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Saturday, 02/Feb/2008
Mark Reynier Interview on BBC 4
As briefly mentioned yesterday Mark Reynier of Bruichladdich distillery on Islay was on Fi Glover's Saturday Live this morning. To listen to Mark talking about how he got into whisky, Bruichladdich, Islay and running a business on a remote Hebridean island again go to the Saturday Live 02/Feb/2008 page and click on the ‘Listen to this programme in full’ link, Mark's part begins at approx 35 min into the programme.
Here's my attempt at a quick & dirty as well as completely unauthorised transcript while listening to it again:
- Introduction by Fi: Our next guest, Mark Reynier, owes his career to a bottle of whisky. A chance encounter with a prize draw at a wine fair in London in 1984 led him to decamp to a remote Scottish island, stare financial ruin in the face, miss the birth of a child and take his life in a direction he didn't really foresee. Mark is now the very successful owner of the Bruichladdich whisky distillery on the Hebridean island of Islay. He flew into our Glasgow studio yesterday, I think in a force 10 gale to tell us just what happened at that wine fair.
- Mark: I was walking down an aisle between the different stands and I felt a tap on my shoulder and I span round and there was a big hairy Scotsman. He asked me if I wanted to win a bottle of whisky that was worth a 1000 pounds. He said all you have to do is to put your visiting card in a hat and it's a lucky draw and whoever wins, wins the bottle. At the time I didn't have a visiting card, so he said take mine and cross out my name, he crossed his name out and put my name on it and put it in the hat and I thought nothing more of it. That was it.
- Fi: But presumably you ended up being the winner?
- Mark: Yes, he called me up a couple of days later and he said, actually, you know you've won this prize, you better come and collect it.
- Fi: And that's where the plot thickened, you were kind of embraced into the world of whisky
- Mark: Well, you can put it that way, yes. I turned up at this Dickensian little office above the shop he had there in Soho. He said, right, now here's the bottle worth a 1000 pounds and on the table he had these little sort of sample bottles of different whiskies from different distillieries, and he said, since you're here you should try some of these. So out of politeness I tasted these samples and one of them just struck me like being exactly like a wine. It was one of these dramatic moments in your life where the clouds part and a huge thunderclap comes and you think it's an epiphany moment.
- Fi: And what was the whisky you were tasting?
- Mark: It was a completely unpronouncable whisky called Bruichladdich, what the French Breuschladdisch (?). It just sort of struck me that here was something that had all the sophistication and complexity and elegance and harmony of a great wine which is what I had been taught to appreciate ever since I was a young boy.
- Fi: Did you really leave the shop that day, you know, unable to think about anything else apart from the taste of this remarkable whisky?
- Mark: I promise you, yes, that's exactly how it was. I thought, I have discovered something that nobody else knows anything about and I started retailing it in London with great success and great interest from everybody.
- Fi: When did you first decide that you wanted more than just selling a couple of bottles?
- Mark: Well, when you work in the fine wine trade you need to know who made it and where it was made and what their philosophy was, what their beliefs are so that you can understand what makes this different from that. So I decided I ought to visit the place, a Hebridean island called Islay, 70 miles due west of Glasgow as the crow flies, but to drive it's 2.5 hours and then a 2 hour ferry journey
- Fi: So you went on a pretext of a golfing holiday...
- Mark: Well, that seemed like a good idea, to go and visit it with my brother. The idea was we play golf on all the island golf courses on the west coast of Scotland and so we hired some bicycles and decided to take 4 golf clubs each strapped to the crossbar and headed up the west coast playing golf.
- Fi: When you got to Islay though, had you had a rather romantic vision in your head of what this distillery would actually be like that was creating your magical tipple?
- Mark: Well yes, because the elegance of the whisky from my wine background made me think of, you know, a fantastic Burgundy estate or a great Bordeaux chateau where you would be welcomed into the heart of this place. But what I found was something completely different.
- Fi: Right, what was it?
- Mark: I turned up at the gates and it was all rusted and corroded and on it was a sign, that said ‘Plant closed, no visitors!’ I thought, well, I've come all this way, I pedaled all the way around to this place, I got to see what this place is about. So I rattled the gates, I saw a man crossing the courtyard in the distance, he came over and he said, what do you want? And I asked, you know actually I'm really fond of your whisky, I sell a lot of it in London, I haven't booked but can you let me in just to have a look around and the guys said, well, I can't say that on the BBC, to go away in that usual Anglo-Saxon expletive.
- Fi: Oh dear...
- Mark: So I thought, well, if it's closed, I ought to try and buy it. So I wrote to the owners, I can't help but noticing that you're not producing anything there and if you ever want to sell it would you please sell it to me? I duly got back a reply saying, thanks, but no, we're not going to sell it and certainly not to you.
- Fi: Would it be fair to say that this turned into something of a family joke, didn't you in effect wrote that same letter again and again?
- Mark: I'm not sure if it's a family joke, but it became an obsession, yes.
- Fi: How many years did you write to them?
- Mark: 10 years, each year to whoever owned the distillery.
- Fi: When did you finally get a letter with a response, yes, OK, go ahead, you can buy it?
- Mark: January 2000
- Fi: Had you seriously thought, gosh, what would happen if they did write back or phone me and say, yeah, ok, we'll sell it to you?
- Mark: No, no, no.
- Fi: So you didn't have a plan?
- Mark: No, not at all, I never expected it to happen.
- Fi: But had you shared this pipe dream with your wife and other members of your family?
- Mark: No
- Fi: What was the conversation like with your wife, when you said, you know, that this distillery can be mine/ours, why don't we go for it?
- Mark: Well, unfortunately that actually didn't happen until after I'd bought it.
- Fi: You didn't tell your wife until after you'd bought it?
- Mark: No
- Fi: How much money did you need to raise?
- Mark: 7.5 million pounds
- Fi: Do you have extremely rich friends? I mean, could you just ring round and ask for it?
- Mark (laughing): I have one or two, so yeah, I wrote to them, and I wrote to all the landlords on Islay and to these guys credit they rallied around and said, yeah, well ok, I'll do a bit of that.
- Fi: Talk us through what happened on the day of the deal, Mark, and this extraordinary situation you found yourself in at about quarter to mid day...
- Mark: The deal was very simple, it was put to me by these guys if the money is not here by mid day on Friday the 19th of December the deal's off. The money had been sent from these various private investors but it just hadn't arrived. You know, sort of lost in cyberspace. As the clock ticked down I was going to end up in the humiliating position of having to call up the guys and having to say, I'm really sorry but I've led you on this dance and I can't deliver. I don't mind saying, I was almost in tears, I was absolutely trembling.
- Fi: So what eventually happened, I mean, did the phone go at one minute to mid day?
- Mark: 5 to 12 my solicitor picks up the phone in the middle and he says, we call the cash desk one more time and they said, we're really sorry, but there's no money, it hasn't come in. So he put the phone down and just as he was putting the phone down the girl said, hold on a second, some money has come in but it's not the whole amount it's just some has come in. I needed 4 million pounds there, you know, of equity, and she said, no, no, no the total is only 3 million, and I oh, and then she said, oh no, I've got it wrong, and she typed it out again and she said the total is 4 million and I just jumped up, yeah, and I jigged round this room going Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!
- Fi: Mark, I don't want to sound like I'm labouring the point, but where was your wife at this moment?
- Mark: She was in hospital, expecting a baby and R was born half an hour later.
- Fi: Seriously, do you ever regret not having been there at the birth of your child?
- Mark: Well, the thing was that he's like our mascot, because he's like a physical embodiment of our whole project.
- Fi: How much had you actually thought about how much your life would change if you moved to Islay and actually, you know, lived the distillery life?
- Mark: I know it sounds silly, but I never really thought that was going to happen and then there was this time where I thought, crumbs, I have to go there. And when you suddenly buy that ferry ticket and the girl at the counter says, when are you coming back, and you say, well, I'm not, it's one way. And you think, you know, what am I doing?
- Fi: When you first became the owner of the distillery, was there an awful lot of work that needed doing to it?
- Mark: Being on the Atlantic, salt, corrosion are a big problem. It is all big old-fashioned Victorian engineering and because it's like that we can repair it, renovate it and that's what we did, we spent 6 months, we basically dismantled everything, unbolted everything, cleaned it all up and put it back together again. And that means we can run this distillery entirely self-sufficiently without having to worry about microchips or anything.
- Fi: Do you ever think about where you would now be if you hadn't put your visiting card, not even yours, into that pot at the wine fair in the 1980s?
- Mark: I have no idea, I honestly don't. You know, it's an extraordinary thing to suddenly move and live on a Hebridean island, I'm not there to retire, I have a job to do. And I have the most beautiful commute in the world, nine miles along the Atlantic ocean every morning with my son, taking him to school, and you think, this certainly beats the hell out of taking the 7:45 from Haywards Heath to Victoria.
- Fi: What would you have done if the business had failed, Mark, are you the type of person who would have almost embraced that, moved on, found another challenge?
- Mark: I don't know, I think I would have taken it very seriously, but yes, if it had all failed, and yes, it almost failed and we needed to get back and needed to get more money from our shareholders, not once but twice. Had it failed, I would have been distraught. The thing about this story is that anybody can do it, can run a business from a Hebridean island, a serious business that employs 50 people and make money without having all sorts of grants and subsidies, you can do it if you have a good idea, you have good people with you to do it, you can do it, if you believe in it.
- Fi: Mark Reynier talking about his experiences running his distillery on the island of Islay
Very good interview I think, Fi seemed to be well prepared and Mark in good form despite a rough flight. Nothing really new about how he bought the distillery, but I quite like how it is told again. Some Londoners might disagree, but I think a lot of commuters would love to say this: ‘And I have the most beautiful commute in the world, nine miles along the Atlantic ocean every morning with my son, taking him to school, and you think, this certainly beats the hell out of taking the 7:45 from Haywards Heath to Victoria.’
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