Having lunch with Mark Reynier, the managing director of the Bruichladdich distillery, is a far from dull affair. Even after a hectic few days in London, he crackles with energy and a constant stream of pithy soundbites tumble out between mouthfuls of crab salad and sips of white Burgundy.

A former London wine merchant, he has a clear vision of how whisky should be made and scorns the way alcohol producers have industrialised the production of wine and spirits.

“It is indisputable that the French make some of the best wines in the world. And that is because they have refined the process over centuries ­- figuring out which grape produces the best wine on which land,” he says.

“Yet when the big drink companies make whisky they think that they can import grain from Russia to be distilled in Scotland and it will not have an impact on the flavour.”

Reynier experienced a Damascene conversion to the beauty of single malt after a chance encounter with a bottle of whisky at a wine fair in the 1980s. This led to him tasting Bruichladdich for the first time and it instantly reminded him of a great wine.

He became so obsessed with Bruichladdich that he went to visit the distillery on the Hebridean island of Islay and discovered it very neglected.

This marked the beginning of a 10-year battle to buy the distillery. Every year, he wrote a letter to a series of different owners trying to buy it.

Despite a last-minute scramble to secure the £7.5m needed, he finally succeeded and bought the distillery from US group Jim Beam Brands in 2001. Bruichladdich then became one of a handful of privately owned independent distilleries in Scotland.

It takes a certain amount of self-confidence to be the lone independent whisky operator in a market dominated by drinks giants such as Diageo and Pernod-Ricard.

Bruichladdich does not have the same marketing budgets as these giants. “Diageo spends about 11 per cent of the £10bn revenue it generates every year on marketing,” says Reynier.

Even though that marketing budget is spread over a number of brands, including whisky, it is still enormous compared with a company that generated sales of £6.9m last year. Bruichladdich only spends 1.7 per cent of sales on advertising and promotion.

On the warpath

“We just do not have the money to match that size of budget. We need to get the maximum bang for our buck so I have wholeheartedly embraced the concept of guerrilla marketing,” says Reynier.

Achieving as high a profile as possible for as little outlay as possible made the company embrace the web early on. Today its site bulges with pictures, facts and figures.

One particular venture managed to yield a far higher level of publicity than anyone could have predicted.

To bolster its standing among the whisky geek community, where no detail is too mundane, Bruichladdich installed webcams around the distillery so that fans could log on to the site and watch the whole process from barley to bottle.

It turned out that it was not just the whisky aficionados watching; so too was the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), a US government agency based in Belvoir, Virginia. It is charged with protecting the US and its allies from the threat of chemical and biological weapons.

The distillery discovered the additional interest after the DTRA emailed to complain that the distillery’s webcam was out of action.

When Bruichladdich asked why the agency was interested in a distillery in a remote Scottish location, the agency said that the process of manufacturing chemical weapons and distilling whisky were very similar so it was using the Bruichladdich web site to train its operatives.

Reynier made the most of the opportunity. He released the story to the national press and then launched his own WMD: a whisky of mass distinction. “That was an example of guerrilla marketing at its best,” he says with a grin.

Rising sales

The combination of clever marketing tactics and his distillery’s passionate commitment to making the best possible product is producing results: single malt sales recently increased by 34 per cent.

There is a dichotomy to Reynier’s attitude towards technology though, as he eschews an industrial approach to making whisky, preferring to make it as it was in 1881.

One of his first investment decisions on taking over the distillery was to spend £300,000 renovating the Victorian machinery.

“I am on a crusade to make whisky the way it was made 200 years ago. That means using the original stills and using the best possible ingredients including organic barley and crops grown on Islay,” he says.

But Reynier’s obsessive attention to detail and the popularity of the brand with single malt whisky drinkers around the world have created a huge headache for the business.

“As all the other distilleries are owned by big drinks companies, the different processes involved in making and selling whisky is farmed out to different locations. Marketing might be done in Edinburgh while accounting could be done in London,” he says.

“Bruichladdich, however, is running a global distribution business off a small Scottish island.”

As a result, the company has to keep track of everything from orders for its eight varieties of barley from 24 different origins, to tracking the distillation and bottling, as well as shipping 50 different types of whisky to 25 different countries.

“We started out with some spreadsheets that became bigger and increasingly complex until they just did not work any more,” says Reynier.

Technological move

Bruichladdich has, therefore, decided to embrace the 21st century and has just invested £200,000 in an enterprise resource planning system developed for t he beverage manufacturing industry to manage the supply chain, as well as support the distillery’s planned expansion.

“The system will help us to improve efficiency and minimise duplication. Everyone in the company will be able to access it -­ from the most senior manager to the workers in the bottling plant,” he says.

It will also help the distillery to control all aspects of the business including HM Revenue & Customs reporting, distilling, maturation, bottling and distribution.

“The system is capable of managing a much larger company so we will be able to expand Bruichladdich without having to increase our headcount,” says Reynier.

The system will mean that Reynier can devote more of his time to his true love: making the best possible whisky.

Bruichladdich is not only experimenting with different types of barley grown from different locations, it also makes its whisky using four different malting techniques.
In addition, Reynier has started to make whisky from organic barley, something that his Scottish colleagues initially treated with deep scepticism.

“One suspicious Scottish sales director thought I was just a southern ponce talking about organic whisky but when he tasted it, it blew his mind,” he says with another grin.

“The best way to make the best whisky is to have as many variables as possible. With this new IT system, that is now possible without driving us all to the edge of a nervous breakdown.”

Reynier’s love for Bruichladdich seems undiminished despite the challenges of running the day-to-day business and relocating to a remote Scottish island from Sussex.

It looks as if the drinks industry should brace itself for a continued flow of steady criticism from this self-confessed malt crusader, while whisky aficionados can look forward to even more varieties of single malt.