Original subtitles

This is the story of whisky and I start it right here,

in the heart of Tokyo.

Around these streets are bars

crammed with people imbibing the amber liquid.

It'll be a fascinating journey,

so come with me as I tell the story of Scotland's gift to the world.

'I'm going on a pilgrimage to find out why such a simple drink

'has come to mean so much.'

Hi, my name's Jim, I'm from Scotland.

'From the makers to the marketeers,

'and the chemists to the cocktail makers

'and from the Highlands to Hobart in Tasmania.

'I'll be meeting the people and travelling to the places

'immersed in Scottish whisky's world story.

'This is the tale of an ancient craft that became a global colossus.

'It is the tale of Scotch.'

Isn't it grand that this stuff's made in Scotland?

Aye, but that's gey true.

I can't shake the feeling that so much of what makes this drink

is what surrounds us here in Scotland.

There is something about the landscape, about the air itself,

some unquantifiable atmosphere that adds its personality to our whisky.

Now, it might sound overly romantic, but if the idea of terroir -

the effect on a product of its place of origin -

can be applied to wine, then why not to Scotch?

Some places in Scotland feel, to me, like the living embodiment of this.

What a majestic welcome this epic sweep of landscapes offers.

Over here, we have rugged, vast Jura, with its distinctive Paps.

And over here, we have bountiful Islay - the Queen of the Hebrides.

Below us, the waters swirling and birling like a witch's cauldron.

Islay casts a spell on you, and perhaps that sorcery imbues whisky.

I love the place names on Islay. They are all rooted in fact.

You know, you're looking at the sea, the land, nature, topography,

and all of these names that are derived from Norse, from Gaelic,

from Islay's history, really.

Bunnahabhain is "at the foot of the river".

Bunnahabhain. Um, Port Askaig is "ash tree bay".

"Ask-vik" in Norse was, um... means ash, ash tree,

and, remember, the Lords of the Isles,

in the 12th, 13th century, would come in, sail into Port Askaig

and use the ash for repairs, which is lovely, a lovely part of history.

Um, Ardbeg in Gaelic means "small headland".

Islay means "island bent like a bow", so wonderful words and names

that are so evocative of the land and the island of Islay, really.

150 years ago on Islay, there were 23 licensed distilleries.

A couple of hundred years ago,

there were many, many more illicit distilleries and, you know,

the people who made whisky at that time were using the landscape,

they were using nature, the topography, hiding in caves,

they were very cunning about where they would actually make

their whisky, so the sense of that in Islay's landscape

absolutely prevails, for sure - we feel it on a daily basis.

In many ways, this is seen as the home of whisky.

It's the Whisky Island, isn't it?

Do you have a sense of community? Yes, of course, absolutely.

You know, there are so many people who work at distilleries, but people

who have lived at distilleries, generations and generations,

so that sense of history within a distillery is very, very strong and,

sometimes, when we talk about it, you know, the distilleries are here,

but the villages and communities almost pre-date the distilleries,

so, when people now come back to Ardbeg or Lagavulin or Laphroaig,

you know, they talk about the...

They talk about the community that they lived in, the school,

the shop, the post office. It's not just talking about the distillery.

The distillery was part of it,

but you have a much broader sense of community.

If you stepped back today and looked at a map of Scotland and said,

"Right, we'll ostensibly build 120 factories to make a spirit,

"um, economically, what's the most sensible thing to do?

"Where will we build them? How big will they be?

"How much will we produce?",

you wouldn't end up with a map of what you have today.

You know, these distilleries are far-flung, they're difficult

to travel to, you're reliant on a rural population of staffing.

There's lots of things that, economically,

wouldn't be the thing that would necessarily be

a suitable and significant driver for investment,

but the history of how they've developed,

and the fact that you have this really fantastic rural diaspora,

is not only great for Scotch whisky, but is obviously,

you know, great for making it intrinsically part of the country.

This is a cultural product.

You know, this comes from us. It comes from Scotland.

It's part of our psyche. It's part of our history.

And once you begin to factor that in, the importance of whisky

to a community, whether you go up to the Highlands, to Islay

or whatever, the importance of whisky to families,

to communities, to farming communities,

to ancillary industries, to transport, farmers, etc, etc,

suddenly, it becomes more than just a product.

As soon as whisky becomes a product, or a brand, it loses...

It's not magic, cos magic is kind of ephemeral, magic is kind of made up.

It's a real link to place and a real link to culture.

The whisky industry is strong, it's forceful and it's built

an economy on Islay in this landscape in the 21st century,

which is so important for islanders and for locals.

Then, it is said, the secret is in the water.

And there's plenty of it about in Scotland.

Little springs that become clear, clean streams.

This island has to be visited to be understood or even believed.

The land gives itself to the whisky,

and the whisky keeps Islay alive and vibrant.

It produces joyous, ebullient characters

who know they have something special going.

'Jim McEwan is one Scotland's great distillers and an old pal of mine.'

You live in paradise, Jim. Thank you.

I realise that. I know you do.

But listen, all these years I've known you, right,

and I've interviewed you, there's one question I've never asked you.

That's the source of your nickname

within the world of whisky - The Cask Whisperer.

Now, how did that come about? HE SIGHS: I think...

I used to talk to casks.

That might sound kind of bizarre, but when I was sampling casks,

I would, um, put a little bit of whisky in the glass

and I'd look at it and evaluate the colour and the nose and think...

"..You're just not ready yet. I'll see you in three months' time."

And back to the cask and you'd try another one

and you'd say, "Oh, my God!

"You are ready to go! You're ready! You can fly!"

So, once or twice, people are going past me in the warehouse

and said, "That guy is drunk! He's talking to himself!"

"He's talking to the casks!" I was actually talking to the casks.

Well, each of these barrels is one of your children... Yeah?

..cos you created it. Not myself, personally,

but myself with a team, you understand? Yes. It's not me.

But you've created many, many fine whiskies. I know.

But I mean, there's a whole bunch of us - the mashman, stillman,

all that, these sort of guys - so it's a team effort, but you...

David, let me tell you something.

It's really, really very simple.

If the spirit is the child, then the cask is the mother.

If the child, when born, goes into a good cask, you're guaranteed

to have a good whisky at the end of it, or a good adult.

I think it is ultimately, um,

a combination of nature and nurture.

The nature of our landscape, er, the atmosphere, the humidity,

um, the environment and the nurture, which is in people's minds.

At all three of our distilleries now, we produce a peated style.

A limited volume, but a peated style.

And if you compare our peated style with Islay,

they are actually totally different.

The Islay one is drier and saltier, whereas the one in the mainland,

up at BenRiach, and at Glendronach and Glenglassaugh,

they're actually quite sweet peat.

So, you know, the land does play a part.

Where the peat comes from plays a part.

The environment plays a part.

Glenglassaugh's on the coast. It'll have a...

It'll have a much different microclimate in the warehouse

than at, say, in the valley at Glendronach,

or indeed near Elgin, at BenRiach.

If landscape does indeed influence taste, then Islay's has been

tinting its whisky for longer than is the case elsewhere.

It is here, go legends,

that some of Scotland's earliest "water of life" was made.

Here we are at the rather elegant tip of Islay.

Sail that way through the mist and you reach Ireland.

In the most romantic telling of how whisky came to Scotland,

this whole stretch of coastline was a portal through which

the instant Celts arrived to preach the art of distilling.

Now, depending on who you ask, we have the Irish, the Romans,

the Persians and even the Chinese to thank for its invention.

Whisky's origins are as complex as a fine blend.

This is Finlaggan, in the centre of Islay,

once home to the MacDonald Clan, Lords of the Isles,

and to what is the most likely truth of how distilling reached Scotland.

When Angus MacDonald married

Princess Aine O Cathain of Ulster, in 1300,

Aine's entourage brought the art of distilling from Ireland with them.

We don't know exactly where or when, but soon,

these distilling techniques were being employed to make

a raw form of whisky here in Scotland for the very first time.

DOG BARKS

Then, in the 15th century, a first recorded mention of whisky emerged.

The art of distilling first made it into print in Britain

in The Canterbury Tales.

A century later, in 1494, came Scotland's first recorded mention

and, in it, Friar John Cor, a Fife monk,

is listed in King James IV's Exchequer Rolls as having received

"eight balls of malt for aqua vita".

Now, that's enough barley to make over 1,000 bottles of whisky!

But it's unlikely that Friar John

was either Scotland's first or only whisky producer.

Whisky was now trickling its way across Scotland and into the

country's customs and identity.

The first real record I think you get of whisky becoming Scottish,

and kind of part of a Scottish psyche,

the first record of that is

Martin Martin's account of whisky drinking on the Isle of Lewis,

at the beginning of the 18th century, where he says -

and I'll paraphrase here - but he says something along the lines of...

when the community, that their manner of drinking was called

"a streah" or "a round", because they would sit in a circle

and the cup would be passed from one to the other

and all would drink until it all became drunk.

Now, there's kind of two ways to look at that.

You know, one is, that's just people sitting around in a circle

in a big ceilidh and getting drunk, but I think the...

When you begin to look deeply into that, you see here is whisky

being used as a social lubricant, or as a way for a community to cohere,

er, and here is whisky being used to sort out,

to loosen people's tongues, for a community to come together,

to say, "Right, who's getting married?

"Who's going to be ploughing that particular field?"

"Who's going to go fishing?"

And, suddenly, I think, from that record, you say that whisky

isn't just this alien spirit that's used in certain occasions,

whisky's now part of us, it's now part of a Scottish culture.

From fuzzy origins,

this simple drink seeped its way into everyday life.

Nowhere came to embody the spread of whisky into an area's soul more

than Speyside or, to some of us,

Strathspey in north-eastern Scotland.

The peaty water of life.

This is Speyside, the capital of whisky.

It's a place of wonder and pilgrimage,

a secret zone where the sweet smell of malt seems to hang in the air.

And it's almost as if, every corner you turn, there's a distillery,

and in every nook and cranny,

you'll find evidence of the making and the worship of whisky.

You know, within a 20-mile radius of where I'm standing now,

there are about 60 distilleries.

I mean, that's almost half the total number in Scotland!

But you see, it's more than a whisky region. It's a whisky republic!

And I think they should rename it the Amber Republic!

It is truly a place of wonder!

If you talk about The Glenlivet to the average Scotsman

or the man on the street, his mind goes straight to the Highlands

and he thinks of an old distillery producing the finest whisky

distilled in the Highlands - The Glenlivet.

Glenlivet is a Speyside whisky,

with a foot in both the past and the present.

Two centuries ago, one of countless illicit distilleries on Speyside,

it now produces the highest-selling

single malt in the world.

Master distiller Alan Winchester

took me for a walk in the hills

overlooking this amber realm.

What would this place be like without...? You've got - what? -

something like 50-60 distilleries round here? Well, absolutely, um...

I mean, it's the heart and soul of this country, isn't it? Yes.

Er, it's been very important. It's very important.

It goes along with all the traditional...

You can see it. ..farming, forestry, landed estates,

where you can go fishing and shooting. The whisky distillation

really took off here after the 1824 Distilleries Act,

getting the push with the railways.

It's got all the things correct here.

It's got bags of peat, if you want to make peaty whisky.

Lots of water, a fairly dry climate at the coast,

which is ideal for growing barley,

so all the... all the magic comes together

and then, as Sir Walter Scott said,

the cunning alchemists were based at Glenlivet.

DAVID LAUGHS And that's an important part

in making whisky as well. Cunning alchemists? Yes.

Aha! I like that title.

If you travel round the world, you find local spirits

and you'll say, "Why's that spirit not bigger in the world?"

You go to Calvados, you get that apple brandy. Mm-hm.

You do see it round about.

Whisky was this local drink, it was used by my great-grandfathers

and that to turn a little barley into a bit of cash, you know,

add value to it and it would keep better.

It was one of the few agricultural products that improves with keeping,

with age, you can't keep milk for years.

You make cheese to preserve your milk, etc.

So it was part of that, and then it was very much woven into the fabric

of the country from the early days of distillation.

One of the founders of Cragganmore distillery speaks

about 200 illicit stills here.

Now, that seems a lot of little stills working away,

so there was crofts all around here, er...

Small production, so, to fill a few ankers,

you needed a few of these working.

So, all these communities were working their little stills,

very remote, and also, some of the estates

would take whisky as the rent. It would be part of that cash trade.

Just for consumption? For their own personal consumption?

Personal or sell on.

Because many of the local distillers here were the distillers and

then they handed it onto the smuggler, the other...

A distiller was called a smuggler,

but the smuggler was the guy that took it to the market, and they were

the hard men that would take on the Customs and Excise, etc.

A lot of the ladies did the distilling in the area round here,

in these 200 illicit stills.

When they smuggled them on land, were they actually carrying casks?

They would strap the casks to the ponies.

Two ankers onto the side of a Highland pony and away they went.

It was maturing all the way to the market.

THEY LAUGH

The smuggling of whisky was a way of life.

Scallywag, brazen stories are still proudly told on Speyside.

One of my favourite spots here is

the Fiddichside Inn, in Craigellachie.

Joe Brandie married into a family that had been running the pub

since 1919 and were shifting whisky less legitimately before that.

Joe, there's a wonderful photograph up there

of an interesting character. Who's he?

That was my wife's grandfather and he was a gamekeeper over in Glass,

you know, between Dufftown and Huntly... Uh-huh.

..er, in a very remote croft there.

And he used to make his own whisky and the Customs and Excise

used to go and try to catch him.

They would go dressed as tramps and knock at the door and

he would say, "Oh, come on in!"

and they thought, "Oh, well, this is it now."

They were asking for something to warm them up and they thought he'd

produce the whisky, but he didn't, he gave them a bowl of soup instead.

THEY LAUGH But he was finally caught.

His boss was the laird over at where he worked.

It was in a dinner down in London and, unknown to him,

sitting next to him was the head of Customs and Excise and, er,

he said to the head of Customs - he didn't know that was him -

he said, "I would get a better dram from a gamekeeper."

So they came up and caught him and confiscated some of his gear

and he was fined £10.

Just because of an overheard conversation in London? Yes.

Dear me, oh, that's a shame that he was caught out.

Yeah, he was caught out.

So, Joe, when you were a boy,

you must have been aware of illegal stills all round this area?

Oh, there was a lot, but I don't remember much about them at all.

But I know there was a lot,

there was a lot in Glenlivet

and they used go to Inverness with the whisky,

but they got word that they were going to be waylaid

on the way by the Customs and Excise,

so they hired a hearse - and it was horse in these days -

put a coffin in it and put all the whisky into the coffin

and when they passed,

the Customs and Excise, they took off their bonnets

and let them go through.

And you can get a hell of a lot of whisky into a coffin, couldn't you?

A good lot, yeah.

In this region, it feels like whisky is in the soil.

While history's more clandestine traditions are gone,

some roots remain firm.

There are entire whisky generations here,

some connected by association, and some by family.

Glenfarclas, one of the many distilleries

scattered throughout Speyside.

Like many places, this seems to inspire an old-fashioned

devotion and dedication from the workforce.

I've found that's true right across the whisky industry in Scotland.

Because everyone I talk to seems to have a passion

and a commitment to their work and the craft,

and in a cynical 21st century, that's pretty rare.

But I guess it helps that very often the distilleries are family owned,

and none more so than this one, because this is owned by one of

the first great whisky families, the Grants,

who are now in their sixth generation of custody.

George, Glenfarclas is a family affair.

It is indeed. Is that important to you?

It's the most important thing that we have.

It gives us our most exclusive selling point,

our most exclusive, advantageous... over other brands.

In the world today,

so many brands are being overtaken by big conglomerates.

We're still family owned, still family run,

still very much family hands on.

And you're determined to keep it that way. Very much so.

Very much so. So, you must be the sixth generation.

I'm the sixth generation of my family to work here.

And you can trace them all back to the very origins.

We do, so it was my great-great-great-grandfather

that bought Glenfarclas in 1865

for the princely sum of £511 19s.

Away you go!

So we hope it's worth a little bit more now. I bet it is.

I mean, I'm able to drink whisky, taste whisky,

sell whisky that was made by my grandfather,

made by my father, you know, it gives you so much passion to it.

And it's not even just the fact that we're family owned, family ran,

so many people that have worked here

have worked here for generations as well.

So it really is a totally family affair.

But also that means the whisky you're producing today will be

enjoyed by your children or your grandchildren in years to come.

That's the beauty of it.

So any mistakes I make, nobody will find out for a few generations.

You'll be well gone. That's very good.

That's what you call passing the buck. That's it.

How many people do you employ here? We've got about 35, 36 people here.

Some of them have been here for a very long time.

We have a gentleman in the still house who's been here

for over 42 years.

42 years? Yes, he's been here for a while.

So will he get a special bottle or a cask when he retires?

Well, he's one of these people that I don't think ever will retire.

But for his 40th anniversary,

we gave him a gallon bottle of 40-year-old...

Ohh! ..which apparently didn't last very long.

THEY LAUGH

It wasn't always as easy to move whisky around as it is now

for Glenfarclas and Speyside's many other distilleries.

The coming of the railways was momentous for this area.

I'm about to jump aboard the Whisky Train. I can't wait.

TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS

I love train journeys,

but this has got to be the slowest train journey I've never taken.

Good afternoon, sir. Can I interest you in a wee dram?

Peter, what are you offering me?

I'm offering you Chivas Regal 18-year-old.

I think that'll do me very nicely, thank you.

OK? Slainte! Thank you. Your very good health.

This railway shunts along as a tourist attraction.

It takes day-trippers from Dufftown to Keith...

through beautiful Speyside.

But it also has a deep meaning to the whisky industry

and the flowering of this area as the centre of whisky,

because, historically, it was very difficult to get anything in or out

of this remote pocket of Scotland.

And then suddenly, at the tail end of the 19th century,

they opened the railway and it became much, much easier

to get coal into the area and the best of Strathspey out to the world.

And just as Islay and Campbeltown had used water as their motorway

to create their own eras as being the centre of

whisky excellence, the railway shifted it here,

so these very tracks helped change this area

and this industry for ever.

Here's to the Whisky Railway.

TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS

Tourism founded upon history and a vibrant, modern whisky industry

brings thousands of people to Speyside

from every corner of the globe.

Some of them never leave.

Like Tatsuya Minagawa,

owner of the Highlander Inn in Craigellachie.

How long have you been here? 17, 18 years. 17, 18 years.

Stopped counting.

Wow! So what was your passion? Did you come because of the whisky?

Purely, yeah.

So initially it was the whisky, then you fell in love with

the country and the people and you decided to stay.

Absolutely, yes, it's not only whisky,

I'm living totally your life -

whisky, scenery and the people, all mixed together.

You're in the heart of Scotch whisky country... Mm-hm.

..and you're selling Japanese whisky. Yes.

Do many people buy it?

Surprisingly yes. Really?

It's not cheap stuff, it's quite pricey, some of them,

but ten years ago, people say,

"Oh, Japanese whisky, rubbish!" I'm not doing Scotch.

But nowadays, people come here only for Japanese whisky, some people.

Do you appreciate the differences

between Japanese whisky and Scotch whisky?

Japanese whisky industry inspired by Scottish whisky industry.

Basically, we learn how to make whisky from this country.

So, ingredients we use and the method -

exactly this same as the Scottish way.

So I'm always telling people, you know,

Champagne comes from France, you know, Cava from Spain.

All the same ingredients, same principle, right?

Both good product.

So Japanese whisky and whisky from Scotland, pretty much like that.

You're in a very unique position.

You're a man from Japan, from the other side of the world,

you grew up in whisky, you come here and you're surrounded by whisky

at the heart of whisky country,

so you see it from an outsider's perspective.

Do we do enough, do we appreciate our own whisky enough?

Or does it take someone like you to come from another culture,

another language, to come and say to us,

"Hey, look what you have on your doorstep"?

I think the same happens back home, you know?

Young people don't drink sake, you know, drink beer,

wine or a cocktail, it's exactly the same as here.

Say some weekend a number of young people,

they pretty much drink vodka and...

..Jack Daniel's or maybe a pint of lager,

so whisky is, I don't know...

You have to be like some sort of a certain age to appreciate... Mm-hm.

Yeah. So, I don't know, those young people when they grow up,

a little older, maybe they will start drinking whisky.

When they reach the age of wisdom... Oh, that's a good one, aye, yeah.

..they will start to drink whisky. Yeah. Yes.

There remains a Speyside institution built upon such wisdom of age,

a Victorian grocer, blender of whisky and curator of fine malts

that continues to thrive.

In 1895, a family opened a grocery store here

on a street corner in the heart of Elgin...

It was Gordon & MacPhail's,

and like the other great whisky families, like the Buchanans and

the Walkers, they created a great whisky brand from a corner shop,

and as the whisky side of the business expanded,

they had the foresight to do deals with the Spanish for their oak,

and with fellow Scots for their best whisky.

So, Gordon & MacPhail soon became a byword for quality whisky.

It's a business rooted in the family and it still is.

SHOP BELL JINGLES

Stephen, this shrine to whisky started off as a wee grocer's shop

on a street corner in the heart of Elgin, didn't it?

Yes, back in 1895, David. Yeah, so a long...

Just coming up to our 121st birthday, in fact.

It was James Gordon and John MacPhail who started the business

with a young apprentice by the name of John Urquhart,

and John, who was my great-grandfather,

worked his way up through the business very quickly

to become a partner by 1911

and in 1915 he was sole owner.

So, the Urquharts have been involved since day one.

We've passed the knowledge of whisky down through, now,

four generations.

Gordon & MacPhail was built on two strands of whisky selling -

they made blended whiskies, as befitted a grocery store,

and bought casks to be matured in their own warehouses,

then bottled and sold on.

That second strand thrives today.

LIGHT SWITCHES CLICK

Wow!

Look at this!

It's a liquid museum of whisky.

It's owned by Gordon & MacPhail.

There are over 7,000 oak casks here, slowly maturing the whisky inside,

and each barrel is stamped with the name of a different distillery,

and the idea is that they're brought here for further maturation,

so that the aspects of climate and place

can add unique flavours to the whisky.

Gordon & MacPhail's believe it's the wood that makes the whisky

and I think I tend to agree with them

cos, you see, these casks are a portal into another world.

It's quite something to imagine that, once bottled or blended,

so much of the liquid gold here

will reach markets way beyond these shores.

Over 90% of Scotland's whisky is sold outside of the United Kingdom.

When Scotland sells its whisky, it sells casks,

but also places like Speyside...

The marketing of Scotch

has long promoted an image of Scotland to the world

with triumphant success,

no matter how far from reality that image stretches.

BAGPIPES PLAY

A land of beauty and poetry...

A land of violence and colour...

A part of the world unlike any other in its people,

its exciting history and even its products...

..probably the most famous of which is...Scotch.

Fusing a sense of the romantic with arresting visuals and novel methods,

advertising put this product on the path

to global success.

In 1898, Dewar's produced

the world's earliest filmed advertisement for any product.

It was the first major strike by an industry

which knew that sales rested on image and communication.

The story of Johnnie Walker represents Scotland's success

in marrying tradition and innovation to take a drink to the world.

This is the life-sized figure of the very handsome Striding Man...

Johnnie Walker's Red Label,

which is the largest-selling Scotch whisky in the world,

and it's owned by Diageo.

Now, Diageo have enough resources to employee six archivists,

which is extraordinary in itself,

and they take great pride in being custodians of the history

of some of the major whisky brands over the last 100 years,

but more than that, they also contain the image of Scotland

as it has changed throughout the world over those hundreds of years.

Oh, these wonderful old tomes, look at the size of them, great ledgers!

All written by hand.

'The Diageo Archive also includes a temple of bottles.'

Cor, wow!

Christine, this is amazing.

We use this space to show the evolution of our brands from

the very earliest bottle, and also to look at brands that have come

and gone over the years.

This is actually our oldest bottle of Johnnie Walker.

It dates from the 1880s.

We don't really know why it has a snake in it...

Um, we think it left Scotland without a snake

and probably went somewhere in the Far East,

but it's not unusual for things that end up in whisky bottles.

That is truly bizarre!

We're not sure how it ended up back in Scotland,

but we actually found it

when we were clearing out a space at one of our packaging plants

about 12, 13 years ago.

So it's amazing what you can still find around in the industry

and in the business.

So, we're always adding to the archive with historical items,

but actually, we always collect everything that we create today

to build the archive of the future. So what I love...

One of the things that I love about our archive,

it's never going to be complete cos we're always going to be

adding to it and always telling the story.

Yeah, it's a living, working, growing archive. Absolutely, yeah.

So, this side really shows some of our Johnnie Walker collection,

our Gold Label, Blue Label and Green Label, but actually,

around the other side we have Red Label and Black Label,

and they were introduced in 1909 and the display really shows

the evolution from our earliest right through to present day.

Christine, one of the most famous logos and brand marks

in the world of whisky is the Johnnie Walker walking man.

Yeah, the Striding Man, yeah, yeah. The Striding Man.

Yep. So, yeah, he's really famous,

so wherever you travel around the world, everybody recognises

the Striding Man and associates it with Johnnie Walker.

Um, we've got some bottles where you can see how the Striding Man

first appears...

So, he was actually drawn in 1908 and... 1908?!

Yeah, so the story goes that we... The Walkers invited Tom Browne,

who was the cartoonist for Punch magazine to lunch

and he drew the figure on the back of a menu card.

But even though it was drawn in 1908,

it didn't actually appear on the pack until the 1950s.

So, here we can see how the Striding Man looked in the 1950s.

Did he change over the years? He has evolved.

Yeah, so right from when Tom drew him in 1908, through to the '50s,

individual artists drew the figure,

and then, in more recent times, they've actually modified him,

made him a bit more contemporary, and in 1999 we switched

the direction in which he was walking. Why did you do that?

That coincided with the launch of our Keep Walking campaign,

which was the first truly global advertising campaign for

Johnnie Walker, but it was also the advent of the Millennium,

so it was all about the brand moving into the next century.

'In 2009, Diageo and London agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty produced

'this enchanting commercial in which Robert Carlyle delivers

'the history of Johnnie Walker blended whisky

'in just six minutes.'

John actually grew up on a farm on the west coast of Scotland

and when he was 14 years old, in 1819, his father died

and the decision was taken to sell the farm

and the money that they raised, they used to buy a grocery shop

and that's where he started selling

and eventually blending his own whiskies.

But young John was smart enough to be lucky.

His father's farm, where he was born and raised,

was sold and the proceeds used to open a grocer's...

'The Johnnie Walker described so vividly by Carlyle

'was just one of many individual entrepreneurial whisky blenders

'whose names became brands.'

And they bought this lovely grocery shop.

You know, in the early days, in John's time,

it would have sold household products,

but also wines and spirits,

and we are lucky enough to have this inventory from 1825,

which actually tells us what John was selling

in the shop at that time.

Back then, all grocers stocked a range of local single malts,

but they could be...

..a wee bit inconsistent.

For John, that wasn't good enough.

He began blending different malts together

as a way of offering his customers a consistent, unique product.

So, if we think about it, in John's time,

he didn't have a brand,

so customers would just come into the shop and say,

"I like this type of whisky," or, "This type of flavour,"

and he would make something to suit them, and that's how the whisky...

Wow, like bespoke whisky, really. Yeah, that's how...

They're tailor-made for the individual.

..Walker's whiskies started and it was his son, Alexander,

that created the first brand.

Young Alexander wasn't content with being Scotland's biggest blender,

not ambitious enough for him, no, no.

He convinced the ships' captains of Glasgow to act as agents for him

and drove the whisky bearing his father's name across the globe.

By 1860, he had developed the square bottle.

They started exporting their whisky overseas, and it was all about

getting more in a crate, less damages, ease of transportation.

200 years later...

'Striding among the midges of Loch Doine in the Scottish Highlands,

'Carlyle nailed this one-take wonder at 8pm on the last day of filming.'

So, how long did the company stay in the family's hands? Um, so...

Until when?

John Walker & Sons became part of the Distillers Company in the 1920s.

Johnnie Walker and other blending companies like Buchanan's and

White Horse all became part

of the Distillers Company around the same time.

But they kept their autonomy, didn't they?

They certainly did and at that time we had moved on to the third

generation of Walker's and they still ran the company, even though

it was part of this bigger parent company, I guess.

One of the things that I love about the archive is we actually

have advertising and photographs from most of those export markets,

so we can not only tell, you know,

the great back story for Johnnie Walker,

but we then can show how it appears, you know, in Latin America and Asia

and out there in the world, and what a huge global success it's become.

From modern-era films to ornate printed sketches of old,

advertising has been crucial to the expansion of Scotch,

whether aficionados like it or not.

The malt whisky snobs seem to see marketing somehow

as the demon in the world of whisky.

Well, frankly, again, reality check -

no marketing, no Scotch whisky industry.

And in the late 19th and early 20th century,

the big blending houses pioneered marketing and they brought in

expertise from America in terms of this new science of advertising,

they used the very best copywriters, they used the very best artists

and if you visit our archive and look at some of that material -

you really need to look at it hard and think about it

to understand how brilliantly executed it is -

and I think people who do whisky marketing today

have a lot to learn from the way it was done 100 years ago, you know.

I mean, if you just think, you know,

of the number of bottles of Johnnie Walker that are sold

around the world and they've got...

on the bottom of each bottle, it's got "product of Scotland".

It's in houses almost everywhere in the world, you know,

and that's what people are going to think - Scotland, Scotch.

During the bad days of the '70s, '80s, into the 1990s,

marketing was running whisky rather than production,

and marketing and production did not talk to each other.

So, if you think, like, back in the 1980s,

where, you know, sales are going like that,

but if you are a marketing director, are you going to turn around to your

boss and say, "You know, next year, boss, I'm going to be selling less"?

You'd be out the door.

So everybody was saying, "Oh, no, we're going to sell more, things will turn round."

So you suddenly get production going like that and sales going

like that, which you end up with Whisky Loch as a result of that.

Marketing is a very easy thing to have a,

"Ooh, it's bad, they're doing evil things..."

My job is to get really nice, amazing whiskies out there

for people to drink, so I don't think that's a bad thing.

Graphic designer Jules Akel

relocated to Dalwhinnie in the north of Scotland from London.

He became captivated by the influence of marketing

upon Scotch whisky and turned his fascination

into a number of beautifully crafted distillery books.

In it is to be found the sunshine and shadow

that chased each other over the billowy cornfield,

the hum of the bee, the hope of spring,

the breath of May, the carol of the lark,

the distant purple heather in the mountain mist

and the wealth of autumn's rich content,

all golden with imprisoned light.

Absolutely beautiful, Jules, isn't it?

It is. And that was Tommy Dewar.

Can you imagine drinking the whisky after reading that? DAVID CHUCKLES

But that really creates an impression about a place

and the story of a...

whisky...

..is not sold without those stories,

those fantastically evocative purple pastures of prose, aren't they?

Mm-hm.

Cos if we just drink whisky from a label-less bottle,

without a brand, it's going to be nice,

but if you know the story behind it, the characters who built

the distillery and the brand and its location

on top of a moor or somewhere,

then you go back to the spirit, don't you?

You do, and it's a much richer experience, yeah.

Yeah, and you enjoy it so much more.

Great brands will have a people story, a place story

and a production story and Scotch is the best in the world at doing that.

So you'll always have either...

you know, a distillery founder, do you know what I mean?

There's always... So you can think of it,

you can name every Scotch brand and you can tell me

there's distillery founders or there's, you know,

blender founders, there's a place, there's a...

this beautiful iconic distillery or this area of Scotland

full of glens and nooks and crannies and smugglers and harlots,

and you'll have a production story and everybody will say, "Well...

"There's up to 40 different whiskies in this blend!" Or...

"Well, we make it with the widest copper pot stills in the world."

You know, so there's always those things.

Those are the bits that actually make it really interesting,

because every brand I've ever worked on,

once you find those stories, you love it.

Sometimes you'll see the message

being very much about heritage,

about the Auld Alliance,

about the clans, about the piper,

about whatever it is,

and sometimes you'll purely see it as the brand,

and the brand values and what they stand for in terms of character,

and the kind of markets they go to

and how they're served as long drinks,

and you're a million miles away from tartan and heather

and pipes and bagpipes, and sometimes it's not even

necessarily known as being Scotch whisky.

It's known as being "that brand".

Brands are personalities,

so if you're a pretentious person, you might like a pretentious brand.

We feel affinities to certain brands

because they work with us as persons, don't we? Yes, true.

So here we are in Dalwhinnie,

and the whisky has a very appealing story.

We're right up in the heather moors,

top of the Grampian mountains,

with all those glorious peaks of snowy tops,

but if you stop and think about the Dalwhinnie distillery

and its product, how much of it actually is of Dalwhinnie?

It gets the water from down the burn,

the grain is grown miles away, it's malted miles away,

the wood that the cask... the whisky's put in the cask,

But it's manufactured here, put in the casks and then,

well, many of those casks are left down in the Central Belt,

so what is it of Dalwhinnie, you see? It's interesting, isn't it?

Mm-hm. But the story is very powerful and very romantic. It is.

You compare that to, say, a chateau

which makes glorious wine and cognacs,

they'll have their own land, their vineyards

and they'll make the wines there in the chateau,

and then they'll put it in the casks in their cellars,

and then they'll bottle it there in the chateau,

so it's much more of a provenance story, isn't it?

But here, it's more like an assemblage, isn't it?

Mm-hm. It's interesting, isn't it?

It's a really interesting way of looking at it, yes.

So... But it's been a very successful campaign,

the branding with Dalwhinnie. Yes. Extremely successful.

Well, that's where design comes along, you see,

and creates this story out of what it's got and makes it so appealing,

and gives it a provenance.

Scotland is... It's a tiny, tiny place.

To have such presence from something

that we produce is just phenomenal,

so I think it's grown beyond being just a drink.

It is something that is about passion, about love,

about friendship, about family

and everything else that encompasses that.

Like any image, it's rooted in some sort of a reality,

but of course it ignores

some of the industrialisation

that's necessary to the industry.

It ignores some of the scale, and the picture-postcard image

that we might have of the little distillery nestled in the glens

doesn't necessarily accord with

the reality of a mega warehouse somewhere in the Lowlands,

but there's enough there for us to hang onto and believe in.

My marketing director came in and said,

"I'd like to replace the capsule...

"I'd like to replace the ROPP...

"..with a cork and capsule." ROPP is a screw-top.

"I'd like to replace that with a cork and capsule."

And I said, "Why?"

He said, "Because it just... It's not classy the way it is."

And I had a phone call from my brother, and he said,

"Why on earth did you change the screw-top to a cork and capsule?"

And I thought, "Oh, my..." All my fears are coming.

I said, "Why? What's wrong?"

He said, "Well, when it was a screw-top,

"I could open one at night, pour myself a dram before I went to bed.

"Now, when I pull the cork, it goes..."

HE IMITATES A CORK COMING OUT

And my wife says, "Jack! Is that you at the Macallan again?"

As advertisers know, whisky creates desire.

One modern expression of this is the exponential growth

in people buying Scotch for collection and investment.

This is McTear's Auction House in Glasgow

and I've come to bid for a piece of the action

with two men who make a living from doing just that.

So, Andy, what is this? Apart from a display case of gorgeous whiskies.

Well, what we've got here is some of the...

I guess the oldest and rarest in the auction,

so there's some absolutely fantastic...

what we call the three types of whisky,

so the drinker, the collector and the investor,

so I'm a drinker, a collector and investor, but as a collector,

I'll buy kind of weird old stuff that I just think is cool,

that I just have never seen or the label's a bit odd.

It might cost £20 at auction. I know it's never going to go up in value.

I might drink it one day

but it's a collectable, so it's just a kind of different, weird thing.

What makes a difference? Is it the rarity of a whisky

or is it the taste that gives it its premium value?

So, quality is paramount. Rarity, scarcity,

we're looking for all these things. Let's take this, age and vintage,

so we're looking at this Macallan

and I'm going to pick this one out specifically.

My colleague to my left here, David, actually was responsible

for the liquid and the bottling of this specific bottle,

so David's signature is on every single one

of just over 3,000 bottles.

But, David, you weren't alive in 1946!

I obviously didn't distil the whisky but I was lucky enough

to work at Macallan during the 1990s

and I was given the kind of task, I suppose, to select the barrels

that went into the 1946 vintage, which was a terrific responsibility,

great, great fun doing it,

but the one downside was having to sign 3,036 certificates.

It took me a whole week to sign...

to sign all the certificates for these bottles,

but it's a wonderful old smoky style of Macallan, very unusual...

Because Macallan's not a smoky whisky.

It typically is not, but when you look at Macallan

pre and post the Second World War, it actually was a smoky whisky

when coal was in short supply

and they used peat to actually dry the malted barley back then.

So why did they change? Why did they stop using the peat?

Coal became available again after the Second World War,

so they went back to something that was much more fuel efficient.

Interesting. So what would that be worth now?

Anything, £7,000, maybe even £8,000 a bottle. When it first came out...

You're joking! ..in 1998,

I think it was retailing for about £1,575 a bottle.

Shall we head off and spend some money? Let's do that.

As long as it's yours. No way, Andy.

That lot is going now, are you all done at 80?

At £80 on that lot there, £80 and it's away to...

Buyer number for that is 656.

280, 300 bid. (Is it just one bottle?) Any advance at £300?

320 at the back there. Any advance on that 320, can I see 40?

We're at 320 standing.

Any advance at 320? 340 seated.

360 bid, any advance at 360?

380? 360 here standing.

Any advance at 360 again?

Are you all done at 360? Last chance at 360...

GAVEL STRIKES 360, that is 36606.

Thank you. That's away at 360...

So will you drink that or hold on to it?

I don't know. Let's find out afterwards.

Depends how thirsty we get.

We open at 100...

'After Andy's success, it was my turn to bid.

'Competition comes not just from those in the room, but

'from remote online and telephone bidders across the planet.'

Can I see 90 again? We're at £80 in the book here. Any advance at 80?

Are you all done now? Any advance at £80 on that lot there?

90 with you, sir. Any advance at 90 way at the back?

Any advance at 90? Are you all done?

At £90 for that lot, that is going at 90. Are you all done at 90?

GAVEL STRIKES £90, thank you. Yay!

Result. Well done.

After a morning's hard bidding,

Andy, David and I went for lunch to discuss the finer details of

whisky valuation, collection and investment.

Now, do you buy and sell these whiskies for yourselves

or for other people? Well, we act as the catalyst in the middle,

so we've got a number of buyers that are looking for specific

bottles or collections, and we have a number of sellers at any one time,

so we're really just a matchmaker, so we bring the two parties together

so certain people might be looking for a collection of rare Macallan

or a collection of the rare malts from Diageo,

or maybe they're peat freaks and they love Ardbeg

and want every single bottle of Ardbeg on the planet,

so we help kind of plug those gaps that they might have in their own collection,

and sometimes, which is really interesting from our point of view,

in recent times, people have come to us as professional investors

rather than just kind of amateur collectors,

and that something that's really changed,

probably in the last two, three, four years maximum,

where people can see value,

they've maybe done a little bit of tracking of their own

and they understand that we've got this incredible database, 146...

Thousand. ..pieces of data now, covering 22,000 different bottles,

that give us a really powerful... That's phenomenal.

..piece of insight that obviously people use for a number of different reasons.

Now, David, who are these individuals that you work

on behalf of? I know that you can't be indiscreet... Of course.

But obviously, A - they have money. Yes.

They have money to spend and money to burn.

Yes, and most people might expect that it's all Asian money or

Chinese money. That's not the case.

We've got clients from North America, from Canada,

from Europe, from the UK, Hong Kong,

Taiwan, Singapore, I mean, it really is quite global

and we're kind of surprised at where we get calls from.

What percentage of your clients buy whisky purely for investment

and which of them buy it purely because they just love whisky?

The vast majority of the...

kind of the big old bottles that we are moving at the moment

are for collecting and investing.

However, we recently sold a collection for

just under half a million pounds

to somebody who opened it

and is probably drinking it as we are sat here now.

They opened and are drinking a half-million-pound collection

of whisky? Absolutely. How many bottles would be involved? 50, 50...

50 bottles exactly. Now, this is the interesting thing.

We did this, we did a similar collection or the same collection

three or four years ago to a different buyer

and we sold it for slightly less than that,

and this buyer again opened this collection of 50 bottles

and drank it with his mates playing snooker,

so the answer to the question, does everybody buy for collecting and investing? Absolutely not.

That is really good news, gents,

because I think whisky is for drinking and for enjoying.

We couldn't agree more. It's one of the most delicious nectars available

in the history of humankind. Couldn't agree with you more.

And to buy a bottle, or a collection of bottles,

purely for investment purposes, to me, is immoral.

Yeah, do you know what... I know it must be, you know...

You're both on a cleft stick because you make a living from it. Indeed.

Yeah. It's kind of half-and-half, and we've grown up, both of us,

drinking whisky as well as both of us collect whisky, and both

of us invest in whisky at the same time, so three distinct areas

that we focus on, which is drinking, collecting and investing.

The one thing that I guess worries me particularly is this idea

that's taken hold recently that you can "invest" in whisky,

that whisky is some kind of

an alternative to the stock market,

some kind of an alternative

to pork belly futures or whatever it might be.

Now, I have a very firm view on this.

Whisky was made to be drunk and to be enjoyed.

Whisky has no meaning until the moment of its consumption.

It is just a glass bottle of cold tea until its destruction,

and only in its consumption does it achieve meaning and worth and value.

So, chaps, this is the bottle of Rosebank 12-year-old

that I bid so successfully for. Well done. Congratulations.

But, Andy, you've got a treat for me in that glass, haven't you?

Oh, this is... Because you've popped your cherry at auction,

at a whisky auction,

we thought we'd celebrate with something special,

so we brought you some Mortlach from 1936... Mortlach!

..to celebrate with. Please accept that on Davy and I.

Oh, it's got a wonderful nose!

Slainte. Slainte mhath.

'The pursuit of Scotch is full of surprises.

'I never expected to be drinking a 1936 Mortlach in a Glasgow car park.'

How much would this cost a bottle?

£3,500 at the moment if you buy it retail.

Three-and-a-half grand? Yeah, yeah.

You haven't poured me a big enough dram.

THEY LAUGH

You've got the last. That's it. Run out!

The first whisky experience that I - vaguely - remember

was in Studland Beach in England.

I was over working in a pub for the summer

and I decided to join some of my new friends for a night out.

I was about 18 and let's just say

I decided after that night that I would never drink whisky again.

I remember the first one that I tasted and hated

when I was very young was on a camping trip with my dad.

I think we were in Jedburgh and he had brought a hip flask of

Highland Park, which is one of his favourite whiskies, along with him,

and I took a sip of it and just thought it was disgusting.

It was a Lagavulin

and I assumed that all whisky was really smoky and peaty,

and I absolutely loved it. I completely fell in love with it.

It was actually the point that changed my life.

Next time, I'll be visiting a spellbinding whisky collection,

then assessing the rise of craft distilleries

and the future of Scotch, but most importantly,

I'm heading to Norfolk, Sweden, Japan and Australia

to meet our whisky rivals.