A very expensive drop of Scotch

Driving through the pretty towns of Speyside, as I did last week, it’s hard to believe you’re at the centre of a booming global industry. As the road follows the course of the river into the Highlands, you can spot the chimneys of the distilleries every few miles. But they’re mostly small-scale and they still retain the look and feel of a cottage industry. At the picturesque Strathisla near Keith, with its traditional pagoda-style malting towers, pretty girls in kilts greet you at the visitor centre. At Glenlivet, I was given a guided tour by a former excise man whose job it once was to police the distillery. There’s tartan everywhere, of course, and cheesy bagpipe CDs in the souvenir shops to go with all the whisky paraphernalia.

But this quaintness is largely for show, for the benefit of the tourists who turn up each summer in their tens of thousands to follow the brown-signed whisky heritage trail. These distilleries are not like French chateaux, painstakingly turning out their vintages each year. Only 5 per cent of Scotch production is bottled as single malts. Instead, these are highly efficient manufacturing operations, belonging to one or other of the giant international groups that control the global market for Scotch. The spirits they produce are blended with other whiskies to create international brands such as Johnny Walker, Chivas Regal and Ballantine’s. This is an industry that has just celebrated its best ever year, with exports breaking the £2.5 billion mark for the first time.

Proof that these are good times for Scotch came last week when Vijay Mallya, a flamboyant Indian billionaire, paid a glass-dropping £525 million for Whyte & Mackay, the owner of 14 distilleries including Jura and Dalmore — more than double what its previous owners, Vivian Imerman and Robert Tchenguiz, had paid five years earlier.