable. I’ve never seen a reason to compromise if you have the quality that makes up for the tons of money spent. Our customers have a big appetite for it. LFW: What type of consumer is leading you? Some are extremely knowledgeable—in fact they know far too much! But 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 sometimes get tangled up in the opinions of one or two enthusiasts with big ideas but to think we’d better do something about that every time is obviously wrong. There are millions of people who have not tried it yet and all I want is that when they do try it, they want some more. LFW: How much attention do you give to the whisky ‘anoraks’? We take them very seriously. We may be looking at one thing, usually our navels and the anoraks are looking at everything else. 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. These guys buy the rare and exclusive stuff and are essential for the making of a reputation. If they like what you are doing they will tell other people about it. I have a lot of time for them but when it is time to plan you have to moderate their desires for that of the majority. 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. Specialists like us have created a market for weird stuff but the general public have turned away leaving a diminishing hard-core of demanding fans, looking for the more esoteric bottlings. LFW: Aren’t you a main culprit? At Bruichladdich we have a large debit 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. Some buy 10yo because of the price and flavour, some buy one of the vintages as a treat and some may want to buy all as a collector. 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 have just 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 Mouvedre 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? This 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. By doing something different a consumer may understand why it is different. 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—something that I have had quite an interest in over the last 15 years. 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. If you enjoy aged spirits then the complexity found in single malts can also be found in other spirits like Armagnac, Calvados, rum and aged tequila. I reckon the malt whisky drinking population are the most informed consumers of spirits—traditional drinkers of brandy or Cognac have drunk it because it is what they feel they should drink after dinner, they haven’t sought them out for their individuality. Malt whisky drinkers tend to be quite loyal to their category mainly because other spirits have not been presented to them in the same fashion. 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. Calvados and Armagnac have the history, characteristics and passion that malt whisky drinkers look for. What I’m trying to do, possibly experimentally, is to get malt drinkers to move out of the box and appreciate other spirits. Those that I have chosen are on a par with the finest malt whisky and offer unique differences. LFW: So a lot 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 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 Alchemist. LFW: What malts? The whiskies are in the final stage of choosing. I think one will be a Macallan, of about 15years. 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 malt. I want to try to work more with the on-trade, which independent bottlers have shied away from because it is difficult to access. I am looking for distributors who have a presence in great bars. That’s how I plan to build the name of Alchemist. LFW: Tell us more about these others, oh great wise one. Calvados is produced in a specific area of northern France. It is made from apples and pears, which are fermented into cider and then distilled, then aged in oak barrels. The Calvados I have chosen comes from the Pays d’Auge region and is made from apples only. Armagnac is distilled from grapes, like Cognac but a single distillation. My Armagnac is from a small independent producer in the Pays d’Armagnac region where everything is done on site—similar to Bruichladdich! LFW: White spirits? Nah! Vodka and gin, too easy market. I like the up-hill slog. I’m starting with four products, which is enough to show the variety I have and has a chance of getting shelf space. Six would be pushing my luck. I don’t want a range that gets broken up; I want people to see the generic concept behind it. Having two whiskies will raise people’s appreciation of the sincerity of what I’m doing and good whiskies will suggest that I am bottling good Calvados and Armagnac. 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 faith in you to come up with the goods, at a fair price and exemplary quality; pick distributors for their ability to explain and deliver. I plan to label informatively, with digestible information. For example, my Calvados producer is an individual with two distilleries in two areas, one produces Calvados using pears, the other 100% apples. I’m starting with his apple variety. I’m going to concentrate on 7 or 8 markets including UK, US, France, Germany, Canada. Selling Calvados and Armagnac to France is going to be interesting; they are not well informed about their home spirits, just like Scotland. Scots are not born with an innate knowledge of whisky though many believe they are; it is the enthusiasts from overseas who tend to be the most well informed. 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.