‘Kinclaith made less than one million litres per year and it wasn’t a spectacular whisky,’ admits John. ‘It was designed as a “packer” malt for blending. There were maltings on site at that time, too. I was a lab assistant and was given day-release to get Part 1 of my Royal Institute of Chemistry qualification.’
After his time at Strathclyde Distillery, John worked outside the whisky industry for three years, acting as a lab technician in the chemistry department of Coatbridge Technical College, before joining a local whisky bond as an industrial chemist.
‘Hall and Bramley ran the bond and they were agents for new-make whisky in the north of England,’ says John. ‘It was still common for publicans to take their own fillings then and have their own blends. Hall & Bramley were based in Liverpool. They dealt with The Macallan, Glen Grant, Highland Park, Glenrothes and Tamdhu malts and North British grain.’ Hall & Bramley also acted in association with the Italian vermouth firm of Martini & Rossi, whose Scotch whisky interests were operated by their William Lawson & Co Ltd subsidiary.
‘Hall and Bramley moved the whisky production side of Martini and Rossi to Coatbridge in 1968,’ notes John. ‘They did the whisky blending for Martini and Rossi. The operation got bigger and bigger, and they eventually needed a laboratory, which was when I got the job.
‘It got me back into the whisky industry and Paul Rickards moved north from Liverpool to run it all. He said, around 1971, that he would teach me the blending side of the business. Paul then joined Robertson and Baxter Ltd, a couple of years later, as their Master Blender, and William Lawson decided to employ its own blender, Hamish Robertson, who had previously blended for William Grant and Sons. I was asked to change employer from Hall and Bramley to William Lawsons, but stay in the same place. Hamish left in 1981 and I took on the Master Blender’s role full-time, doing the job for nine years, until 1990.’
When it came to perfecting the complex and demanding art of whisky blending, John says that, ‘Learning to blend was “hands-on”, or rather “nose-on”. It involved nosing a range of whiskies, initially just grains, to determine the differences between them, how North British differed from Invergordon, for example. Then I progressed to the spectrum of character of single malts. From there you learnt maturation, how to nose the whiskies at different ages, learnt the “template” for what different ages brought to the spirit.
‘We did grains first, because they are generally less complex, then malts – from refill hogsheads, or “hoggies” and butts, from American oak and European oak. Then we built up to how these various whiskies at different ages interact with one another. I had to learn about mixing peaty whiskies – how much you use in a blend, and things like that. It was about listening and learning as much as anything, and finally being allowed to put stuff together – being told you had used too much of one, not enough of another, and so on. I learnt by trial and error and by supervision.
‘At William Lawson’s there was the standard blend, then an eight and a twelve-year-old, the latter being sold as William Lawson’s Scottish Gold. As a malt we had Macduff, distilled just outside Banff and sold as Glen Deveron. It was a five-year-old, designed to mimic Glen Grant in the lucrative Italian market, and there was a ten-year-old. You saw the influence of better quality casks in the ten-year-old. At that time, William Lawson still “married” their whiskies, and they did it at full strength. They mixed grains and malts and didn’t dilute them prior to marriage.
‘At Robertson and Baxter we diluted the blend to forty-six per cent and then married it. For me blending is about using malt, grain and water. I think diluting it like that gives a better blend, particularly in terms of texture. Chill-filtration affects texture, though it doesn’t affect flavour so much.’
In terms of changing to the blending regime, John notes that, ‘Over time, as an industry we came to use fewer component malts in our blends, and there has been a change in that people now clean plant more thoroughly, so there is more control and more uniformity of malts. Stills don’t boil over as they sometimes did when heated by coal rather than steam, and overall there just aren’t such big variations in spirit character from batch to batch as there used to be. Consistency is very important for blending.
‘Robertson and Baxter weren’t into too many component malts anyway. Cutty Sark and The Famous Grouse contain fewer different malts than some of their competitors. I always say that if you take all the colours of the rainbow, you end up with white light!
‘You have core malts in any blend – in our case Highland Park, The Macallan, Glenrothes and so on – and you would use others such as fifty hoggies of six or seven-year-old Glen Spey, then replace that with fifty of Strathmill, perhaps, when they were used up. You would interchange malts like those two, with similar profiles. I instigated that practice and saw no reason to change it.
‘People became much more knowledgeable about wood, but Robertson and Baxter had always been keen to use decent quality wood and had a rigorous cask-rejection policy. They were doing this even before wood chemistry was well understood. We had less understanding of why it was important, and it was work carried out by the Scotch Whisky Research Institute over the years that helped us all to comprehend it better. A big part of the blender’s job now is to establish a wood policy for each brand. You always had to have a long-term strategic eye to filling for the future.’
In 1990 John joined what was then known as Highland Distilleries Ltd, where he was employed as Production Controller. ‘I worked on the distilling side, and part of my role involved input into new -make spirit quality. I had the sensory background to do this.’
William A Robertson had set himself up as a whisky broker in Glasgow during 1855, going on to establish Robertson & Baxter Ltd five years later, with bonding and bottling activities ultimately being added to the firm’s ‘middleman’ role.
Later in the century, the firm took the next logical step and became involved in actual whisky production, with William Robertson being one of the founding partners of the company that built Bunnahabhain Distillery on Islay in 1880-1. Robertson & Baxter also went on to have an involvement in the Speyside distillery of Glenrothes and were instrumental in the establishment of the Highland Distilleries Co Ltd in 1887, with William Robertson serving as one of its original directors.
Highland Distilleries proceeded to acquire Glenglassaugh Distillery at Portsoy, on the Moray Firth coast, and Tamdhu, in the heart of Speyside, while James Robertson became head of both Robertson & Baxter and Highland Distilleries in 1898, following the death of his father.
Nineteen thirty-six saw Robertson & Baxter supply the first blend of the revolutionary, pale-coloured and light-bodied Cutty Sark brand, which was specifically targeted at post-prohibition North America, while Highland Distilleries bought Highland Park Distillery in 1937. The latter firm became a blender in its own right in 1970, with the purchase of Perthbased Matthew Gloag & Sons, owners of The Famous Grouse brand. Meanwhile, in 1961, the three Robertson sisters who had inherited the Scotch whisky business built up by their family, established The Edrington Group, named after a farm near their home, and formed the Robertson Trust.
As far as John was concerned, ‘Paul Rickards retired at Robertson and Baxter and I was offered his job in 1991. From then on I was Master Blender for The Edrington Group.’
Edrington and Highland came together in 1999, when Highland Distillers Ltd, as it had become, was bought for £601 million by a partnership comprising the Edrington Group Ltd, who were the major shareholders (70%), and William Grant & Sons Ltd (30%). Highland had previously acquired the Glenturret and Macallan distilleries, while Robertson & Baxter owned Glengoyne Distillery in Stirlingshire, having bought Lang Brothers in the mid-1960s. John’s role of Master Blender had come to embrace the use of some of the highest-profile malt whiskies in Scotland.
‘The Famous Grouse only came to The Edrington Group in the early seventies,’ he says, ‘and I don’t imagine it would be much different in character now to the old d
ays before that, when Matthew Gloag and owned the brand. They would probably have been filling Macallan and Glenrothes anyway, along with North British grain whisky. I started working on Grouse in 1991 and there was no policy to change those fillings. Grouse today should be very similar in style to the way it was in 1970.’
As well as more consistent spirit, better wood polices and a progressive reduction in the number of component malts, one other significant alteration to the Master Blender’s role is that he, or she, has been dragged out of the anonymous shadows of the blending lab and given a higher, public profile.
‘Today, the blender has a public face and that’s very important now, and he or she is also asked to produce far more products, far more range extensions and special bottlings.
‘When I took over as Master Blender we had two or three variants of age with Cutty Sark, we had Grouse, and we had single malt bottlings of Glenrothes and Highland Park and a Tamdhu. Macallan came in later. It snowballed through the mid-nineties in terms of new products. One of the first was the aged version of The Famous Grouse, which became Gold Reserve. Then it was single malts.’
While the role of Master Blender is popularly seen as being confined to the creation and continued development of Scotch whisky blends, ask any of the current high-profile occupants of the position, such as Richard Paterson, Brian Kinsman or Rachel Barrie, and they will tell you that a very significant, and high-profile, part of their role is in relation to single malts, and particularly the creation of new expressions of those malts.
One of the developments with which John was particularly strongly associated was the creation of an ongoing range of vintage expressions of The Glenrothes. Rather than just bottle another 12-year-old, for example, it was decided to opt instead for the wine industry model of releasing vintages, working on the basis that maturity, rather than age, is what really matters. ‘This involved a lot of hard work but it was very satisfying to do that. It also gave me great satisfaction to work with iconic malts like Highland Park and The Macallan.’
When it came to the increasing number of product innovations, John says that, ‘It was usually eighty per cent a case of the marketing people coming to me and wanting new things for brands within the portfolio – to cover new price or age points – and twenty per cent of the time the ideas were mine.
‘The sheer growth in The Macallan hadn’t been foreseen. There had, after all, been an eighties’ downturn in distilling and The Macallan had been no exception. So there was a big inventory gap from the early eighties, which meant we were using a lot of 1979 whisky. There was serious over-ageing as a result of the shortage. If the whisky wasn’t there it wasn’t there – though that didn’t stop a marketing man asking me once if we couldn’t make some more eighteen-year-old!
‘Part of my job was to keep the costs down and the product balanced, too, so things like the use of over-aged whisky aren’t ideal. We ended up buying back stocks of The Macallan from rival distillers, like Chivas Brothers. The Famous Grouse blended malt range came out of over-demand for The Macallan. They were done for markets like Taiwan in particular. Sales of them soared, and everyone else started to get in on the act, William Grant with Monkey Shoulder, Johnnie Walker with Gold Label and so on. They all suddenly hit the Taiwanese market.
‘As Master Blender I had a Macallan team, which identified all the casks for a particular product – they drew samples and nosed them and produced a “bench” sample which was sent down to me in Glasgow for a final check. With new products I set the make-up and they put it together to that spec. For any single malt expression I would decide the spread of age and the cask types to be used. Max Macfarlane, “Whisky Maker” for Edrington, worked with me, and did lots of nosing. With Highland Park, we would get samples from casks and put together a bench sample if we needed to, at our head offices in Glasgow’s Great Western Road.
‘Every cask is nosed by somebody, both malts and grains. The grains would be nosed at the North British Distillery in Edinburgh, where the grain portion of our malts was all assembled. The nosers would be looking for any off-notes and judging the quality of the wood, considering whether these particular casks should be filled again. And the guys at most of the individual distilleries would be doing the same as the people at North British – checking for off-notes and future cask usage. They were all trained in sensory analysis to be able to do this.’
On a practical basis John says that, ‘Mostly, the malt came in tankers from the various distilleries to Great Western Road for blending as Grouse and Cutty. We would vat all the malts together and get a sample of the malt element. We would then adjust that, if necessary. Then the grain element would be brought through from North British Distillery. We would take a sample of that mix, and then pump from the vat of malt into the grain vat, before adding water to take it down to around forty-five to forty-six per cent.
‘This was then drawn off into casks for a period of marrying. Originally we married for six months, but this was obviously expensive, and we did experiments and found that in four to six weeks most of the desirable changes take place, so now we aim for two months as a general rule, though it does vary. Fundamentally, the blender works as he always has – it’s about your nose. That never alters. You use your nose for quality control and your palate as well, to a greater extent, in new product development. Otherwise you’re not using the palate much.
‘These days there are twenty or more variants of The Macallan, ten or more of Highland Park, and ten of The Famous Grouse. Personally, I would drink a blend, probably The Famous Grouse Finest, most of the time, and maybe twelve-year-old Grouse Gold Reserve, or an aged malt after dinner.’
He adds that, ‘On a personal level, a great achievement was winning the 2007 International Spirits Challenge Trophy for the thirty-year-old The Famous Grouse blended malt. The fact that it was a blended malt, rather than a single malt, gave me great pleasure. Blended malts are a challenge to create, but all in all, I prefer working with malts and grains.’
Like many of his fellow Master Blenders, John has served on the judging panels of a number of internationally significant awards, notably the International Spirits Challenge (ISC), and when it came to a final hurrah before retirement, John crafted a universally well-received expression of his pet project, The Glenrothes.
At the time, a Glenrothes spokesman said that, ‘John has identified a parcel of second-fill American oak sherry casks from 1973 to 1987, which have now been married together and very gradually reduced in strength, but not chill-filtered. This limited edition of only fourteen hundred bottles will stand as John’s legacy to The Glenrothes.’
Ronnie Cox, Brands Heritage Director, declared that, ‘This exceptional bottling is a fitting tribute to one of the quiet men of blending; John lets his whiskies do the talking. I am confident “The Glenrothes John Ramsay” will prove to be an extremely articulate expression that will find favour with whisky enthusiasts everywhere.’
John himself closes with, ‘My signature and tasting notes have been on each and every label of The Glenrothes since 2004. That final bottling gave me a wonderful opportunity to craft a single malt which embodied the exceptional quality and distinctive style of The Glenrothes and I was truly delighted with the result.’
PART FOUR
Keeping It In The Family
CHAPTER 11
John Grant – Distillery Owner
ALTHOUGH THOSE RESPONSIBLE FOR MARKETING Scotch whisky make much of the hand-crafted nature of the product, depicting it as made in small batches by devoted and long-serving employees for small, local companies, the modern Scotch whisky industry has actually developed along similar lines to most other manufacturing industries in Britain.
Its story is one of consolidation, rationalisation and globalisation of ownership. No fewer than 39 of the 98 malt distilleries operating in 2011 were in the possession of just two companies, namely Diageo and Pernod Ricard, and family-owned distilleries are rare creatures indeed.
In the whisky-
making heartland of Speyside, the best-known name in independent distilling is that of William Grant & Sons Ltd, owners of the world’s leading single malt Glenfiddich, from Dufftown. However, ten miles west along the A95 road towards Grantown-on-Spey is another privately owned whisky-making establishment, by the name of Glenfarclas.
Widely regarded as one of the great malt whiskies, Glenfarclas is noted for its significant use of ex-sherry casks for maturation. The distillery was established during 1836 in the shadow of Ben Rinnes. It takes its name from the Gaelic for ‘glen of the green grassland,’ and since 1865 has been in the hands of a branch of the Grant family unrelated to the Grants of Glenfiddich, today headed by chairman John Grant.
In many ways John confirms the impression one might have of an ‘old school’ distillery owner. It is impossible to imagine the imposing, smartly suited figure wearing jeans, and it soon becomes apparent during conversation that for him being a ‘gentleman’ is a very important attribute. A ‘gentleman’ should put on a good lunch for his guests, know his wines as well as his whiskies, and be generous with both. If he happens to own a spot of shooting and play a decent round of golf, then so much the better. John Grant represents the fifth generation of his family to own Glenfarclas, while his son George currently acts as brand ambassador for the single malt and offers the likelihood of continuing family ownership for some time to come.
John recalls that, ‘My earliest memories of Glenfarclas Distillery are from the 1950s, when I was a boy. I was born in Aberdeen but was back at the distillery five days later and I was brought up here. So by the time I was five or six, I knew the distillery very well. There were lots of company houses on site, so there were more than a dozen kids here. There were my two sisters and me and all the staff families. The distillery was our playground, especially the malt barns!’
After leaving school John spent three years working for the Bank of Scotland, based in Edinburgh. ‘That was probably much more use than university would have been. You learnt a lot in Leith in the late sixties! It was a thriving place then, with quite a few whisky companies like Macdonald and Muir, owners of Glenmorangie Distillery and the Highland Queen blend. Our customers included everyone from undertakers to publicans and I learnt a great deal about business in those three years.’ There were, of course, trips back to Glenfarclas, where lessons in the potential perils of distillation could sometimes be learnt.
Stillhouse Stories--Tunroom Tales Page 11
