(traffic rumble) (people conversing)
- This is the story of whisky and I start it right here,
in the heart of Tokyo.
Around these streets are bars
crammed with people imbibing the amber liquid.
It'll be a fascinating journey,
so come with me as I tell the story
of Scotland's gift to the world.
I'm going on a pilgrimage to find out
why such a simple drink has come to mean so much.
Hi, my name's Jim, I'm from Scotland.
From the makers to the marketeers,
and the chemists to the cocktail makers,
and from the Highlands to Hobart in Tasmania,
I'll be meeting the people
and travelling to the places
immersed in Scottish whisky's world story.
This is the tale of an ancient craft
that became a global colossus.
It is the tale of Scotch. (triumphant music)
I can't shake the feeling
that so much of what makes this drink
is what surrounds us here in Scotland.
There is something about the landscape,
about the air itself,
some unquantifiable atmosphere
that adds its personality to our whisky.
Now, it might sound overly romantic,
but if the idea of terroir,
the effect on a product of its place of origin,
can be applied to wine, then why not to Scotch?
Some places in Scotland feel, to me,
like the living embodiment of this.
What a majestic welcome
this epic sweep of landscapes offers.
Over here, we have rugged, vast Jura,
with its distinctive Paps.
And over here, we have bountiful Islay,
the Queen of the Hebrides.
Below us, the waters swirling and birling
like a witch's cauldron.
Islay casts a spell on you,
and perhaps that sorcery imbues whisky.
- I love the place names on Islay.
They are all rooted in fact.
You know, you're looking at the sea,
the land, nature, topography, and all of these names
that are derived from Norse, from Gaelic,
from Islay's history, really.
Bunnahabhain is at the foot of the river.
Bunnahabhain.
Um, Port Askaig is ash tree bay.
Ask-vik in Norse was, um...
means ash, ash tree, and, remember,
the Lords of the Isles, in the 12th, 13th century,
would come in, sail into Port Askaig
and use the ash to repair their
(speaking in foreign language), for repairs,
which is lovely, a lovely part of history.
Um, Ardbeg in Gaelic means small headland.
Islay means island bent like a bow,
so wonderful words and names
that are so evocative of the land
and the island of Islay, really.
A couple of hundred years ago in Islay,
there were 23 licensed distilleries.
Couple of hundred years ago,
there were many, many more illicit distilleries
and, you know, the people who made whisky at that time
were using the landscape, they were using nature,
the topography, they were hiding in caves,
they were very cunning about
where they would actually make their whisky,
so the sense of that in Islay's landscape
absolutely prevails, for sure.
We feel it on a daily basis.
- If you stepped back today
and looked at a map of Scotland and said,
"Right, we'll ostensibly build
"120 factories to make a spirit,
"um, economically, what's the most sensible thing to do?
"Where will we build them?
"How big will they be?
"How much will we produce?",
you wouldn't end up with a map of what you have today.
You know, these distilleries are far-flung,
they're difficult to travel to.
You're reliant on a rural population of staffing.
There's lots of things that, economically,
wouldn't be the thing that would necessarily be
a suitable and significant driver for investment,
but the history of how they've developed,
and the fact that you have
this really fantastic rural diaspora,
is not only great for Scotch whisky,
but is obviously, you know, great for making it
intrinsically part of the country.
- The whisky industry is strong,
it's forceful and it's built an economy on Islay
in this landscape in the 21st century,
which is so important for islanders and for locals.
- [Narrator] Then, it is said, the secret is in the water.
And there's plenty of it about in Scotland.
(gentle Scottish music)
Little springs that become clear, clean streams.
- This island has to be visited
to be understood or even believed.
The land gives itself to the whisky,
and the whisky keeps Islay alive and vibrant.
If landscape does indeed influence taste,
then Islay's has been tinting its whisky
for longer than is the case elsewhere.
It is here, go legends,
that some of Scotland's earliest water of life was made.
Here we are at the rather elegant tip of Islay.
Sail that way through the mist and you reach Ireland.
In the most romantic telling
of how whisky came to Scotland,
this whole stretch of coastline was a portal
through which the ancient Celts arrived
to preach the art of distilling.
Now, depending on who you ask,
we have the Irish, the Romans,
the Persians, and even the Chinese
to thank for its invention.
Whisky's origins are as complex as a fine blend.
This is Finlaggan, in the centre of Islay,
once home to the MacDonald Clan, Lords of the Isles,
and to what is the most likely truth
of how distilling reached Scotland.
When Angus MacDonald married
Princess Aine Ni Chathain of Ulster, in 1300,
Aine's entourage brought the art of distilling
from Ireland with them.
We don't know exactly where or when,
but soon these distilling techniques were being employed
to make a raw form of whisky here in Scotland
for the very first time.
(dog barks)
Then, in the 15th century,
a first recorded mention of whisky emerged.
(drums skirling)
The art of distilling first made it into print
in Britain in The Canterbury Tales.
A century later, in 1494,
came Scotland's first recorded mention
and, in it, Friar John Cor, a Fife monk,
is listed in King James IV's Exchequer Rolls
as having received eight balls of malt for aqua vita.
Now, that's enough barley to make
over 1,000 bottles of whisky!
But it's unlikely that Friar John
was either Scotland's first or only whisky producer.
Whisky was now trickling its way across Scotland
and into the country's customs and identity.
- The first real record I think you get
of whisky becoming Scottish,
and kind of part of a Scottish psyche,
the first record of that is Martin Martin's account
of whisky drinking on the Isle of Lewis,
at the beginning of the 18th century,
where he says, and I'll paraphrase here,
but he says something along the lines of,
"When the community,
"their manner of drinking was called a streah or a round,
"because they would sit in a circle
"and the cup would be passed from one to the other
"and all would drink until all became drunk."
Now, there's kind of two ways to look at that.
You know, one is, that's just people
sitting around in a circle in a big ceilidh
and getting drunk, but I think the...
When you begin to look deeply into that,
you see here is whisky being used as a social lubricant,
or as a way for a community to cohere,
and here is whisky being used to sort out,
to loosen people's tongues,
for a community to come together,
to say, "Right, who's getting married?
"Who's going to be plowing that particular field?"
"Who's going to go fishing?"
And, suddenly, I think, from that record,
you see that whisky isn't just this alien spirit
that's used in certain occasions.
Whisky's now part of us,
it's now part of our Scottish culture.
(waves lapping)
- From fuzzy origins,
this simple drink seeped its way into everyday life.
Nowhere came to embody the spread of whisky
into an area's soul more than Speyside,
or, to some of us, Strathspey in north-eastern Scotland.
The peaty water of life.
This is Speyside, the capital of whisky.
It's a place of wonder and pilgrimage,
a secret zone where the sweet smell of malt
seems to hang in the air.
And it's almost as if, every corner you turn,
there's a distillery,
and in every nook and cranny, you'll find evidence
of the making and the worship of whisky.
You know, within a 20-mile radius
of where I'm standing now,
there are about 60 distilleries.
I mean, that's almost half the total number in Scotland!
But you see, it's more than a whisky region.
It's a whisky republic!
And I think they should rename it the Amber Republic!
It is truly a place of wonder!
- [Narrator] If you talk about The Glenlivet
to the average Scotsman or the man on the street,
his mind goes straight to the Highlands
and he thinks of an old distillery
producing the finest whisky distilled in the Highlands,
The Glenlivet.
- Glenlivet is a Speyside whisky,
with a foot in both the past and the present.
Two centuries ago,
one of countless illicit distilleries on Speyside,
it now produces the highest-selling single malt
in the world.
Master distiller Alan Winchester took me for a walk
in the hills overlooking this amber realm.
What would this place be like without...
You've got, what,
something like 50, 60 distilleries round here?
- Well, absolutely, um...
- I mean, it's the heart and soul of this country, isn't it?
- Yes, eh...
It's been very important.
It's very important.
It goes along with all the traditional...
You can see it, farming, forestry, landed estates,
where you can go fishing and shooting.
The whisky distillation really took off here
after the 1824 Distilling Act,
getting the push with the railways.
It's got all the things correct here.
It's got bogs of peat, if you want to make peaty whisky.
Lots of water, a fairly dry climate at the coast,
which is ideal for growing barley,
so all the magic comes together,
and then, as Sir Walter Scott said,
"the cunning alchemists" were based at Glenlivet.
And that's an important part (chuckles)
in making whisky as well.
- Cunning alchemists? - Yes.
- Aha! - I like that title.
If you travel round the world, you find local spirits
and you'll say, "Why's that spirit
"not bigger in the world of things?"
You go to Calvados,
you get that apple brandy.
You do see it round about.
Whisky was this local drink,
it was used by my great-grandfathers
and that to turn a little barley
into a bit of cash, you know,
add value to it and it would keep better.
It was one of the few agricultural products
that improves with keeping, with age.
You can't keep milk for years.
You make cheese to preserve your milk, etc.
So it was part of that,
and then it was very much woven
into the fabric of the country
from the early days of distillation.
One of the founders of Cragganmore distillery
speaks about 200 illicit stills here.
Now, that seems a lot of little stills working away,
so there was crofts all around here, er...
Small production, so, to fill a few ankers,
you needed a few of these working.
So, all these communities were working their little stills,
very remote, and also,
some of the estates would take whisky as the rent.
It would be part of that cash trade.
- Just for consumption?
For their own personal consumption?
- Personal or sell on.
Because many of the local distillers here
were the distillers and then they handled it on
to the smuggler, the other...
A distiller was called a smuggler,
but the smuggler was the guy that took it to the market,
and they were the hard men
that would take on the Customs and Excise, et cetera.
A lot of the ladies did the distilling
in the area round here,
in these 200 illicit stills.
- [David] When they smuggled them on land,
were they actually carrying casks?
- They would strap the casks to the ponies.
Two ankers onto the side of a Highland pony
and away they went.
It was maturing all the way to the market.
(both laugh)
The smuggling of whisky was a way of life.
Scallywag, brazen stories are still
proudly told on Speyside.
One of my favourite spots here is the Fiddichside Inn,
in Craigellachie.
Joe Brandie married into a family
that had been running the pub since 1919
and were shifting whisky less legitimately before that.
Joe, there's a wonderful photograph up there
of an interesting character.
Who's he?
- That was my wife's grandfather
and he was a gamekeeper over in Glass, you know,
between Dufftown and Huntly. - Uh-huh.
- In a very remote croft there.
And he used to make his own whisky
and the Customs and Excise used to go and try to catch him.
They would go dressed as tramps and knock at the door
and he would say, "Oh, come on in!"
and they thought, "Oh, well, this is it now."
They were asking for something to warm them up
and they thought he'd produce the whisky,
but he didn't, he gave them a bowl of soup instead.
(both laugh)
But he was finally caught.
His boss was the laird over at where he worked.
It was in a dinner down in London and,
unknown to him, sitting next to him
was the head of Customs and Excise and, er,
he said to the head of Customs
he didn't know that was him,
he said, "I would get a better dram from a gamekeeper."
So they came up and caught him
and confiscated some of his gear and he was fined 10 pounds.
- Gorrah!
Just because of an overheard conversation in London?
- Yes, yeah.
- [David] Dear me, what, oh that's a shame
that he was caught out.
- Yeah, he was caught out.
- So, Joe, when you were a boy,
you must have been aware of illegal stills
all round this area?
- Och, there was too, a lot,
but I dinnae remember much about them at all.
But I know there was a lot, - But you knew they were there
- there was a lot in Glenlivet
and they used go to Inverness with the whisky,
but they got word that they were going to be waylaid
on the way by the Customs and Excise,
so they hired a hearse, and it was horse in these days,
put a coffin in it and put all the whisky into the coffin
and when they passed the Customs and Excise,
they took off their bonnets, downed their buckets,
and let them go through.
- And you could get a hell of a lot of whisky
into a coffin, couldn't you?
- A good lot, yeah.
- In this region, it feels like whisky is in the soil.
While history's more clandestine traditions are gone,
some roots remain firm.
There are entire whisky generations here,
some connected by association, and some by family.
Glenfarclas, one of the many distilleries
scattered throughout Speyside.
Like many places, this seems to inspire
an old-fashioned devotion and dedication from the workforce.
I've found that's true
right across the whisky industry in Scotland.
Because everyone I talk to seems to have
a passion and a commitment to their work and the craft,
and in a cynical 21st century, that's pretty rare.
But I guess it helps that, very often,
the distilleries are family owned,
and none more so than this one,
because this is owned by one of
the first great whisky families, the Grants,
who are now in their sixth generation of custody.
George, Glenfarclas is a family affair.
- It is indeed.
- Is that important to you?
- It's the most important thing that we have.
It gives us our most exclusive selling point,
our most exclusive, advantageous over other brands.
In the world today,
so many brands are being overtaken by big conglomerates.
We're still family owned, still family run,
still very much family hands on.
- And you're determined to keep it that way.
- Very much so.
Very much so.
- So, you must be the sixth generation.
- I'm the sixth generation of my family to work here.
- And you can trace them all back to the very origins.
- We do, so it was my great-great-great-grandfather
that bought Glenfarclas in 1865
for the princely sum of 511 pounds and 19 shillings.
- Away you go!
- So we hope it's worth a little bit more now.
- (chuckles) I bet it is.
I mean, I'm able to drink whisky, taste whisky,
sell whisky that was made by my grandfather,
made by my father, you know,
it gives you so much passion to it.
And it's not even just the fact
that we're family owned, family ran,
so many people that have worked here
have worked here for generations as well.
So it really is a totally family affair.
- But also that means the whisky you're producing today
will be enjoyed by your children
or your grandchildren in years to come.
- Well, you see, that's the beauty of it.
So any mistakes I make,
nobody will find out for a few generations.
- (chuckles) Aye, you'll be well gone.
That's very good.
That's what you call passing the buck.
- That's it (chuckles).
- How many people do you employ here?
- We've got about 35, 36 people here.
Some of them have been here for a very long time.
We have a gentleman in the still house
who's been here for over 42 years.
- 42 years!
- Yeah, he's been here for a while.
- So will he get a special bottle or a cask when he retires?
- Well, he's one of these people
that I don't think ever will retire.
But for his 40th anniversary,
we gave him a gallon bottle of 40-year-old,
- Ohh...!
- which apparently didn't last very long.
(both laugh)
- It wasn't always as easy to move whisky around
as it is now, for Glenfarclas and Speyside's
many other distilleries.
The coming of the railways was momentous for this area.
I'm about to jump aboard the Whisky Train.
I can't wait.
(train horn blares)
I love-- (horn blares)
I love train journeys, but this has got to be
the slowest train journey I've never taken.
- Good afternoon, sir.
Can I interest you in a wee dram?
- Peter, what are you offering me?
- I'm offering you Chivas Regal 18-year-old.
- I think that'll do me very nicely, thank you.
- Okay?
- Slainte!
- Thank you. - Your very good health.
This railway shunts along as a tourist attraction.
It takes day-trippers from Dufftown to Keith
through beautiful Speyside.
But it also has a deep meaning to the whisky industry
and the flowering of this area as the center of whisky,
because, historically,
it was very difficult to get anything in or out
of this remote pocket of Scotland.
And then suddenly, at the tail end of the 19th century,
they opened the railway and it became much, much easier
to get coal into the area
and the best of Strathspey out to the world.
And just as in Islay and Campbeltown had used
water as their motorway to create their own eras
as being the center of whisky excellence,
the railway shifted it here,
so these very tracks helped change this area
and this industry for ever.
Here's to the Whisky Railway.
(train horn blares)
Tourism founded upon history
and a vibrant, modern whisky industry
brings thousands of people to Speyside
from every corner of the globe.
Some of them never leave.
Like Tatsuya Minagawa,
owner of the Highlander Inn in Craigellachie.
How long have you been here?
- Eh, 17, 18 years.
- 17, 18 years.
- Stopped counting.
- Wow!
So what was your passion?
Did you come because of the whisky?
- Purely, yeah, yeah.
- So initially it was the whisky,
then you fell in love with the country
and the people and you decided to stay.
- Absolutely, yes, it's not only whisky.
If it's not only whisky, I'm living Tokyo life.
Whisky, scenery and the people, all mixed together.
- [David] Now, you're in the heart of Scotch whisky country.
- [Tatsuya] Mm-hmm.
- [David] And you're selling Japanese whisky.
- [Tatsuya] Yeah.
- [David] Do many people buy it?
- Surprisingly yes.
- Really? - Aye.
It's not cheap stuff, it's quite pricey, some of them,
but 10 years ago, people say,
"Oh, Japanese whisky, rubbish!
"I wanna drink Scotch."
But nowadays, people come here
only for Japanese whisky, some people.
- Do you appreciate the differences
between Japanese whisky and Scotch whisky?
- Eh, because Japanese whisky industry
inspired by Scottish whisky industry.
Basically, we learn how to make whisky from this country.
So, ingredients we use and the method,
exactly same as Scottish way.
So I'm always telling people, you know,
Champagne comes from France, you know,
Cava from Spain.
More or less same ingredients, same principle, right?
Both good product.
So Japanese whisky and whisky from Scotland,
pretty much like that.
- Tatsuya, you're in a very unique position.
You're a man from Japan, from the other side of the world.
You grew up in whisky, you come here
and you're surrounded by whisky
at the heart of whisky country,
so you see it from an outsider's perspective.
Do we do enough, do we appreciate our own whisky enough?
Or does it take someone like you
to come from another culture, another language,
to come and say to us,
"Hey, look what you have on your doorstep."
- I think the same happens back home, you know?
Young people don't drink sake, you know,
drink beer, wine, or a cocktail,
it's exactly the same as here.
Say some weekend a number of young people,
they pretty much drink vodka, and
Jack Daniel's or maybe a pint of lager,
so whisky is, I don't know...
You have to be like
some sort of a certain age to appreciate?
- Mm-hm. - Yeah.
So, I don't know, those young people when they grow up,
a little older, maybe they start drinking whisky.
- When they reach the age of wisdom--
- Oh, that's a good one, aye, yeah.
- They will start to drink whisky.
- Yeah. - Yes.
(whisky trickling) (gentle music)
There remains a Speyside institution
built upon such wisdom of age,
a Victorian grocer, blender of whisky,
and curator of fine malts that continues to thrive.
In 1895, a family opened a grocery store here
on a street corner in the heart of Elgin.
It was Gordon & MacPhail's,
and like the other great whisky families,
like the Buchanans and the Walkers,
they created a great whisky brand from a corner shop,
and as the whisky side of the business expanded,
they had the foresight to do deals
with the Spanish for their oak,
and with fellow Scots for their best whisky.
So, Gordon & MacPhail soon became
a byword for quality whisky.
It's a business rooted in the family and it still is.
(shop bell jingles)
Stephen, this shrine to whisky
started off as a wee grocer's shop
on a street corner in the heart of Elgin, didn't it?
- Yes, back in 1895, David.
- Yeah, so a long--
Just coming up to our 121st birthday, in fact.
It was James Gordon and John MacPhail
who started the business
with a young apprentice by the name of John Urquhart,
and John, who was my great-grandfather,
worked his way up through the business very quickly
to become a partner by 1911,
and in 1915, he was sole owner.
So, the Urquharts have been involved since day one.
We've passed the knowledge of whisky down
through, now, four generations.
- Gordon & MacPhail was built
on two strands of whisky selling.
They made blended whiskies, as befitted a grocery store,
and bought casks to be matured in their own warehouses,
then bottled and sold on.
That second strand thrives today.
(tense music) (light switches snapping)
Wow!
Look at that.
This is a liquid museum of whisky.
It's owned by Gordon & MacPhail.
There are over 7,000 oak casks here,
slowly maturing the whisky inside,
and each barrel is stamped
with the name of a different distillery,
and the idea is that they're brought here
for further maturation,
so that the aspects of climate and place
can add unique flavors to the whisky.
Gordon & MacPhail's believe
it's the wood that makes the whisky
and I think I tend to agree with them, 'cause, you see,
these casks are a portal into another world.
(drums skirling)
It's quite something to imagine that,
once bottled or blended,
so much of the liquid gold here
will reach markets way beyond these shores.
Over 90% of Scotland's whisky
is sold outside of the United Kingdom.
When Scotland sells its whisky, it sells casks,
but also places like Speyside...
The marketing of Scotch has long promoted
an image of Scotland to the world with triumphant success,
no matter how far from reality
that image stretches. (Scottish jig music)
- [Narrator] A land of beauty and poetry.
A land of violence and color.
A part of the world unlike any other in its people,
its exciting history and even its products.
Probably the most famous of which is, Scotch.
- Fusing a sense of the romantic
with arresting visuals and novel methods,
advertising put this product on the path
to global success.
In 1898, Dewar's produced
the world's earliest filmed advertisement for any product.
It was the first major strike by an industry
which knew that sales rested on image and communication.
(film reel clattering)
The story of Johnnie Walker represents Scotland's success
in marrying tradition and innovation
to take a drink to the world.
This is the life-sized figure
of the very handsome Striding Man.
Johnnie Walker's Red Label,
which is the largest-selling Scotch whisky in the world,
and it's owned by Diageo.
Now, Diageo have enough resources to employee
six archivists, which is extraordinary in itself,
and they take great pride in being custodians
of the history of some of the major whisky brands
over the last 100 years, but more than that,
they also contain the image of Scotland
as it has changed throughout the world
over those hundreds of years.
(pulsing music)
Oh, these wonderful old tomes,
look at the size of them, great ledgers!
All written by hand.
The Diageo Archive also includes a temple of bottles.
Cor, wow!
Christine, this is amazing.
- We use this space to show the evolution of our brands
from the very earliest bottle,
and also to look at brands that have come and gone
over the years.
This is actually our oldest bottle of Johnnie Walker.
It dates from the 1880s.
We don't really know why it has a snake in it.
Um, we think it left Scotland without a snake
and probably went somewhere in the Far East,
but it's not unusual for things
that end up in whisky bottles.
- That is truly bizarre!
- We're not sure how it ended up back in Scotland,
but we actually found it
when we were clearing out a space
at one of our packaging plants, about 12, 13 years ago.
So it's amazing what you can still find around
in the industry and in the business.
So, we're always adding to the archive
with historical items, but actually,
we always collect everything that we create today
to build the archive of the future.
So what I love...
One of the things that I love about our archive,
it's never going to be complete,
'cause we're always going to be adding to it
and always telling the story.
- [David] Yeah, it's a living, working, growing archive.
- Absolutely, yeah.
So, this side really shows
some of our Johnnie Walker collection,
our Gold Label, Blue Label and Green Label,
but actually, around the other side
we have Red Label and Black Label,
and they were introduced in 1909
and the display really shows the evolution
from our earliest right through to present day.
- Christine, one of the most famous logos and brand marks
in the world of whisky is the Johnnie Walker walking man.
- Yeah, the Striding Man, yeah, yeah.
- The Striding Man.
- Yep, so, yeah, he's really famous,
so wherever you travel around the world,
everybody recognizes the Striding Man
and associates it with Johnnie Walker.
Um, we've got some bottles
where you can see how the Striding Man first appears.
So, he was actually drawn in 1908 and--
- 1908?
- Yeah, so the story goes that we...
The Walkers invited Tom Browne,
who was the cartoonist for Punch magazine, to lunch,
and he drew the figure on the back of a menu card.
But even though it was drawn in 1908,
it didn't actually appear on the pack until the 1950s.
So, here we can see how the Striding Man looked
in the 1950s.
- Did he change over the years?
- He has evolved.
Yeah, so right from when Tom drew him in 1908,
through to the '50s, individual artists drew the figure,
and then, in more recent times,
they've actually modified him,
made him a bit more contemporary,
and in 1999 we switched the direction
in which he was walking.
- Why did you do that?
- That coincided with the launch
of our Keep Walking campaign,
which was the first truly global advertising campaign
for Johnnie Walker, but it was also
the advent of the Millennium,
so it was all about the brand moving into the next century.
- So how long did the company stay in the family's hands?
- So... - Until when?
- John Walker & Sons became part of the Distillers Company
in the 1920s.
Johnnie Walker and other blending companies,
like Buchanan's, and White Horse,
all became part of the Distillers Company
around the same time.
- But they kept their autonomy, didn't they?
- They certainly did and at that time,
we had moved on to the third generation of Walkers
and they still ran the company,
even though it was part of this bigger parent company,
I guess.
One of the things that I love about the archive
is we actually have advertising and photographs
from most of those export markets,
so we can not only tell, you know,
the great back story for Johnnie Walker,
but we then can show how it appears, you know,
in Latin America and Asia and out there in the world,
and what a huge global success it's become.
(jaunty pipes music)
- [David] From modern-era films
to ornate printed sketches of old,
advertising has been crucial - Good old Johnnie Walker!
- to the expansion of Scotch, - The Scotch of Scots.
whether aficionados like it or not.
- The malt whisky snobs seem to see marketing somehow
as the demon in the world of whisky.
Well, frankly, again, reality check,
no marketing, no Scotch whisky industry.
And in the late 19th and early 20th century,
the big blending houses pioneered marketing
and they brought in expertise from America
in terms of this new science of advertising.
They used the very best copywriters,
they used the very best artists,
and if you visit our archive
and look at some of that material,
you really need to look at it hard and think about it
to understand how brilliantly executed it is.
And I think people who do whisky marketing today
have a lot to learn from the way it was done
100 years ago, you know?
(pulsing music) (pages flipping)
I mean, if you just think, you know,
of the number of bottles of Johnnie Walker
that are sold around the world, and they've got
on the bottom of each bottle,
it's got "Product of Scotland".
It's in houses almost everywhere in the world, you know,
and that's what people are going to think,
Scotland, Scotch.
- During the bad days of the '70s, '80s, into the 1990s,
marketing was running whisky rather than production,
and marketing and production did not talk to each other.
So, if you think, like, back in the 1980s,
where, you know, sales are going like that,
but if you are a marketing director,
are you going to turn around to your boss and say,
"You know, next year, boss, I'm going to be selling less?"
You'd be out the door.
So everybody was saying,
"Oh, no, we're going to sell more.
"Things will turn round."
So you suddenly get production going like that
and sales going like that,
which you end up with Whisky Loch as a result of that.
- Marketing is a very easy thing to have a...
"Ooh, it's bad, they're doing evil things."
My job is to get really nice, amazing whiskies
out there for people to drink,
so I don't think that's a bad thing.
- Graphic designer Jules Akel relocated to Dalwhinnie
in the north of Scotland from London.
He became captivated by the influence
of marketing upon Scotch whisky
and turned his fascination into a number
of beautifully crafted distillery books.
In it is to be found the sunshine and shadow
that chased each other over the billowy cornfield,
the hum of the bee, the hope of spring,
the breath of May, the carol of the lark,
the distant purple heather in the mountain mist
and the wealth of autumn's rich content,
all golden with imprisoned light.
Absolutely beautiful, Jules, isn't it?
- It is.
- And that was Tommy Dewar.
- Can you imagine drinking the whisky after reading that?
(David chuckles)
But that really creates an impression about a place
and the story of a...
A whisky...
is not sold without those stories,
those fantastically evocative
purple pastures of prose, aren't they?
- Mm-hm.
- 'Cause if we just drink whisky from a label-less bottle,
without a brand, it's going to be nice,
but if you know the story behind it,
the characters who built the distillery,
and the brand, and its location
on top of a moor or somewhere,
then you go back to the spirit, don't you?
- You do, and it's a much richer experience, yeah.
- Yeah, and you enjoy it so much more.
- Great brands will have a people story,
a place story, and a production story,
and Scotch is the best in the world at doing that.
So you'll always have either, um...
a distillery founder, do you know what I mean?
There's always...
So you can think of it,
you can name every Scotch brand
and you can tell me there's distillery founders
or there's, you know, blender founders,
there's a place, there's a...
this beautiful iconic distillery or this area of Scotland
full of glens, and nooks, and crannies, and smugglers,
and harlots, and you'll have a production story
and everybody will say, well...
"There's up to 40 different whiskies in this blend!"
Or, "Well, we make it with the widest
"copper pot stills in the world."
You know, so there's always those things.
Those are the bits that actually make it really interesting,
because every brand I've ever worked on,
once you find those stories, you love it.
- Sometimes you'll see the message
being very much about heritage,
about the Auld Alliance,
about the clans, about the piper,
about whatever it is,
and sometimes you'll purely see it as the brand,
and the brand values, and what they stand for
in terms of character, and the kind of markets they go to,
and how they're served as long drinks,
and you're a million miles away from tartan, and heather,
and pipes, and bagpipes, and sometimes,
it's not even necessarily known as being Scotch whisky.
It's known as being "that brand".
- Brands are personalities,
so if you're a pretentious person,
you might like a pretentious brand.
We feel affinities to certain brands
because they work with us as persons, don't we?
- Yes, true.
- So here we are in Dalwhinnie,
and the whisky has a very appealing story.
We're right up in the heather moors,
top of the Grampian Mountains,
with all those glorious peaks of snowy tops,
but if you stop and think about
the Dalwhinnie distillery and its product,
how much of it actually is of Dalwhinnie?
It gets the water from down the burn,
the grain is grown miles away,
it's malted miles away, the wood that the cask...
The whisky's put in the cask, that comes from abroad.
But it's manufactured here, put in the casks,
and then, well, many of those casks
are left down in the Central Belt,
so what is it of Dalwhinnie, you see?
It's interesting, isn't it?
- Mm-hm.
But the story is very powerful and very romantic.
- It is.
You compare that to, say, a chateau
which makes glorious wine and cognacs,
they'll have their own land, their vineyards,
and they'll make the wines there in the chateau,
and then they'll put it in the casks in their cellars,
and then they'll bottle it there in the chateau,
so it's much more of a provenance story, isn't it?
But here, it's more like an assemblage, isn't it?
- Mm-hmm, mh-hmm. - It's interesting, isn't it?
- It's a really interesting way of looking at it, yes.
But it's been a very successful campaign,
the branding with Dalwhinnie.
- Yes! - Extremely successful.
- Well, that's where design comes along, you see,
and creates this story out of what it's got
and makes it so appealing, and gives it a provenance.
- Scotland is... It's a tiny, tiny place.
To have such presence from something
that we produce is just phenomenal,
so I think it's grown beyond being just a drink.
It is something that is about passion, about love,
about friendship, about family,
and everything else that encompasses that.
Like any image, it's rooted in some sort of a reality,
but of course it ignores some of the industrialization
that's necessary to the industry.
It ignores some of the scale, and the picture-postcard image
that we might have of the little distillery
nestled in the glens doesn't necessarily accord with
the reality of a mega warehouse somewhere in the Lowlands,
but there's enough there for us to hang onto and believe in.
- My marketing director came in and said,
"I'd like to replace the capsule...
"I'd like to replace the ROPP...
"with a cork and capsule."
ROPP is a screw-top.
"I'd like to replace that with a cork and capsule."
And I said, "Why?"
He said, "Because it just...
"It's not classy the way it is."
And I had a phone call from my brother, and he said,
"Why on earth did you change the screw-top
"to a cork and capsule?"
And I thought, "Oh, my..."
All my fears are coming.
I said, "Why? What's wrong?"
He said, "Well, when it was a screw-top,
"I could open one at night,
"pour myself a dram before I went to bed.
"Now, when I pull the cork, it goes..."
(mimics cork popping)
And my wife says, "Jack! Is that you at the Macallan again?"
- As advertisers know, whisky creates desire.
One modern expression of this
is the exponential growth in people buying Scotch
for collection and investment.
This is McTear's Auction House in Glasgow
and I've come to bid for a piece of the action
with two men who make a living from doing just that.
So, Andy, what is this?
Apart from a display case of gorgeous whiskies.
- Well, what we've got here is some of the...
I guess the oldest and rarest in the auction,
so there's some absolutely fantastic...
what we call the three types of whisky,
so the drinker, the collector and the investor,
so I'm a drinker, a collector, and and investor,
but as a collector, I'll buy kind of weird old stuff
that I just think is cool,
that I just have never seen, or the label's a bit odd.
It might cost 20 pounds at auction.
I know it's never going to go up in value.
I might drink it one day, but it's a collectable,
so it's just a kind of different, weird thing.
- What makes a difference?
Is it the rarity of a whisky
or is it the taste that gives it its premium value?
- So, quality is paramount.
Rarity, scarcity, we're looking for all these things.
Let's take this, age and vintage,
so we're looking at this Macallan
and I'm going to pick this one out specifically.
My colleague to my left here, David,
actually was responsible for the liquid
and the bottling of this specific bottle,
so David's signature is on every single one
of just over 3,000 bottles.
- But, David, you weren't alive in 1946!
- I obviously didn't distill the whisky
but I was lucky enough to work at Macallan during the 1990s
and I was given the kind of task, I suppose,
to select the barrels that went into the 1946 vintage,
which was a terrific responsibility,
great, great fun doing it,
but the one downside was having to sign 3,036 certificates.
It took me a whole week to sign...
to sign all the certificates for these bottles,
but it's a wonderful old smoky style of Macallan,
very unusual, highly regarded.
- Because Macallan's not a smoky whisky.
- It typically is not, but when you look at Macallan
pre and post the Second World War,
it actually was a smoky whisky,
when coal was in short supply and they used peat
to actually dry the malted barley back then.
- So why did they change?
Why did they stop using the peat?
- Coal became available again after the Second World War,
so they went back to something
that was much more fuel efficient.
- Cor, interesting.
So what would that be worth now?
- Anything, seven, maybe even 8,000 pounds a bottle.
(gasps) When it first came out...
You're joking! - in 1998,
I think it was retailing for about 1,575 pounds a bottle.
- [David] Shall we head off and spend some money?
- [Andy] Let's do that.
As long as it's yours.
- [David] No, no way, Andy.
- That lot is going now, are you all done at 80?
At 80 pounds on that lot there, 80 pounds
and it's away to...
- Buyer number for that is 656.
280, 300 bid. - Is there just one more?
Any advance at 300 pounds?
320 in the back there.
Any advance on 320?
Can I see 40?
We're at 320 standing.
Any advance at 320?
340 seated, 360 bid.
Any advance at 360?
380?
360 here standing.
Any advance at 360 again?
Are you all done at 360?
Last chance at 360...
(gavel strikes) 360, that is 3606.
Thank you.
That's away at 360.
- So will you drink that or hold on to it?
- I don't know.
Let's find out afterwards.
Depends how thirsty we get.
- We open at 100...
- [David] After Andy's success, it was my turn to bid.
Competition comes not just from those in the room,
but from remote online and telephone bidders
across the planet.
- Can I see 90 again?
We're at 80 pound in the book here.
Any advance at 80?
Are you all done now?
Any advance at 80 pound on that lot there?
90 with you, sir.
Any advance at 90, way in the back?
Any advance at 90?
Are you all done?
At 90 pounds for that lot, that is going at 90.
Are you all done at 90?
(gavel strikes) 90 pound, thank you.
- Yay!
- [Auctioneer] That's to bidder number 3606.
- Result. - Well done.
(both chuckles)
(drums skirling)
- After a morning's hard bidding,
Andy, David, and I went for lunch
to discuss the finer details
of whisky valuation, collection and investment.
Now, do you buy and sell these whiskies for yourselves
or for other people?
- Well, we act as the catalyst in the middle,
so we've got a number of buyers
that are looking for specific bottles or collections,
and we have a number of sellers at any one time,
so we're really just a matchmaker,
so we bring the two parties together.
So certain people might be looking for
a collection of rare Macallan
or a collection of the rare malts from Diageo,
or maybe they're peat freaks and they love Ardbeg
and want every single bottle of Ardbeg on the planet,
so we help kind of plug those gaps
that they might have in their own collection,
and sometimes, which is really interesting
from our point of view, in recent times,
people have come to us as professional investors
rather than just kind of amateur collectors,
and that something that's really changed,
probably in the last two, three, four years maximum,
where people can see value,
they've maybe done a little bit of tracking of their own
and they understand that we've got
this incredible database, 146...
- Thousand, yeah. - Thousand pieces of data now,
covering 22,000 different bottles,
that give us a really powerful...
- That's phenomenal. - piece of insight
that obviously people use for a number of different reasons.
- Now, David, who are these individuals
that you work on behalf of?
I know that you can't be indiscreet...
- Of course.
- But obviously, A, they have money.
- Yes.
- They have money to spend and money to burn.
- Yes, and most people might expect
that it's all Asian money or Chinese money.
That's not the case.
We've got clients from North America, from Canada,
from Europe, from the UK, Hong Kong,
Taiwan, Singapore, I mean, it really is quite global
and we're kind of surprised at where we get calls from.
- What percentage of your clients
buy whisky purely for investment
and which of them buy it
purely because they just love whisky?
- The vast majority of the...
kind of the big old bottles
that we are moving at the moment
are for collecting and investing.
However, we recently sold a collection
for just under half a million pounds
to somebody who opened it
and is probably drinking it, as we are sat here now.
- They opened and are drinking
- Absolutely. - a half-million-pound
- Absolutely - collection of whisky?
- Absolutely.
- How many bottles would be involved?
- 50, 50, 50 bottles exactly.
Now this is the interesting thing.
We did this.
We did a similar collection or the same collection
three or four years ago to a different buyer
and we sold it for slightly less than that,
and this buyer again opened this collection of 50 bottles
and drank it with his mates playing snooker,
so the answer to the question,
does everybody buy for collecting and investing?
Absolutely not.
- That is really good news, gents,
because I think whisky is for drinking and for enjoying.
- [Andy] We couldn't agree with you more.
- It's one of the most delicious nectars available
in the history of humankind.
- [Andy] Couldn't agree with you more.
- And to buy a bottle, or a collection of bottles,
purely for investment purposes, to me, is immoral.
- [Andy] Yeah, do you know what...
- I know it must be, you know...
You're both on a cleft stick
because you make a living from it.
- Indeed. - Yeah, yeah.
It's kind of half-and-half,
and we've grown up, both of us,
drinking whisky as well as both of us collect whisky,
and both of us invest in whisky at the same time,
so three distinct areas that we focus on,
which is drinking, collecting, and investing.
(melancholy strings music)
- The one thing that I guess worries me particularly
is this idea that's taken hold recently
that you can invest in whisky,
that whisky is some kind of an alternative
to the stock market, some kind of an alternative
to pork belly futures or whatever it might be.
Now, I have a very firm view on this.
Whisky was made to be drunk and to be enjoyed.
Whisky has no meaning until the moment of its consumption.
It is just a glass bottle of cold tea until its destruction,
and only in its consumption
does it achieve meaning, and worth, and value.
- So, chaps, this is the bottle of Rosebank 12-year-old
that I bid so successfully for.
- Well done, congratulations.
- But, Andy, you've got a treat for me
in that glass, haven't you?
- Oh, this is...
Because you've popped your cherry at auction,
(David laughs) at a whisky auction,
we thought we'd celebrate with something special,
so we brought you some Mortlach from 1936...
- Mortlach! - to celebrate with.
Please accept that on David and I.
- Oh, it's got a wonderful nose!
Slainte.
- Slainte mhath.
- The pursuit of Scotch is full of surprises.
I never expected to be drinking
a 1936 Mortlach in a Glasgow car park.
How much would this cost a bottle?
- Three-and-a-half thousand pounds at the moment,
if you buy it retail.
- Three-and-a-half grand?
- Yeah, yeah.
- You haven't poured me a big enough dram.
(all laugh)
Next time, I'll be visiting
a spellbinding whisky collection,
then assessing the rise of craft distilleries
and the future of Scotch, but most importantly,
I'm heading to Norfolk, Sweden, Japan, and Australia
to meet our whisky rivals.
(water trickling) (gentle music)
[END CREDITS]