Stillhouse Stories--Tunroom Tales

by Gavin D. Smith

  ‘However, he got very drunk in our company on the Saturday evening and finally found his way to bed in the early hours of Sunday, and proceeded to stay there until his flight to Glasgow was ready to leave on Monday morning. He didn’t get to write anything about the distilleries and no supplement ever appeared. The Islay distillers were far from happy and they blamed me. I still have the letter they sent me, signed by representatives of all the distilleries, effectively saying I was not welcome back on the island!’

  Along with the proliferation of cask finishes, another recent trend in the world of Scotch whisky has been for small-scale, ‘craft’ distilling ventures, and on this topic Grant says, ‘Good luck to them if they can survive. It’s not a business you come into to make a quick buck. You’ve got a big outlay for six to eight years and it’s unlikely any of the blenders will buy big quantities of an unknown make. I wish them well, but will they be there in 25 years I wonder? Sadly, I think the future is in the Roseisles of this world, just big industrial units.’

  Roseisle is just one of the latest in a line of some 20 new malt distilleries to have been constructed in Scotland since the end of the Second World War. However, John is unimpressed with the spirit, which is wholly destined for the blending vats. ‘Not one of the distilleries built since the Second World War makes truly outstanding whisky,’ he asserts. ‘I would argue that none would be in any whisky drinker’s top ten malts.’

  Noting that in 2010 sales of Glenfarclas grew in volume by 26.7% over the previous year, and in terms of value to even greater level of growth, John says that, ‘There has been a definite swing towards our older and more expensive products. Since the recession started, we have been doing really well. It’s very strange.’ Musing on life as one of the few chairmen of a family-owned Scotch whisky distilling business today, John concludes that, ‘These are exciting times, though I think lots of fun has gone out of the business. But let’s say we don’t have a bad life!’

  CHAPTER 12

  Fred and Stewart Laing – Independent Bottlers

  TODAY, WE TEND TO TAKE FOR granted the fact that major distillers spend large sums of money bottling and promoting their single malts, with leading players in the Scotch whisky industry like Diageo, Chivas Brothers, The Glenmorangie Company, William Grant & Sons and The Edrington Group working hard to market the various expressions of brands such as Cardhu, Talisker, The Glenlivet, Glenmorangie, Glenfiddich, The Macallan and Highland Park.

  However, this is a relatively recent phenomenon, fuelled by the exceptional rise in the global profile of single malts during the past three decades. Once upon a time, very few producers bottled their own whiskies, with long-established companies like Gordon & MacPhail of Elgin on Speyside undertaking the bottling of a range of single malts on their behalf. Accordingly, Gordon & MacPhail became closely associated with distilleries such as Glen Grant, The Glenlivet and Strathisla.

  Not only has the development of interest in malt whisky encouraged producers to bottle their own whiskies, but it has also seen a rise in the number of independent bottlers keen to capitalise on this new-found consumer interest. Venerable firms such as Gordon & MacPhail and Wm Cadenhead & Co have been joined by companies like Murray McDavid and Signatory, while other well-established but formerly low key enterprises have gained a new lease of life and a much higher profile of late. In this latter category is Glasgow-based Douglas Laing & Co, presided over by brothers and fellow directors Fred and Stewart Laing.

  Fred says that, ‘We were born Glasgow, and Fred Douglas was our father. In the thirties he was in shipping, and during the war he was an RAF sergeant operating radar in North Africa. After the war he met some Americans who owned the blended whisky brands House of Peers and King of Scots, and they had stocks of whisky for these blends. Initially they wanted our father to ship Scotch whisky for them to the USA and South America, but then he got into actually putting the blends together to their recipes. He was personally doing the blending.

  ‘Then, in 1948 he bought the Americans out and started up on his own, with just the two brands and not much stock. So he had to establish contacts with distillers in order to be able to buy whisky, and in the early fifties he put his own “spec” of blended Scotch together. By starting his own filling programme, which is still carried on to this day, he developed a great nose and kept his notes in a “special book” which we still have.’

  Stewart adds that, ‘He had an office in Renfield Street, in the centre of Glasgow, on the corner of Drury Lane, and then moved to Robertson Street. He started doing an “admix” [Scotch whisky which is exported in bulk and blended with locally produced spirit] for Brazil that was big there, and one day he was sitting in his office unable to think of a name for it and he looked out of the window and saw the sign for Drury Street on the wall, so he called it Drury’s.’ Now part of the Campari Group, Drury’s remains one of the best-known whiskies in Brazil.

  Fred Laing Snr was operating at a time when the Scotch whisky industry was far less centralised, rationalised and monopolistic than is the case today, when several large distilling concerns dominate distillery and brand ownership, along with bulk sales. The pace of working life was less frenetic, and whisky brokers played a key role in buying and selling ‘parcels’ of whisky, principally for blending purposes. The brokers – ‘the ten per cent men’ as they were sometimes known – tended to be larger-than-life characters, such as Willie Lundie, George Christie and Gus Paterson, father of Whyte & Mackay’s current, long-serving Master Blender, Richard Paterson.

  ‘Our father did a bit of broking,’ recalls Fred, ‘but really saw himself as a brand builder. If he was tight on stocks he would deal with brokers like George Christie and Gus Paterson, who were real brokers. He was working with the DCL to buy stocks, along with Robertson and Baxter Ltd [now part of The Edrington Group] and Long John Distilleries. He had a good association with all of them.’

  Fred Laing Snr enjoyed living in style, and Fred Jnr recalls that, ‘He liked his Armstrong-Siddeley cars, his Jaguars and his Mercedes, and he would stay at the Savoy Hotel when he was in London. On business trips he would fly to New York on the BOAC Stratocruiser, which was a forerunner of the Jumbo jet. He was keen on horseracing, too, and liked the occasional bet. Like most people at the time he bet under a nom de plume [off-course bookmaking was not legalised until 1960], phoning the bookie and saying “Hello it’s ‘Jockey’ here … ”

  ‘Like a lot of guys who had seen service the war he was simply delighted to be alive – carpe diem, and all that. However, he was a very commercial and astute guy, though he liked his long lunches. They were part of the culture of the whisky business in Glasgow at the time. He would leave at noon perhaps for 101 or The Malmaison, which were two of the favoured Glasgow restaurants, to meet his chums, like Gus Paterson and George Christie. And we might see him home at eight pm, pleasantly intoxicated, having done what everyone did in those days – driven home from the restaurant. I guess there was probably only the odd tram to miss!’

  When it came to career choices for the young Fred and Stewart, there was little chance that they would fail to follow their father’s chosen career. ‘I am the elder son, so I left school first,’ says Stewart, ‘and I think our father had the philosophy that he knew his sons would make mistakes and he wanted them made at someone else’s expense.

  ‘One of my mother and father’s great friends was Sandy Grant, of A and B Grant and Co, who owned Bruichladdich and Bladnoch distilleries in the sixties. So I trained at Bruichladdich on the island of Islay in the summer of 1966. The seamen’s strike was on at the time so I couldn’t have left if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to because I loved the place. I did a bit of everything, from working in the warehouses to running the stills. I have to say that Bruichladdich hasn’t changed very much at all since my time there.’

  Sandy Grant is the subject of one of Fred’s favourite stories, which he tells while brother Stewart listens with a smile. ‘Sandy was great friends of mum and dad,’ h
e says. ‘Sandy drove a Rolls-Royce and co-owned “bits” of racehorses with father. Sadly, he and his wife couldn’t have children, and one night in the late fifties the two couples were having dinner. Suddenly, after a few glasses of wine and a number of drams had been consumed, Sandy suggested that he would like to swap Bruichladdich for “wee Freddy”. Dad was apparently about to pounce on the deal when our mother intervened. Stewart is still annoyed that the exchange didn’t happen!’

  After his training at the ‘sharp end’ at Bruichladdich, Stewart joined Stevenson Taylor & Co, a wine and spirits company, learning about the commercial side of the Scotch whisky industry. ‘After that, I went back to work for my father,’ he says. ‘He had a bottling hall downstairs in his place on Robertson Street, and in the Railway Bond on Bell Street. I became involved with the bottling side of things.’

  Brother Fred recalls that, ‘Father steered me towards the University of Life, instead of university, and he did it quite forcefully, really. I got a trainee apprenticeship with Whyte and Mackay, one of the major independent Glasgow distillers at the time, and it was still run by Major Hartley Whyte and his brother, Alex.

  ‘The Major was a remarkable figure, with a luxuriant, white moustache, and a habit of wearing plus-fours. He had a collection of vintage cars and he knew everybody. In the company’s old offices in Wellington Street in Glasgow there were photographs of him playing golf with Clark Gable, arm-in-arm with Marilyn Monroe, having lunch with Trevor Howard, and so on. He was very clever at opening up markets in the States for Whyte and Mackay, and was clearly adept at “pressing the flesh”.’

  After this initial grounding in the Scotch whisky business, Fred spent some time working with White Horse Distillers, a subsidiary of DCL. ‘After that, I joined Stewart and dad in 1972. I came in partly to free up Stewart to get more into the sales side of things. I got involved with production, and it allowed us to expand. During the industrial disputes of 1976 we loaded up trucks with bottles ourselves and ran the picket lines to get supplies of glassware, and we even hand-labelled bottles when we had to at that time.’

  Having been perceived as what Stewart Laing calls ‘cheap and cheerful’ during the early to mid-1970s, Douglas Laing & Co Ltd moved into the duty-free arena, and Fred recalls that, ‘We saw that the French Cognac houses were putting their old Cognacs into really good packaging. The King of Scots blend had a fabulous name, and we went about packaging it well for the duty-free market.

  ‘We started to use some of the older stock we had and launched King of Scots Rare Extra Old and seventeen and twenty-one-year-old versions for duty-free in the Far East. From the early 1980s onwards we were selling lots of whisky in the Pacific Rim area, and I even crammed a Japanese language course at night school to help our sales there. Ultimately, we got into even fancier packaging. Everybody was using ceramics and crystal decanters, with parchment scrolls and wooden boxes. Fancy packaging was big in the the Far East markets then and still is today.’

  In addition to the King of Scots range, Laing’s also produced another eye-catching bottling, this time for Imperial Tobacco, namely the John Player Special or JPS blended whisky. ‘Today, tobacco and whisky aren’t really seen as a good mix,’ admits Fred, ‘but I remember the black and gold JPS Lotus Formula 1 racing cars, driven by people like Emerson Fittipaldi and Ayrton Senna and they looked amazing.’

  As involvement with Pacific Rim markets had developed, less attention was paid by the Laing’s to Europe and North America, and as Stewart recalls, ‘When the so-called “tiger” economies [Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Taiwan] had problems in the mid-1990s we were hit by that.

  ‘We had piled up stocks of old whiskies for blending for the Pacific Rim markets, where we were doing thirty and thirty-five-year-old blends, so we were severely exposed. We couldn’t put the same blends into Europe or the USA, because they just weren’t the right product; the really old blends appealed to countries in Asia.’

  It was out of apparent adversity at this point that the Laing brothers hit on the idea that was to transform the profile of the company’s product lines. Fred says that, ‘We hadn’t actually blended those stocks of old whiskies, so we decided, with some trepidation, to market them as single-cask bottlings. We knew it was a potential nightmare, being such a change in scale for us, down from thousands of cases to perhaps just 350 bottles.

  ‘We had twenty-five, twenty-six and twenty-seven-year-old Ardbegs, old Macallans, Port Ellens and Laphroaigs, to name but a few. We began to release whiskies under the Old Malt Cask label in 1998. We were releasing mid-twenties to early thirty-year-old whiskies at prices that helped establish the range.’

  Before long, Douglas Laing & Co was perceived as a ‘second string’ independent bottler behind the likes of Gordon & MacPhail and the energetic newcomer Signatory Vintage Scotch Whisky, established in 1998 by Andrew and Brian Symington.

  Fred notes that, ‘The Urquhart family, which owns Gordon and MacPhail, and Andrew Symington had “seeded” the market by teaching people about the single malt category and, in a way, we rode their coattails. We really prefer to build from nothing, as it were, to create, and the single cask bottlings didn’t involve us in blending or anything. It was purely cask selection.’

  The initial batch of releases included Auchroisk, Caol Ila and a 31-yearold Oban, all brands owned by Diageo. Turnbull Hutton, the industry giant’s Scottish production director, a gloriously politically incorrect and expletive-ridden character, subsequently ‘requested’ that the Laings refrained from bottling any more of Diageo’s Classic Malts, such as Oban.

  Diageo had invested heavily in marketing this regionally representative range of six single malts, and were understandably reluctant to see independent, and perhaps ‘rogue’ bottlings of those brands, hitting the shelves. They had no control over the quality of the product, and there was no guarantee that all independent bottlers have been as professional and scrupulous as the Laing brothers.

  ‘We had stocks of Oban and another Classic Malt, Cragganmore,’ says Fred, ‘but we agreed not to bottle any more as single casks. Another distiller who didn’t like what we were doing very much was John Grant of Glenfarclas, who had just fought Cadenhead’s in the USA over use of the Glenfarclas name and he had won the court case. Eventually, we settled on bottling our Glenfarclas as “Distilled at probably the best distillery on Speyside”!

  ‘We have a second “home” for casks that are good, but not good enough for Old Malt Cask bottlings, as we can use them in our blends. Quantity-wise we sell more blends than malts, though the blends are trailing off a bit, but they are still very important in giving us volume sales.’

  In addition to the Old Malt Cask line up, bottled at the Laing brothers’ preferred strength of 50%abv, the company also produce what Fred refers to as, ‘The big brother to Old Malt Cask,’ namely Old & Rare Platinum Selection which comprises cask-strength bottlings, along with several other ranges. Today, there are probably more than 100 different expressions of Douglas Laing whisky available at any one time, with ages varying from 10 up to 45 years old.

  Noting the hands-on nature of their business, Fred points out that, ‘Two or three times a week Stewart and I go through cask samples, deciding on what will go into future bottlings.’ He jokes that, ‘If I’ve been swallowing the samples to get a real sense of the palate and finish, I can occasionally be quite relaxed by around nine-thirty in the morning!’

  A perennial favourite among the company’s bottlings is the cult Islay malt of Port Ellen, which is invariably one of the most popular offerings from any defunct distillery, whichever independent bottler produces it. Port Ellen was one of the distilleries to be axed by the DCL in 1983, and according to Stewart, ‘It was our father’s favourite whisky. We removed it from our blending programme to keep it for single cask bottlings, and increasing the price doesn’t slow sales down! The characteristic old, soft, chewed leather appeals to consumers, and people like the closed distillery aspect. It’s popular with collect
ors.’

  Fred notes that, ‘Without naming names, some distilleries past and present haven’t always had great reputations for their single malts, but even if the reputation of a distillery wasn’t good we would release a bottling it if we had a particularly fine cask from it.

  ‘We compete with the opposition in terms of independent bottlers partly by reputation, partly because Stewart and I as brand owners are regularly out there in the market place, and also because people know we have big stocks of old whisky, we’re not just out there buying whatever we can. Ultimately, we are competing on the basis of the last bottle bought by the consumer.’

  The switch from being principally a purveyor of blends to a specialist small-batch bottler has changed the profile of trading territories for the Laing brothers, and Stewart says that, ‘The UK is now our biggest market, and if you’d told father that would be the case one day, he wouldn’t have believed you. We never sold in the UK until ten or eleven years ago. After the UK there are Taiwan and Japan, both high-value markets. Germany, France and Scandinavia are important, too. I enjoy going to Japan, New Zealand and Australia in particular. Usually it’s principally work, and we don’t get much time for anything else, but in China I will go sightseeing. I’m fascinated by the country.

  ‘There is obviously a far greater interest in malts now than there ever was, and it’s exciting to go into a country like Finland, which is just getting into malts. Traditionally, it’s a Cognac country. People like the depth and breadth of flavours of Scotch whisky and the great story of the spirit and its history. I love to be part of that. Overall, there’s a much greater level of knowledge we find now. People love the country, its history, and the actual drink itself. I am privileged to be involved. We feel the benefits of everything that people in the past, including our father, have done for Scotch whisky.’

  As well as the change of direction taken by the Laings, the wider whisky industry ‘landscape’ has altered significantly. Stewart says that, ‘The biggest change since I started in the whisky business in 1964 is that there are far fewer companies. So many of the small ones have gone or have been amalgamated into bigger concerns. The industry is much bigger, but with far fewer players. Dad wouldn’t recognise the industry today.’