The Heritage of Scotch Whisky

The Scotland of the late Middle Ages was, in many respects, ideally suited to the making of whisky. Barley grew in the fertile lowlands of the north-east and the Moray plain; peat, cut from the moors, provided abundant fuel for drying the grain; and cold, soft water flowed in almost every glen. Small pot stills, first introduced by monastic communities and then rapidly adopted by the wider population, made possible the production of a strong distilled spirit that could be kept and traded.

The earliest written record, from the Scottish Exchequer Rolls of 1494, is a brief and unglamorous entry: eight bolls of malt supplied to Friar John Cor 'wherewith to make aqua vitae'. From this single line, an entire industry, and eventually an entire chapter of Scottish national identity, would grow.

For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the making of whisky in Scotland was a semi-legal pursuit. Successive excise duties, introduced from 1644 onwards, sought to tax the trade, and the punitive rates imposed on smaller producers pushed most of the industry into the shadows. The Highlands, in particular, became the domain of the illicit still.

The image of the small still concealed behind a Highland bothy, the exciseman climbing the hillside in pursuit and the whisky carried down at night to the market town below is one of the founding narratives of Scotch. It was, in truth, an era of considerable danger and of not inconsiderable violence. But the whisky itself, made from local barley and local water in stills of modest size, was the direct ancestor of the malt whiskies that the great Highland distilleries would later produce quite legally.

The Highlands were dotted with illicit stills. The Excise Act of 1823 did not create Scotch. It brought it out of the shadows.

The turning point was legislative. In 1823, Parliament passed the Excise Act, which drastically reduced duties and licence fees and set out a framework under which distillers could operate legally at modest cost. Within a generation, hundreds of distilleries had come out of the shadows or been founded anew.

Many of the distilleries that consumers now regard as the classic names of Scotch whisky — Glenlivet in 1824, Cardhu in 1824, Balblair in 1826, Strathisla legalised in 1825 — trace their formal foundations to the years immediately following the Act. The Highlands and Speyside in particular were transformed.

The second transformation of the nineteenth century came from the merchants of the Lowlands. In Kilmarnock, Aberdeen, Perth and Glasgow, a new generation of grocers and wine merchants — Walker, Chivas, Dewar, Bell, Buchanan, Haig — began to combine whiskies from many distilleries to create consistent, reliable blends that could be sold in bottle under a single house name.

The combination of the column still, patented in 1831, and the tradition of the pot still made this possible. Grain whisky from the column still provided a lighter, more neutral component; malt whisky from the pot stills provided character. Together they produced blended Scotch, and blended Scotch went to the world.

For most of the first two centuries of the legal industry, single malt whisky was scarcely known outside Scotland. It went, almost in its entirety, into the great blends. The change came in the 1960s, when Glenfiddich resolved to bottle its whisky as a single malt in its own right and to market it internationally. The decision transformed the industry.

Other distilleries followed — The Glenlivet, The Macallan, The Balvenie, Highland Park, Talisker — and by the closing decades of the twentieth century single malt had become one of the fastest-growing categories in the world of spirits.

Blended Scotch built the industry. Single malt made it a category of prestige.

Few products are as thoroughly identified with a nation as Scotch is with Scotland. The distilleries are named on maps; the six regions are recognised in law; the phrase 'Scotch whisky' is a protected geographical indication under British and international regulation. Scotch is, together with wool, salmon and shortbread, one of the emblematic exports of Scotland — and, by extension, one of the most recognisable products of the United Kingdom.

For all the modern prestige of single malt, it is blended Scotch that remains the most consumed style in the world. Johnnie Walker, Chivas Regal, Dewar's, Ballantine's, Grant's and Bell's are drunk in every corner of the earth, and the blending houses of Kilmarnock, Aberdeen and Paisley continue to sustain the vast majority of the Scottish industry by volume. The two categories are not rivals but complements — different chapters of the same long book.