A winning wee dram: The Dalmore boss looks for global market
SOME 6,000 miles separate the sleepy, picture-perfect waters of the Cromarty Firth and the Sotheby’s auction room in Hong Kong, but they are now bound together in the record books.
A fortnight ago a collection of six rare whiskies from the Dalmore distillery in the far north of Scotland was auctioned off in the Asian territory at a record Sotheby’s price for the continent: a cool HK$8.75m, or around £830,000.
Unsurprisingly, Bryan Donaghey – the CEO of Whyte and Mackay, the distillery’s parent company – is pretty chuffed with the sale.
“I think the auctions are a great opportunity for people to be able to see the rarest whiskies that we create and if you’ve got the money, it’s a great opportunity to buy a bit of liquid history,” he tells me via video call from a Cop26 disrupted Glasgow.
“But also you can still get a taste of that quality and heritage and the character of the whisky in the normal core collection,” he says.
So far it’s a strategy that’s working. The Dalmore is now the world’s fastest growing single malt brand, and amongst the top ‘investable’ distilleries too. Much of that growth has come on the back of the strength of recent ‘no age’ expressions, but the core of the brand remains the 12, 15 and 18-year old expressions.
For a global, luxury whisky brand, 2020 was tough, but the auction success has come alongside a resurgence in the whisky industry, whose exports – before being caught in a tariff war – tallied around £4.9bn in 2019.
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“Between 2015 and 2020 we more than doubled the brand,” he says, and despite the shutdown of global travel (and the associated airport-based whisky trade) the firm continued its momentum.
In 2021, with travel retail coming back, and markets rebounding in Asia, things are looking up.
Donaghey is clearly of the view that The Dalmore is at the start of what he calls a journey – one that he expects to lead to great things. Donaghey is happy to look down the road to even more success, built on the brand’s quality and character – the brand’s chief distiller, Richard Paterson, is already something of a whisky legend. “It’s a got a lot further to go, and a lot of future potential in terms of still a small brand in the global scheme.”
From a business perspective, Donaghey credits the team around him for the speedy ascension of the brand up the global whisky charts. But he also says the culture of Whyte & Mackay has helped too.
“We can trace our roots back to 1844, and Jura (another whisky under the umbrella) back to 1810,” he says.
“But we’re still a start-up at heart. The lines of communication are short, the decision-making is quick, and we can be a lot more agile than some of our bigger competitors.”
With profit hitting £50m last year despite the chaos of Covid-19, Donaghey has almost as much to be cheerful about as the punter who paid nearly a million for the six bottles in Hong Kong.
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