The Quintessence

Fhairson had a son

Who married Noah's daughter,

And nearly spoilt ta flood

By trinking up ta water.

Which he would have done--

I, at least, believe it--

Had ta mixture been

Only half Glenlivet.

--Old Scotch Ballad

The heart of Great Britain's export trade is the Scotch whisky industry; last year it earned $63 million in dollar sales, more than any other single British manufacture.* The heart of the Scotch industry is Glenlivet, a potent, peat-smoky liquor which many U.S. Scotch fanciers have never heard of. Glenlivet is little known because 98 1/2% of its 220,000-gal. annual output is siphoned off by big brand-name Scotch distillers, who use it to provide tang, bouquet and flavor to their own blends. Unlike other Scotch distillers, Glenlivet's owner, 56-year-old Captain William Henry Smith Grant, a kilted, decorated veteran of two wars,/- never made a blend in his life, and neither did his distilling forebears--father, grandfather and great-grandfather. Their only product was, and still is, pure malt whisky, slowly distilled from barley in old-fashioned pot stills.

Last week Smith Grant was winding up his busiest season since the war at Glenlivet Distillery, which stands on a brae overlooking a fertile Banffshire valley in the heart of the Highlands. Black peat smoke belched from the distillery's tall chimney, and the pungent odor of fermenting barley drifted from its odd-shaped kiln towers. Glenlivet's 50 workers, completing their biggest distilling season in seven years, processed the last batches of whisky before the annual summer shutdown. In the three summer months, the tumbling mountain springs which rise 1,200 feet above the glen go dry; then Glenlivet's men use the idle time to cut the next distilling season's peat fuel from the nearby bog of Faemussach.

Old Smugglers. Glenlivet men have been cutting Faemussach peat since 1824, when Grant's great-grandfather, George Smith, took out a license for his illicit still and legalized it as The Glenlivet Distillery. This won the enmity of his Highland neighbors, who ran some 200 bootleg stills in the glen, and smuggled their spirits to the Lowlands rather than pay duty to His Majesty's revenue officers. Highland hijackers waylaid Glenlivet's pony trains as they packed legal whisky over the craggy hills to Perth and Edinburgh. George Smith, a brace of loaded pistols strapped to his waist, protected the trains in person. By 1871, Glenlivet was the only still in the glen.

New Methods. Glenlivet was nearly done in by mass production. When Aeneas Coffey perfected a still which could mass-produce whisky from grain, giant distilling combines sprang up, added fine malt whisky to grain-distilled spirits; in 1909 they defeated the efforts of Glenlivet and other malt distillers to prevent them from using the name "Scotch" for such blends. Glenlivet and a handful of other malt distillers all but gave up the consumer market, became makers of whiskymakers' whiskies. Today, in the 16 bonded warehouses adjoining the distillery, there are more than 1,200,000 gallons of maturing Glenlivet, mostly in casks belonging to practically every brand-name maker of Scotch.

For the delight of a few well-heeled connoisseurs, Glenlivet bottles about 3,000 cases of pure malt liquor a year, ships 90% of it to the U.S., where it sells for $10.39 a bottle, including taxes and duties. Glenlivet's Smith Grant has never advertised in the U.S., thinks that U.S. drinking habits are against a big market for his whisky. Like most Scotsmen, who say that straight Glenlivet "goes down singing hymns," he is horrified at the U.S. custom of drowning Scotch in water or soda, gulping it down iced.

. . .

In the U.S., the whisky market is now glutted: warehouses hold 900 million gals. of whisky, 80% more than ten years ago. Reason: many customers are buying less, or shifting to lighter drinks, because of stiff federal taxes on spirits, boosted last year from $9 a gal. to $10.50. At retail the price is still higher because venders add their normal markup (average 22%) to the tax itself* While the Big Four distillers (Schenley, National, Seagram's and Hiram Walker) insist that they will maintain prices, smaller distillers have already begun to cut prices of straight whiskies. Sample: United Distillers has slashed its J. W. Dant bottled-in-bond sour-mash bourbon by 90-c- a fifth, to $4.49.

*Woolens, the runner-up, produced only $35 million; autos $34 million.

/- Twice wounded in World War I with the Gordon Highlanders, he won the Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry; in World War II was a navy lieutenant commander.

*The worst victim of the tax grab is, ironically, the U.S. Treasury. In the first five months since the tax went into effect in November 1951, sales slipped so badly that the Treasury's total revenue from whisky taxes went off 21.4%, in spite of the higher rates.

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