News Archive

Whisky galore for Huntly winner

To win any business award in your first year of trading is quite an achievement. To pick up three, however, is downright precocious – but whisky specialist Duncan Taylor and Co Ltd has already made a habit of breaking the rules, right down to bottling and packaging some of Scotland’s rarest malts in a converted Huntly ice-cream factory.

The company won the Gold Medal for Export Achievement at the 2003 Grampian Food Forum Innovation Awards, a category sponsored for the last four years by The Export Partnership. Set up only in July last year, sales for the first six months exceeded £2 million, with over 95% going to export markets in North America, Europe and the Far East, and the hard-working team of twelve has already made its mark in the competitive international world of rare whiskies.

Managing director Euan Shand tells the remarkable story of how a small team of Aberdeenshire entrepreneurs managed to acquire a long-established New York trading company and re-locate it to Huntly…

“The story starts in the 1930s with a remarkable New York businessman, Abe Rosenberg, who, on the repeal of prohibition, proceeded to build up several commercial empires, including transforming an unknown brand called J & B into one of the world’s best-known whiskies.

Rosenberg also had a passion for fine Scotch, and in the 1960s, when it was still far from fashionable, he anticipated the coming boom in single malts by quietly buying up around 4000 casks of the finest Islays, Speysides and many others.

Legendary malts

When he died in 1994, his whisky lake, by now one of the largest private collections of rare whiskies in the world, passed into the ownership of a family trust which had no expertise in realising the value of this priceless asset.

I have worked in the whisky industry all my life, and someone gave my name to the trust’s solicitor as someone who could possibly help them dispose of the collection. I just about passed out when I saw the quality of the stocks – legendary malts like the 1967 Springbank and old Bowmores.
I contacted my co-director Alan Gordon, and we decided this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to acquire the company and its amazing portfolio. We had over a year of really hard negotiations with banks and finance houses but eventually raised the capital and acquired the company along with over £10 million of stock.”

The team had to start calling in the historic casks from bond warehouses all over Scotland back to Huntly, where the really hard work started of branding and distributing this unique product.

Various trademarks were established for different territories, including the appropriate “Peerless Collection” and “Whisky Galore”. A fulltime export manager was appointed, along with a sales office in Los Angeles to cover the huge North American market.

Scotch on the web

A bottling plant and whisky shop were established just off the Square in Huntly, along with a picture-packed and highly informative website www.dtcscotch.com (a bit like a digital “Hello Magazine”, jokes Euan).

The company decided to retain its own in-house packaging designer, a bold investment which has since paid off with two awards for presentation and an accolade from Sams of Chicago, the world’s largest stockist of single malt Scotch whisky (“the most impressive merchant bottling portfolio we have ever seen”).

It has been a heady first few months, but this is a company which has clear ideas about where it is going and what it has to do to get there. Like its products, one suspects Duncan Taylor is simply going to get better with age.

Contact: Duncan Taylor and Co Ltd
Tel: 01466 794055
Email: enquiries@dtcscotch.com
Web: www.dtcscotch.com