An old story by now, but one that deserves the attention it’s getting. A little over a week ago, Mark Reynier, the managing director of Bruichladdich, tweeted the news that the drinks multinational Remy Cointreau are on the point of purchasing the distillery.

@markreynier: Today I can confirm that we are in advanced talks with Remy Cointreau who are eager to buy the company.

This caused quite a stir on the whisky Web, because Bruichladdich has embodied the values of independence, quality and craft distillation that many aficionados so prize. They haven’t chill-filtered their whisky, they’ve never bottled at less than 46% ABV and they’ve got a wide range of special releases to the market. In short, they’d garnered quite a following for themselves.

If the sale goes through – and you wouldn’t expect them to announce the prospect unless it were a near-certainty – little Kilchoman will be the only independent Islay distillery. (A special pat on the back for you if you know which each of the others is without needing to look!) Bruichladdich’s fans will be watching closely to see whether Remy Cointreau (whose other brands include Rémy Martin, Cointreau, Piper-Heidsieck and Metaxa) preserve the quality – and the qualities – that they so value.

Stimulating debate is to be found in the comments at the Whisky Advocate Blog, Dramming and It’s just the booze dancing…

P.S. Apologies for once again indulging in my weakness for poor puns in the headline.

17 Jul This entry was written by Josh and published on July 17, 2012 at 22.09. It’s filed under Information and tagged bruichladdich, islay, kilchoman, multinationals, news, remy cointreau, scotch whisky, scotland, whisky. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.