On another note, John, I am really surprised that you would compare yourself laying off an employee to Diageo closing down a bottling plant. And straightforwardly compare your own feelings about your decision to the feelings of the various members of Diageo’s board of directors. There is no analogy either case.

The badness of you laying someone off is tempered by the goodness of your business project, which should survive. The badness of Diageo harming anyone in any way isn’t tempered by anything because Diageo is a monopoly force in the scotch market, which should not survive. It should be broken up before its massive, unwieldy amalgamation of spirit interests dictates more and more often that scotch must change for the worse.

Compare Glenfarclas and Macallan. Macallan is probably doing better business. But as a scotch consumer which business model do you prefer? Do you get my drift? People are justifying Diageo’s activities as dictated by some business sense, which all business men share. But there are different ways to do business and Glenfarclas is still working it just fine.

a simply answer to the original question.

Of course not!

http://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10183&Itemid=66

Anyway, I’m not a scientist, but I still believe that once you break the chain and Scotch is no longer bottled in the country of its origin, it will make room for further concessions.
I, too, am all about what is in the bottle. But I am in deep anguish whether or not this intended change by Diageo might change matters drastically. I really am.

Diageo is an incredibly powerful and self-serving (as one would expect of a business to at least some degree) force in the industry. With what, 25 whisk(e)y brands alone, plus a plethora of other alcohol brands from gin to champagne to beer.

The decisions they make about their business affect thousands of employees and millions of drinkers throughout the world.

But Diageo, as massive as they are, do not own every scotch distillery in Scotland. They don’t even own half of them. If Diageo ceased to exist tomorrow, would that be the end of Scotch?

That’s the question that politicians have to ask themselves, because that’s a very real issue. If Diageo can’t make business decisions (within reason) that allow it to continue to remain profitable, then many Scotch brands might cease to exist altogether. Will that ruin Scotch whisky any less than sending it overseas to be bottled? Or the closing of a few plants here and there?

It’s all very well to grandstand and rabble rouse when you’re a politician who needs to look as though he’s fighting for his constituents, but the reporting media should (and likely does) know better.

1. the volcanic heat water is subjected to
in the distilling process CHANGES its very
chemical structure. whatever the shape of
the still, when the condensate falls back
into the pot, the liquid is not the same
as when it came down the hill. try blind
tasting 5 similar water samples with any
distillate. or take any glass of water at
any distillery & put 5 different whiskies
beside it on the table. even if you’re
the ghost of MJ, i’ll bet you can’t match
the right to right more than what the odds
would be. water is just BYZ PR. but if it
puts that extra oomph in your dram, Cnoc
yourself out^

2. more & more, just about everything is now made with the most modern of machines.
what difference does it make if you locate
them in Tegucigalpa or KilMarysknockerach?
again, when the sheet hits the tongue, i’ll
bet the farm you’ll be as good at guessing
from whence as the average Chinese.

for me, ALL THAT MATTERS IS WHAT’S IN THE
BOTTLE[s]. since i can’t really escape all the words, i have to let my taste buds be the translators of last resort. if they
say it’s OK……….? significance is a
quaint dance done by coochiecoos embedded in somebody else’s brain^

I am in no position to determine whether the decision makes good business sense, clearly Diagio thinks so. The way it was handled has caused a lot of consternation and questioning about motives and methods by which decisions were made.

If it lingers and actual buying decisions are changed then it will have been because of the “how” as much as the “what” and “why”.

Sam (smsmmns), I have to agree with Tim F on this one. No one is happy about the situation, but to call it shameful??

Diageo’s decision is just a reminder that this is a business. And to survive and prosper (which we all want for the whisky industry), these kinds of decisions need to be made in difficult economic times like this.

I don’t think that the big wigs at Diageo were celebrating after they made this decision. I suspect it was the opposite.

I run a business and I think of my employees as family. I had to let someone go back in March. Did I want to do it? No! It was very painful. But for my business to survive and prosper, I had no choice.

Would you rather I kept all my employees because letting someone go would be “nasty, cruel, and shameful”? If I kept this logic up, eventually there would be no more Malt Advocate magazine, no more WhiskyFest, no more WDJK. Which would you prefer?

Diageo is in the same situation, albiet with a few more employees than I have. For them to survive (indeed for the industry to survive), these sorts of painful, difficult, business decisions must unfortunately be made.

No-one is happy about the situation, but I think your language is a little strong.

The craft/farm distilleries won’t be affected in any way in all this. They are a different breed entirely. Having recently visited the new Abhainn Dearg distillery on the Isle of Lewis you wouldn’t find anything more the opposite of a huge corporation if you tried. And whatever goes on around Diageo certainly won’t affect distilleries like that.

it is all about the sad state Scottish whisky is in.

It seems people in Scotland have by force been made aware that their national drink is not in national hands anymore. As long as the figures were right and people in the whisky industry in Scotland made a living everything was alright and nobody seemed to feel the yoke.

Last year exports of Scotch whisky jumped the 3 billion Pound barrier. Johnnie Walker alone made about 1 billion Pounds for Diageo.

And the world wants more, so much more that you can no longer bottle all that whisky the world demands in his hometown of Kilmarnock.

In the views of Diageo it is a sound decision to move to a place were you can expand the bottling of Johnnie Walker. For the people in Kilmarnock and other Scots the moving away suddenly gets mixed with nationalist Scottish issues. The reasons behind that come in parts from the current politcal setup of the (still) United Kingdom.
It could be embarrasing for the Scottish National Party (SNP) if somebody were to ask them how they see the issue of a forreign controled national drink.

National controled? Too late for that, 95% of all Scotch is not in Scottish hands anymore. There were objections to that development at its time but nobody complained loud enough.

It is hard for Kilmarnock and her inhabitants and it is hard for people working at Port Dundas. No questions about that. They are victims of their own success which is more than bitter and unfair.

That it is a money driven decision with the benefit of shareholders in view and not much else does not make it easier or better.

As to Roseisle. I do not think that Roseisle is there to make Diageo selfsufficient and independent from malts or grains from other companies. Diageo with now 28 Distilleries could use their own malts in their blends only already.

Roseisle is a danger to smaller Diageo owned malt distilleries from the moment the boom begins to die.
That is the purpose of Roseisle producing bulk malts and making smaller ineffetive distilleries redundant – in the eyes of financial managers that is.

The question if bottling of whisky can be moved away from Scotland will interest the powers of the European Community.

They stopped the exports of wine in barrels years ago and thereby caused the sherry barrel shortage in Scotland and England.

They were about to stop the export of whisky in barrels for similar reasons and had the SWA on their side then.

Not sure what the Paul Diageo lead SWA thinks of that. And I do not know what the EC thinks about exports of Scotch in bulk in tankers.

So I would say the situation is not yet decided. And if the EC steps in they could well be the ones who stop Diageo moving Scotch whisky out of Scotland when it is not already bottled.