The Loch and the Renaissance - Part Two: The Pivot

The Family That Started a Category, and the Japanese Company That Believed in It

This is the second article in The Loch and the Renaissance - a three-part series on the most consequential and least understood story in the history of Scotch whisky. Part One told the story of the Whisky Loch: how Scotland’s overconfidence, poor forecasting, and fundamental misreading of what it had produced led to the closure of twenty distilleries in the 1980s and the near-destruction of some of the finest whisky ever made. Part Three examines the resurrection: how Asia built the market that Scotland had failed to imagine, and the uncomfortable question of whether history is about to repeat itself.

In the summer of 1886, a man named William Grant left his job as manager at the Mortlach distillery in Dufftown with a specific and perhaps eccentric ambition: to build his own distillery and produce, as he put it, the best dram in the valley. He acquired second-hand equipment from Cardhu, enlisted his nine children as unpaid construction labour, and by Christmas Day 1887 had his first spirit running from the still. He named the distillery Glenfiddich - Gaelic for the valley of the deer - and began producing malt whisky that was sold, as virtually all malt whisky was sold, to the blending houses.

It would take three more generations of the Grant family to complete what William started. But the ambition he expressed in that Dufftown summer - the best dram in the valley - carries, in retrospect, a significance that nobody at the time could have recognised. It was the founding impulse of a category that would take eighty years to be built, and that would save the Scotch whisky industry from the consequences of its own complacency.

This is the story of how that happened.

The World That Sandy Grant Gordon Inherited

By the early 1960s, if you drank Scotch whisky, you drank blends. Up until the 1960s, the fortunes of Scotland’s commercial whisky industry was based entirely on blended Scotch, as whisky specialist Charles Maclean has observed. Malt whisky was being produced in quantity - it was the essential ingredient in every blend - but virtually none of it was sold in bottles to consumers. It was a raw material, valued for its contribution to a finished product whose character was the blender’s creation rather than the distillery’s.

The notion that a consumer might seek out one distillery’s malt over another’s - might pay a premium for the specific character of Glenfiddich, or Macallan, or Port Ellen, or Brora - was not merely uncommon. It was structurally absent from the industry’s commercial imagination. Single malt as a category did not exist outside Scotland, and barely existed within it.

Into this world stepped Sandy Grant Gordon, Cambridge-educated mathematician, great-grandson of William Grant, and - after the death of his father from colorectal cancer drew him back from a planned career in law and aircraft design - the man who would become managing director of William Grant & Sons between 1968 and 1996. ¹

Sandy and his brother Charles had been watching the blended whisky market with the particular clarity that comes from being slightly outside the mainstream of an industry. The dominance of blended Scotch whisky, indeed the expansion and very survival of the industry itself, had been based on the assumption that Highland pot-still malt was too strong in flavour and body to be welcome to the palates of the educated masses, as The Schweppes Guide to Scotch observed. Sandy Grant Gordon did not accept that assumption. He believed - and the word that recurs in every account of this decision is “proud” - that the malt his family had been making in Dufftown since 1887 was something the world deserved to encounter directly, on its own terms, without the softening and standardising mediation of the blender.

In 1963, he acted on that belief.

The Decision That Started Everything

The product Sandy Grant Gordon launched was called Glenfiddich Straight Malt. The term “single malt” had not yet been coined - that language would come later, as the category needed a regulatory and commercial vocabulary to describe what it was. The expression was an eight-year-old, lighter and more delicate than the heavily sherried malts that would define the category’s prestige tier in the following decades, with what became Glenfiddich’s signature character of fresh pear, baking spice, and a clean, unhurried fruitiness that was entirely its own. ²

It became the first whisky to be sold in an airport travel retail shop - at Heathrow, in 1963 - and the first single malt to be actively marketed outside Scotland on a sustained commercial basis, with exports to Canada and the United States beginning almost immediately. ³ By 1963, 2,000 cases of Glenfiddich were being exported; by 1966, 8,000 cases.

The triangular bottle - designed in 1957 by the influential 20th-century graphic designer Hans Schleger, inspired by the trinity of water, air, and barley - gave the product an immediately distinctive shelf presence in a world of round bottles. In a world of round whisky bottles, Glenfiddich stood out. The design was not simply aesthetic. It was a signal: this is something different from what you already know. It is worth looking at more carefully.

The rest of the industry looked at what Sandy Grant Gordon was doing and, in the main, concluded that he was wrong. Single malt was the ingredient; blend was the product. The consumer wanted consistency and smoothness, and the blenders provided it. A Speyside distillery promoting its malt whisky by name to American consumers was an interesting eccentricity, not a commercial threat to the established order.

Glenfiddich was very farsighted in starting to promote their single malt. They had a ten-year first-mover advantage of the rest of the industry, Maclean notes. That ten years mattered enormously. By the time other distilleries began to understand what Glenfiddich had started, the brand had already built an international audience, established distribution in the key markets, and created the template for what a single malt presentation should look like. In 1980, there were 27 single malts available on the market. By 1989, there were 104. ⁴ While Glenfiddich Highland Malt may not have been the best malt whisky in Scotland, it was certainly the most widely available and must take much of the credit for capturing a place in the consumer spotlight for single malt whisky, a product which had previously been the preserve of the connoisseur and the privileged.

Sandy Grant Gordon received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Wine and Spirit Competition in 2000. The citation noted: “Sandy Grant Gordon was the initiator of the prestigious category of branded Single Malt Scotch Whisky. Sandy opened up the global market for Single Malt Whisky.” ⁵ He died in December 2020, having seen the category he created become the most coveted and valuable in the global spirits world. He was 89.

The Macallan and the Bordeaux Gambit

While Sandy Grant Gordon was building the template, a very different kind of single malt story was developing forty miles to the east - at Macallan, in a different Speyside glen, with a different philosophy and a more audacious commercial imagination.

Macallan had long been considered one of the finest malts available to blenders - sought-after for a rich, heavy spirit style, produced in characteristically small copper stills that created intense, oily character, and matured exclusively in ex-sherry casks that gave it the dark fruit, warming spice, and vanilla depth that would eventually make it the world’s most coveted single malt. As a standalone product, however, it was scarcely seen beyond the borders of Speyside.

The decision to change this was taken in the early 1980s - at the very moment when the Whisky Loch was at its worst and the rest of the industry was closing distilleries, dumping stock, and retreating from ambition. A small team at Macallan, including family members Allan and Peter Shiach, and marketing professionals Willie Phillips and Hugh Mitcalfe, devised a campaign that was, for a Scotch whisky brand, genuinely radical. Macallan’s marketing campaign began in the early 1980s, the brand intentionally positioning itself as a “first-growth” whiskey to parallel its Scotch to high-end Bordeaux wines.

The first-growth parallel - equating Macallan’s quality and rarity to Château Lafite or Château Pétrus - was not merely a marketing metaphor. It was a fundamental repositioning of what single malt whisky was and who it was for. The campaign’s advertisements were literary, witty, and rich in narrative - telling the Macallan story through watercolour illustrations and anecdotal text that assumed an educated, curious reader rather than a casual consumer. They talked about the distillery’s small stills, its sherry casks, its ageing philosophy. They treated the reader as someone capable of caring about the specifics of how something was made.

The approach was counterintuitive to the point of seeming foolish at the time. This was 1981 and 1982 - the years when the Whisky Loch was at its most visible, when the DCL was planning the closures that would be announced in February 1983, when the industry’s dominant emotion was survival rather than ambition. The idea of positioning a Speyside single malt as the whisky equivalent of a Bordeaux first growth was, in that context, either prescient or delusional. It turned out to be prescient.

The early releases that accompanied the campaign were among the finest aged expressions that any distillery had brought to market: a 25-year-old Anniversary Malt, then a 50-year-old, and eventually - because a single cask of 1926 whisky had survived in a Macallan warehouse and presented itself for consideration - a 60-year-old. The nosing panel approved it. Forty bottles of the Macallan 1926 were produced.

Those forty bottles - a production so small it should have been a footnote - became instead the axis around which the entire story of prestige single malt collecting would eventually rotate. One sold at Sotheby’s in 2019 for £1,452,000. In a segment of one: In fine wine terms, it is Château Lafite in a world where the other first growths don’t exist.

The Japanese Eye: Suntory and the Value Nobody Else Could See

In 1986, three years after the worst of the Whisky Loch closures, a Japanese company made a decision that would, in retrospect, prove to be among the most consequential investments in the history of the category.

Suntory - Japan’s oldest and most celebrated whisky producer, whose own story we told in detail in our article on Japanese whisky, and whose founder Shinjiro Torii had built the first Japanese malt whisky distillery at Yamazaki in 1923 - purchased a 25% stake in Macallan. ⁶ Not a controlling interest. Not a full acquisition. A minority shareholding, at a price that reflected the distillery’s current market value in a category that was still, in 1986, considered a niche and uncertain proposition.

What Suntory saw in Macallan in 1986 - at the nadir of the Scotch whisky industry’s crisis of confidence, with distilleries still closing and stock still being dumped at below cost price - tells us a great deal about the quality of observation that the Suntory leadership brought to the category.

They saw a distillery with an extraordinary stock of aged, sherry-matured whisky. They saw a brand that had just spent five years building a prestige positioning that nobody in Scotland had attempted before. They saw a product whose quality was genuine and whose premium credentials were credible. And they saw an undervalued asset in a category that the market had not yet understood - in exactly the same way that Japan had understood, a decade earlier, that Scottish single malt was undervalued.

The connection to the Japanese whisky story matters here. As we explored in that article, Masataka Taketsuru had gone to Scotland in 1919, studied the craft with extraordinary seriousness, returned to Japan, and eventually built a whisky culture that would spend decades perfecting what it had learned before eventually producing something the originators had never imagined. Suntory’s founders had been students of Scotland. By 1986, they had become, in some respects, more expert observers of what Scotland was making than the Scottish industry itself.

The Suntory stake did not transform Macallan overnight. What it did was provide a statement of confidence - from a credible, international, deeply whisky-literate source - at the moment when that confidence was most conspicuously absent from every other conversation in the industry. Suntory became a distributor of Macallan in Japan, Germany, Canada, and South Africa, building the brand in exactly the markets where the growing Asian enthusiasm for premium single malt would eventually translate into extraordinary demand. The relationship deepened over the following decades: in 2020, Suntory acquired a further 10% stake in Edrington, Macallan’s parent company, cementing a partnership that had by then lasted almost four decades. ⁷

What the Pivot Actually Was

It is worth being precise about what the pivot described in this article actually was - because it was not a single decision or a single moment. It was a series of choices made by individuals who were either outside the mainstream of the industry or sufficiently independent from it to see what the mainstream could not.

Sandy Grant Gordon was a family business owner who did not need the blending houses’ approval to experiment with single malt promotion. His independence - the same structural independence that allowed Glenfiddich to never close during the war and to keep its warehouses full when other distilleries were rationalising - gave him the freedom to make a bet that the rest of the industry considered eccentric.

The Macallan team in the early 1980s was operating with the same kind of independent authority. The Roderick Kemp Trust, which controlled the distillery until 1968, had kept decision-making within the family for decades. The willingness to invest in premium positioning at the worst moment of the industry’s confidence was possible because the people making the decision were not answerable to the short-term reporting requirements of a publicly listed drinks conglomerate.

And Suntory was, quite simply, looking at Scotch whisky from the outside. They brought to the category the same quality of external observation that Masataka Taketsuru had brought from Scotland to Japan sixty years earlier: the observer who has studied something seriously, understands it deeply, and is therefore capable of seeing its value clearly precisely because they are not embedded in the institutional assumptions that have made it invisible to those within it.

This is a leadership insight that I find compelling in its generalisability. Sandy Grant Gordon was noted for his ability to forecast trends, particularly in the 1980s when strict laws against drinking coupled with high taxes caused a global slump in sales, and later there was a revival spurred by media depictions of scotch. This was important because of the time intensive ageing element of whisky production. That last sentence carries the key. Whisky is a business where the decisions you make today determine what you can sell in ten or twenty years. The ability to forecast - to commit capital to a vision that the current market has not yet validated - is not merely commercially useful. In whisky, it is the only strategy that works.

The distilleries that closed in the 1980s were not closed by people who lacked intelligence or care. They were closed by people who were forecasting from within a framework that had stopped being accurate. Sandy Grant Gordon and the Macallan team were forecasting from a different framework - one in which the specific character of a specific distillery’s spirit was not an ingredient to be dissolved into a blend but a product to be celebrated in its own right. They were right and the mainstream was wrong, and the consequences are the whisky world we inhabit today.

The Numbers That Show the Scale of the Transformation

The speed at which single malt grew from eccentricity to dominance is worth stating plainly.

In 1963, when Glenfiddich’s Straight Malt was launched, single malt was - in practical commercial terms - a category of one. In 1980, there were 27 single malts on the global market. By 1989, 104. By 2013, single malt was in its eighth consecutive year of record-breaking global sales, reaching $6.5 billion in value. ⁸ The category that was considered a niche producer’s vanity project in 1963 had become, fifty years later, the most prestigious and fastest-growing segment of the global spirits market.

William Grant & Sons, as of 2019, was the wealthiest family in Scotland - a status built on the decision Sandy Grant Gordon made in 1963 to believe that what his great-grandfather had been making in Dufftown since 1887 was worth sharing with the world. ⁹

And Macallan - the distillery that the Whisky Loch did not close, that was sought-after by blenders but scarcely seen beyond Speyside, that was positioned as a first-growth Bordeaux equivalent at the moment of maximum industry scepticism - is now the most valuable single malt brand in the world, with bottles from its rarest casks selling at auction for prices that no one in the industry’s mainstream of 1983 could have imagined as physically possible.

The pivot, in retrospect, was obvious. The distilleries that closed in 1983 were producing liquid of extraordinary quality that a global audience would, within a generation, be competing to acquire at any price. The value was always there. The framework to see it was not.

A Note on What Was Lost in the Pivot

The story of the pivot is, in one sense, a story of commercial triumph. But it cannot be told entirely as triumph, and it would be dishonest to do so.

The same period that saw single malt begin its ascent - the same years in which Glenfiddich was building its category and Macallan was building its prestige positioning - was the period in which Port Ellen and Brora were closed and demolished. The pivot happened; the category was saved and rebuilt. But it happened after the closures, not before them. The distilleries that could not survive the industry’s failure of imagination did not live to benefit from the imagination’s eventual correction.

This is the specific tragedy of the Whisky Loch that no commercial recovery can undo. The liquid in those warehouses in 1983 - the Port Ellen that would become among the most sought-after whiskies in the world, the Brora that would achieve legendary status among enthusiasts who had never tasted it when it was being produced - that liquid survived the closures. The distilleries that produced it did not. And because whisky is a product that takes decades to reveal its full character, the price of the industry’s failure of imagination was paid by communities that could not wait for the market to catch up.

Georgie Crawford’s remark about Port Ellen - that distilleries were the main employer on Islay, and that restoring Port Ellen was putting something back the way it should be - is the most honest way of framing what the pivot cost. The category was saved. The communities bore the price of the delay.

Part Three of The Loch and the Renaissance - The Resurrection - tells the story of how Asia built the market that Scotland had failed to imagine, and asks the uncomfortable question of whether history is about to repeat itself.

Devon Drams articles referenced in this piece

• The Loch and the Renaissance, Part One: The Fall - on the Whisky Loch, the distillery closures, and the institutional failure that caused them

  
  

• How Japan Took On Scotland - and Changed Whisky Forever - on Masataka Taketsuru, Suntory, and the Japanese company whose understanding of Scotch whisky ran deeper than the industry’s own

  
  

• In Defence of the Blend - on the blended whisky tradition that single malt eventually challenged, and the craft of blending that made the category possible

  
  

• The Collector and the Drinker: A Case for Both - on Macallan as the defining prestige single malt, ghost distillery values, and the relationship between scarcity and meaning

  
  

• The Wood Series, Part One: The Jerez Secret - on Macallan’s sherry cask programme and the Jerez supply chain that defines its character

  
  

Sources

1. Wikipedia. Sandy Grant Gordon. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Grant_Gordon (Accessed: June 2026)

   
   

2. PRNewswire. The Whisky That Changed History. Available at: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-whisky-that-changed-history-282405041.html (Accessed: June 2026)

   
   

3. A Thirst for Firsts. First Whisky to be Marketed as a Single Malt. Available at: https://www.athirstforfirsts.co.uk/post/first-whisky-to-be-marketed-as-a-single-malt (Accessed: June 2026)

   
   

4. VinePair. The Surprisingly Short History of Single-Malt Scotch. Available at: https://vinepair.com/articles/best-single-malt-scotch-history/ (Accessed: June 2026)

   
   

5. A Thirst for Firsts. Ibid.

   
   

6. Mark Littler. The History of Macallan: Everything You Need to Know. Available at: https://www.marklittler.com/history-of-the-macallan/ (Accessed: June 2026)

   
   

7. The Drinks Business. Suntory Acquires 10% Stake in Macallan Owner. Available at: https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2020/01/suntory-acquires-10-stake-in-macallan-maker-edrington/ (Accessed: June 2026)

   
   

8. Glenfiddich. The Global Growth of Single Malt Whisky. Available at: https://www.glenfiddich.com/explore/blog/2013/the-worldwide-thirst-for-single-malt/ (Accessed: June 2026)

   
   

9. Wikipedia. Sandy Grant Gordon. Ibid.