Whisky’s changing times and fortunes

It would have been around 30 years ago this week when I was sent on my first trip to Scotland to write about whisky. Blended whisky to be specific. I’d started at Off Licence News in the November and had spent the intervening period learning how to use an electric typewriter, learn the style sheet, write news stories (‘read the press release, disbelieve it and phone up the PR to get the real story’) and attend wine tastings. Now it was time to break me into features.

‘You’re Scottish, eh?’ You could almost hear the gears shifting in my editor’s mind.

‘Dave, do you think you might like to write the blended feature for this year?’ It was more of an order than a topic for discussion, but he was a kindly man. I said yes.

‘Here’s the list of people in Glasgow to see – you can sort out what time suits each. Try and fit in Perth as well, OK? We’ll sort out the flight and the hotel.’

Flight? For years, any trip home had been by overnight bus, train or hitching. This would be luxury. Hotel? That would necessitate some fast thinking to get past my mother.

Big business: Broom recalls whisky meetings in grand offices like Teachers’ in Glasgow

So it was that I found myself at 10:45am on a dank January morning standing in West Nile Street to meet with Lang Bros. I was taken past a room where two men in white coats were heads down over a bench of glasses, and up to the offices. The details of the interview are long forgotten. What happened next remains vivid.

We’d chatted around my questions for about an hour before my victim looked at his watch and said something along the lines of, ‘what about a dram? I think we’ve earned it.’ We went through to another room, the drinks cabinet was opened, a decanter was extracted, and hefty drams splashed into cut glass tumblers. Lunch followed, washed down with rather excellent wines. A farewell dram, a handshake and I found myself out on the pavement blinking in the afternoon light in a somewhat dazed condition. Thank Christ I was in the hotel and not at my mother’s.

I now realised why the trip was so prolonged. Every interview started at 11:00am because, well, lunch would have to be taken and no-one would want to discuss business after that (if they were capable of it). It was taken in Teacher’s magnificent building in St Enoch Square, and then at Matthew Gloag’s appropriately monikered HQ, Bordeaux House.

I seem to recall (allow me some latitude dear reader, some of the memories are understandably hazy) that one firm – I think Whyte & Mackay – also threw in a dinner in one of Glasgow’s old-school Italian establishments, places I would come to appreciate over the years, where Business Was Done.

Merry meals: Restaurants like Rogano were once centres of whisky discussions

I also learned that lunchtime was the time for gossip and discussion, all of which was off the record and therefore contained all of the information which had been withheld during the interview. I discovered which other firms were in (apparent) trouble, their strategies would be dissected, scurrilous rumours spread, my insights (not that I had any) sought, then invitations would be issued to come and visit distilleries, and have lunch again next time I was up – or they were down.

It was, I soon realised, the ending of an era. Sales were crashing, prices were being slashed, and mergers were underway. I think back with hindsight to the men (and they were all men) with their tumblers and wine glasses, their avuncular airs and clubbable talk; of how after laughing and yarning over lunch they would have returned to their offices, locked the door, looked at the sales figures and started to weep. No wonder they needed a lunchtime dram.

Within the next two years our coverage had shifted from blends to single malt. The lunches continued for a good few years, but as the old guard retired, so mineral water replaced the drams, then phone calls took the place of the face-to-face interview, before e-mailed answers filleted of content by zealous PRs became the norm.

What I remember most, three decades on, is how they all welcomed this skinny kid in his badly-fitting suit, poured him drams, answered his naïve questions and over lunches brought him into the world of whisky.