‘At Hogmanay 1968 I was back up at Glenfarclas and a few of us had been celebrating quite lavishly. Eventually we decided to go down to the stillhouse in the early hours to wish the stillman, Jimmy Hill, a Good New Year.
‘When we got there the sides of one of the wash stills were moving in and out. The stills were coal-fired at the time, of course. ‘It’s been on for three hours now and nothing’s appeared in the spirit safe,’ said a slightly bewildered Jimmy. Suddenly the still “blew” and we all dashed away and got every hose in the place and trained them on the hot copper. Someone was dispatched to inform the excise officer, who said “lock the door and we’ll deal with it in the morning!” which wasn’t like him at all.
‘When we emptied the still next day we found that the copper in the bottom was only one-sixteenth-of-an-inch thick. We now carry a spare still bottom just in case we need it, and from then on the insurance company insisted we shut down for New Year!’ After his spell as a banker, John took his first professional steps into the whisky industry, with his father, George, having arranged for him to take up employment with William Teacher & Sons Ltd. ‘Like us, they were still a family company at that time. I was sent to Ardmore and to Glendronach, their two distilleries, not far from Huntly in Aberdeenshire, and I remember that I had never seen a whisky tanker before.
‘They were tankering the whisky down to Glasgow for blending, once it had matured, and that saved a lot of wear and tear on casks and cut back on the lorry mileage. After being at the distilleries for a while I was based in Glasgow, and really I spent three years learning all aspects of how a relatively large blending company worked. I met a lot of nice people during my time there, too.
‘I spent three months in each department, and I discovered that none of them really knew what the others did, they just knew there bit of the operation. I decided to make sure that didn’t happen when I came back to Glenfarclas – that everybody was aware of everything that went on.’
John returned to Glenfarclas in 1974, just as production was slowing a little. ‘We were on full production until 1971 to 72, and the “Old Man” [his father] could allocate stock to people for blending. They would be allocated so many hogsheads per year. ‘In the early sixties my father had written in his diary that he could see mergers coming to the Scotch whisky industry; he could foresee rationalisation, and decided to keep back more of the distillery’s output for himself, to lay down more stock each year with the aim of having a bottled single malt brand.
‘It had first been bottled in the 1870s, but almost as a hobby, and it was only in 1959/60 that it was decided to do more single malt. It was bottled in Elgin by our own Grant Bonding Company, and our main market was the USA. At one time we may have been the number one single malt in the States, with sales of 3,000 to 4,000 cases per year. Because we were farmers we got a licence to distil throughout the Second World War, which meant that come the 1950s, we had stocks which we could sell in the USA.’
Back with the family firm at Glenfarclas, John found himself slightly surplus to requirements, noting that, ‘We had a good distillery manager, so what exactly was I supposed to do? The “Old Man” told me to get out and sell whisky, which was not really something I knew about. I understood production.
‘We had importers in the USA, Australia and New Zealand and Italy, so I bought a plane ticket to Christchurch in New Zealand, and stopped off in Palm Beach, in Alabama and Los Angeles. I arrived at our LA importer’s house literally as he was being carried out in a coffin! In Australia I was coming up the escalator at Sydney airport as David Grant of William Grant and Sons was going down it, and he told me as we passed that they had just bought our Australian importers!’
However, matters improved from that point onwards, and John recalls that, ‘The first importer I actually appointed myself was in Bordeaux, where I formed an association with Mahler-Besse. They were looking for a whisky to sell in France. They were already Teacher’s agents in Belgium and they agreed to take twenty-five cases of Glenfarclas. Thirty-five years on we still have that relationship with them, only now they take it by the container load! It was all about word of mouth – the Mahler-Besse people had lots of contacts which they passed on to us and the snowball kept rolling. Today we export to fifty-five markets around the world.
‘Our biggest markets are France, Germany, the UK and the USA. Ten years ago I’d have laughed at you if you had suggested it, but we now sell hundreds of thousands of cases to the Eastern Bloc each year. It’s incredible how that market has opened up. India as a market has the advantage that English is widely spoken there. We’ve had a joint venture company in India for eleven years now, giving us a wee presence there.’
At the time when John rejoined his family distillery a major programme of reconstruction was under way. ‘From 1973 to the end of 1976 we totally rebuilt the place, effectively creating a new distillery, with six stills rather than the previous four.
‘We did our first mash when it was completed in 1976 and it was a disaster. It took three days for it to process, instead of a matter of hours, but by 1979 it was all worked out and everything was going well. We were doing fine until the early 1980s, when over-production in the industry came home to roost and the DCL closed more than twenty distilleries in 1983 and 1985.
‘So what should we do? We decided just to carry on making whisky, and between 1982 and 1987 we kept building warehouses and filling them. We filled warehouses with spirit during the “great recession”. And sure enough, come 1988 to 89, the phone started ringing with people desperate to get hold of four- and five-year-old whisky for blending. Filling levels increased but consolidation within the industry meant that we actually had fewer customers. In 1989 we paid off our overdraft and went into the black for the first time since 1896!’
John Grant’s father, George, retired in 1979, at which point he became Managing Director. Comparing the way business is done within the Scotch whisky industry today, John says that, ‘It’s a different trade now to the one my father worked in. During the fifties, sixties and seventies people had been in the same jobs for years, there was more continuity, and there was lots more face-to-face contact, less phoning and obviously no emails. People like Duncan McGregor of Long John were almost like members of the family and it was all a lot more sociable. It was a more relaxed and gentlemanly way of doing business. When we installed our first computer in 1980 my father announced that he would retire!’
Despite the generational changes in the whisky industry, John declares that, ‘There were still a lot of gentlemen in the trade during the eighties. Nineteen eighty-six was our 150th anniversary year and I was doing the rounds of our customers as usual. I went to see John Macphail of Highland Distillers, and when I told him what our prices were at that point he suggested I ask them for an extra few pence per litre. ‘It’s going to be an expensive year for you, after all,’ he said. John was the only person who ever asked me to put my prices up! Even at that time, you would be asked by customers to turn up at eleven or eleven-thirty and stay for lunch, or at four or five pm and then go on for dinner after the meeting. People didn’t want to see you at nine am.’
With John back at the family distillery in the mid-seventies, a concerted effort was made to market Glenfarclas as a single malt brand, and John notes that, ‘By 1979 to 80 we had enough stock to offer a fifteen-year-old, by the mid-eighties a twenty-one-year-old, and by the late eighties, twenty-five and thirty-year-olds. Now we are able to have a forty-year-old as part of the current, permanent range. It’s affordable because it’s not over-packaged and we have lots of it. We make a reasonable margin, and I’d rather people drank it than collected it.’
John has firm views on the increasingly lavish way in which whisky is presented, declaring that, ‘I think we should ban all secondary packaging, cartons, tubes and so on, from a carbon footprint point of view. If you buy a bottle of Chateau Latour or whatever, no matter how expensive and prestigious the wine, all you get is a bottle with a label. So why has
the Scotch whisky industry gone down the route of using so much extravagant packaging?
‘Our forty-year-old comes in a plain carton. It wouldn’t even have that, none of our whiskies would, except that the marketing people say they must, in order to be competitive. The same applies to our Family Cask range.’
The Family Casks comprise a unique collection of the best single casks from the distillery’s warehouses. Launched in 2007, the line-up initially comprised 43 single cask bottlings, with one cask from every year from 1952 to 1994. ‘They aren’t cheap, but I would say they represent fair value for money,’ says John. ‘It costs a lot to bottle a single cask. We do it because we have the stock, whereas many of our competitors don’t. Simple as that.’
John’s views on the advantages of Glenfarclas’s much-lauded independence reflect those of many businessmen who are free to back their own judgement without fear or favour. ‘We can take a long-term view and plan long-term strategies,’ he explains. ‘We aren’t answerable to those terrible men in the City who are only interested in higher share prices and bigger dividends and don’t care how it is achieved. We don’t have that burden.
‘During the eighties we were probably the only distillery in Scotland not to lay anybody off. Okay, some of the guys were put onto painting duties for a time and doing other maintenance work, but we didn’t let anybody go. Many of the families, like our own, have been here for generations, and we feel a responsibility to them.
‘The average length of employment here when I came back in the seventies was twenty-seven years, and though that has fallen quite a lot we don’t have a high turnover of staff, and lots of the people working here are related to previous employees. We have three key employees based on site as part of their contracts. It’s essentially a twenty-four-seven operation now and you have to have people here. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night otherwise.’
A total of eight of the old staff houses have been demolished, but some were constructed from iron and wood and dated back to 1911, while others were constructed with breeze blocks in the fifties. John does not rule out rebuilding some of the properties at a future date, and notes that, ‘We have done up the oldest property on the site, a farmhouse, and the brewer lives there at the moment.’
While relatively large Scottish distilleries have become automated to the extent that one person can control an entire shift, this approach does not appeal to John, who says ‘We have fourteen production staff, including the distillery manager. We have four people in sales and four in admin, plus two working full-time in the visitor centre, so around twenty-nine employees in total. We do all the administrative work for the company from the distillery, which adds to our staffing levels.’
Inevitably, when you have developed a brand on a global basis and it enjoys an extremely high reputation for quality and individuality, there is no shortage of people eager to acquire the business from you.
Perhaps the most eminent figure to attempt to purchase Glenfarclas was legendary Canadian-based distilling supremo Sam Bronfman, who headed the mighty Seagram Company Ltd. Bronfman’s fortunes received a major boost during the period of US prohibition (1920-33) when he made large sums of money importing whisky into the USA from Canada, an operation facilitated by characters such as Chicago gangster Al Capone.
After the Second World War Seagram invested heavily in the Scotch whisky industry through its subsidiary Chivas Brothers Ltd, ultimately owning nine Scottish distilleries, including Strathisla, Longmorn, Glen Grant and The Glenlivet. The organisation developed the Chivas Regal blend into a global brand, favoured by high-profile figures such as Frank Sinatra and other members of the ‘Rat Pack.’
John recalls that, ‘We were once offered the proverbial blank cheque for the distillery. It Was around 1968, at Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire. Sam Bronfman offered my father one million for the distillery, then five million when it was refused. Finally, he handed over the cheque book and pen to the old man and said, “Okay, just make it out yourself for whatever sum you want.” I was there at the time and I remember wondering just how many noughts you could fit into the space! But my father just handed the cheque book and pen back to Sam and said, “Sorry, but it isn’t for sale at any price.” Despite that, we got a big order for fillings of Glenfarclas from Chivas Brothers. Sam Bronfman was a gentleman.’
Today, Scotch whisky distillers without a first-class sherried style of Speyside single malt in their portfolios continue to cast covetous eyes on Glenfarclas, and John notes that, ‘I regularly get offers for the distillery; I had one just last year. But I just say no thank you. What would I do? I’m not greedy; I have a good lifestyle and a low boredom threshold. We are in charge of our destiny, because we do everything, including our own bottling. We own half of Broxburn Bottlers Ltd, bought in 1984 by us and Peter Russell of Ian Macleod Distillers.
‘We have built the bottled brand, and it’s great that we are no longer dependent on blenders for our survival, though we do still fill for blenders. We have a theoretical capacity of around three million litres per year, though we’ve never made that amount. We’re doing a five-and-a-half to six-day week, making quantities we are happy with.’
Reflecting on the position of Glenfarclas in the wider world of Scotch whisky, John notes that, ‘We are minnows in a huge ocean. Hopefully we are good members of the Scotch whisky trade. We behave ourselves, act responsibly and produce a quality, up-market product. We try to be good members of the community, too. The distillery will only be sold over my dead body, and I hope it will carry on after me. There are still great opportunities.’
Although Glenfarclas is a highly attractive prize for many rival distillers, John is not above contemplating acquisitions of his own. ‘For years I was interested in buying the Black and White blend but I kept getting turned down. If a blended brand which was doing four to five thousand cases a year came along at the right price we could be interested. Also, I wouldn’t rule out possibly buying another distillery if the right one came along.’
During his career in the Scotch whisky industry to date, Grant has seen many changes, but the most significant for him is the consolidation of the trade into ever fewer hands. ‘I’m thinking of the creation of Diageo and the growth of Pernod Ricard by acquisitions,’ he says. ‘Who would have thought Seagram’s, Allied Distillers, International Distillers and Vintners and so many other major names would have gone? And I’m sure there are still changes in terms of consolidation to come.’
Another change noted by Grant concerns production processes, and in particular the switch from direct-fired stills to internal steam heating, a practice which has been embraced by practically the whole industry, although Glenfarclas continues to directly fire its stills using gas burners. ‘A lot of character has gone from actual whiskies,’ he insists. ‘With Glenlivet, for example, the change from direct-fired to indirect was enormous. Just look at the samples. It’s much more efficient, but different alcohols come off at different rates. You get slower heating when doing it internally, a more even distillation.
‘We put a steam coil into one of our spirit stills for a few weeks – we borrowed it from Miltonduff – and what came out nosed bland. All the character and body and guts had gone. You definitely do get a different spirit. You get really individual character from direct-fired stills.’
Nobody can doubt the individual character of Glenfarclas, which competes with the likes of The Macallan and GlenDronach as relatively heavily sherried Speyside single malts. ‘We have experimented with various types of wood and in 1973 to 74 we filled a dozen types of wood on the same day and put the casks together in the same warehouse. We filled fino, amontillado, oloroso and South African ex-sherries, plus a port pipe, an ex-bourbon cask and various others. We sampled them a few years later and they were all very different whiskies.
‘From this exercise we decided oloroso sherry gave us the flavours we liked best, and for me using second-fill casks works better than first-fills. You get a nice, full-bodied whisky f
rom the oloroso butts. We started buying sherry butts in 1978, and all our whisky has been natural in colour since 1990.’
Continuing to major in sherry-wood maturation while most competing distillers were switching to the widespread use of ex-bourbon casks has paid dividends for Glenfarclas, and any suggestion that his whisky is in any way ‘old-fashioned’ meets with short shrift from John.
‘Sherried whiskies are emphatically not old-fashioned,’ he insists. ‘Just go to Taiwan and say that. They love the style in Asia. Yes, they are traditional, but they are very relevant and extremely popular in many global markets.’
In terms of cask selection, Grant is not a fan of the widespread practice of ‘finishing’ whisky in a secondary cask type, declaring that, ‘I have never tasted a “finish” that is better than the original dram. Some of the finishes on offer have been appalling. It’s either marketing men who are desperate or who have gone mad! Cragganmore is my favourite Diageo dram, but the port finish ruined it for me.’
Grant is not enamoured of the Islay style of medicinal spirit either, and explains that, ‘Theoretically, I’m still banned from the island and until this year I hadn’t been back since 1975. I was over playing golf at the Machrie that year and a Sunday Times journalist was staying at the hotel. He had been invited by the distillers on Islay, who had paid for him to visit with the intention of having him write a supplement about Islay whisky.
Stillhouse Stories--Tunroom Tales Page 12