Unpacking the suffixal ‘Glenlivet’

The following extract is from the autobiography of Elizabeth Grant (1797–1885) and refers to King George IV’s visit to Scotland in 1822. It’s touted by many – not least The Glenlivet distillery – as demonstrating the quality of The Glenlivet’s spirit, even back in the early days of the whisky industry: “[He] was looking everywhere for pure Glenlivet whisky; the King drank nothing else. It was not to be had out the Highlands.”

There’s just one catch: The Glenlivet distillery, or what would become it, didn’t exist until 1824. Even then, it would have been known as farmer George Smith’s distillery at Drumin. Located in the eastern Highlands, just south of the confluence of the Livet and the Avon, which is itself a major tributary of the nearby River Spey, his distillery was in the heart of Glenlivet country.

At the time, ‘Glenlivet’ – named after the glen of the river Livet – was not just a geographical term, but referred broadly to the pot-still whisky made in hundreds of illicit small stills across the Highlands around the Spey. This Glenlivet was systematically smuggled to thirsty and appreciative customers down south, who included the English aristocracy. 

So we have ‘Glenlivet’ as a distillery name – or not – and ‘Glenlivet’ as a synonym for a certain kind of whisky. Add that many distilleries’ names were, until recently, double-barrelled with ‘Glenlivet’ – such as Macallan-Glenlivet and Aberlour-Glenlivet – and we have a semantic puzzle on our hands: What’s up with the term ‘Glenlivet’?

Other than on The Glenlivet’s own expressions, you don’t regularly see the name ‘Glenlivet’ on bottles today. It is, however, commonly found on independent bottlings of Speyside whiskies by Cadenhead’s, as well as on a few continental independent bottlings.

In labelling a distillery with the suffix Glenlivet, e.g. Linkwood-Glenlivet or the examples above, Cadenhead’s are using outdated naming conventions which hark back to the whisky world of yore. Most of the 30-odd distilleries that once used such a moniker no longer do, having dropped the suffix in the last few decades of the 20th century in favour of building a brand around a simpler, ideally unique identity. Regardless, a few distilleries, such as Tomintoul and Glen Moray, are still officially registered with ‘Glenlivet’ attached to their names.

But how did these distilleries get permission to use the name Glenlivet in the first place – and how should we understand the term in the context of the history of the Scotch trade?

Let’s go back to the 18th century. The over-generalised historical, cultural, political and linguistic divide  between the Highlands and the Lowlands was reflected in early whisky-making too. In brief, the more anglicised Lowlands were connected to the legal English market, catering to it with often lower-quality spirit produced at the maximum possible volume and using the latest technical innovations. 

The Highlands, meanwhile, where Gaelic was still spoken and bartering favoured over currency, were home to a plethora of home-scale farm distilleries. For a long time, the British Government didn’t bother trying to control these too much. Their policy, created through strategic taxation, meant that, while Highland distillers paid lower duties than their southern fellows, they were not legally allowed to sell beyond the Highland Line. Then, a 1785 amendment which restricted sales of a whisky to the parish in which it was made. Effectively, the idea was that Highland distillers would distil for home consumption – as a result, it was clearly very difficult for them to legally turn a profit.

Unsurprisingly, this attempt to keep the Highlands’ micro-provenance, direct-fired, hand-malted, craft-distilled, local-peat single malt under a bushel didn’t work. A smuggling trade across the Highland Line soon flourished, especially from the area around the Spey, where the routes were good. You could write many articles about the political dimension to all this; I will weasel out of it by quoting a 1881 article from the Dundee Courier.

They reported: “The smuggling of whisky was considered to be quite an honest and gentlemanly business, and the people being Jacobites to a man, they, of course, thought it all right and proper to despoil the Government.”

We must not imagine, however, this phenomenon was never spoken of in polite society. On the contrary, many were quite open in their praise of smuggled Highland malt. MP’s daughter Elizabeth Grant described the whisky to which she acted as “cellarer” and having “the true contraband goût” – more tasting menu than bothy booze. A 1799 House Of Commons report into distilleries in Scotland confirmed “that the spirits distilled in the Highlands have a pleasanter flavour, at least, if not also a more wholesome quality, than those usually made in the Lowlands. This has been corroborated by the opinion of a member of the committee… theoretically and practically conversant with the art.”

It was the parliamentary Wash Act or Excise Act of 1823 that changed things. The duty on spirits was reduced, and a universal £10 licence fee for distilling was introduced. This was unpopular with the Highland distillers, as it removed the incentives for fraud, and also angered the Lowland distillers, as they thought the Highland distillers were being given unfair advantages in entering their market. Nevertheless, whisky history was irrevocably altered and the Highlanders were on the path to the straight and narrow.

In 1824, illicit distiller and farmer George Smith of Upper Drumin by the Livet was first to take out a licence under the new Act. This was no coincidence as his ultra-Tory landlord was the Duke of Richmond and Gordon, who noticed that some of the finest Highland whisky was being produced on his estate and proposed to the government that they finally make this underground industry profitable.

Unsurprisingly, Smith’s move fell foul of his many clandestinely distilling neighbours. He received death threats, and is said to have carried arms for the rest of his life. These were kindly provided by the Duke. However, Smith’s Glenlivet became very popular, and the same distillers who turned on poor George Smith soon wanted a slice of the action. Many followed suit in acquiring licences and began to style themselves and their product as ‘Glenlivet’. They were thereby cashing in on both Smith’s whisky’s popularity and the storied history of the smuggled whisky everyone knew as Glenlivet.

George Smith’s business expanded rapidly and after fire damaged his Drumin distillery, the operation moved down the hill to Minmore in 1859 and a specially-built larger farm distillery. Only in the following years did he change the name of Minmore to Glenlivet – though he did not live to see the battle for that name play out. 

Understandably, the Smith family was getting a bit annoyed that the same distillers who had been sending them death threats were now, it seemed, capitalising on their fame. Finally, after George Smith’s death in 1871, his son and business partner John Gordon took the issue to court. In the resulting test case of 1880, it was ruled that only the Smiths would be allowed to use ‘The Glenlivet’ as distillery name – the definite article is key here – but the other distilleries could attach the name to their own as a suffix.

At this point, I feel my research can dispel some frequent misconceptions: those who started using the Glenlivet name were not explicitly copying a great business idea of George Smith’s, and he did not invent the idea of ‘The Glenlivet’.

Many sources attest to the use of ‘Glenlivet’ as a catch-all for bootleg Highland whisky. Thus, in a 1822 sketch in the Dundee Advertiser, an exciseman searches in vain for hidden “ankers” of Glenlivet. Meanwhile, a popular early 19th-century song sung to the Farewell To Whisky air, which is still played by folk musicians, praises “guid auld Highland whisky” and “guid Glenlivet whisky”, seemingly using the terms interchangeably and making clear the stuff was available across Scotland. “Nae dose o’ drugs is half sae guid… It does for physic, drink, and fuid,” apparently.

In this respect, nothing changed after the Wash Act of 1823. Newspaper advertisements in the Caledonian Mercury in the mid-to late 1820s promote Edinburgh merchants’ offerings of “Old Malt, Highland and Glenlivet” whisky. The first cocktail book, Jerry Thomas’s Bar-Tender’s Guide of 1862, calls for “whiskey, which should be Glenlivet or Islay, of the best quality” in its Scotch Whiskey Punch. In the 1881 satirical novel Mr Brown’s Journey, “Glenlivet” is offered as a type of drink, like “lime juice” and “Amontillado”.

Smith’s distillery wasn’t even the first to be assigned the name Glenlivet. Just across the river at Aucherachan, Captain William Grant reopened the late 18th-century Glenlivat [sic] distillery within a few years of the 1823 Act. By the mid-century, Grant’s and Smith’s were the only distilleries left in the Livet valley. 

However, Glenlivat Distillery at Aucherachan (today styled as Auchorachan) closed in 1852, clearing the way for the test case just under three decades later.

While the Smiths may have won the right to that definite article, in other ways, they lost their case. From 1880 onwards, Glenlivet was practically enshrined as a whisky category. On closer inspection, they didn’t even really win the definite article. In the mid-20th century, many distilleries attempting to define their brand separately from their blending history or their ongoing blending operations adopted this “derivative flourish” – Michael Jackson’s fitting words, not mine. And this flourish has stuck: from The Macallan to The Balvenie, we can no longer be in any doubt that everyone is the authentic version of themselves.

But where was I? For the purposes of the contemporary whisky consumer, ‘Glenlivet’ is, broadly construed, the historical precursor to the modern term ‘Speyside’. “If Speyside is to be compared with Cognac, the appellation Glenlivet corresponds to Grande Champagne,” wrote Jackson in his first World Guide to Whisky in 1987

Clearly, as distillers have clung to the term ‘Glenlivet’ over the centuries, its significance has morphed. When The Glenallachie was founded in 1967, it too adopted the name Glenlivet. This was presumably not trying to hark back to a non-existent smuggling heritage, but rather aiming to assert its belonging to an esteemed region, as well as appeal to the consumer accustomed to a shelf of other ‘Glenlivets’.

The distinction between style and geography with which we are dealing, while crucial, has often been muddled. In the early and mid-19th century, only a few licensed distilleries were actually in or near the location of Glenlivet, but many others wished to align themselves with the style associated with the area. George Smith’s descendants, meanwhile, wanted to take geographical ownership of a word that, in common parlance, actually referred to a product style – slowly distilled illicit pot-still whisky.

Style and geography in whisky are still rather ambiguously intertwined. Think of how Ardmore doesn’t fit the Speyside template, or how most Bruichladdich bottles aren’t Islay smoke bombs. It’s worth emphasising that although in terms of terminology, ‘Glenlivet’ became ‘Speyside’, the original small-batch Highland whisky was not like your average Speyside dram today – quite the opposite. Firstly, it would all have been peated, if only incidentally as peat was the only fuel to which the Highlanders had ready access, and its earthy smell would have suffused every part of their rural lives. Their whisky would have been what we’d now call new-make; wood-ageing only came later with the expansion of the legal whisky trade and in tandem with the increase in sherry imports driven by phylloxera’s decimation of France’s vineyards from the 1860s.

It was this attack of phylloxera that led London journalist Alfred Barnard to be sent on a mission to visit and write about every whisky distillery in Scotland, as well as a few in Ireland and England. Much of the English elite, which still drank mostly wine-based spirits such as Cognac from France, now needed to be sold the rough Highland dram. 

The invaluable 1887 book that resulted from Barnard’s three years of travel, The Whisky Distilleries Of The United Kingdom, draws the distinction between “Old Still Malt” and “Highland Malt” – both made at a Glasgow distillery – the former being made with unpeated barley, the latter with peated. However, we also see Barnard using “pure Highland malt” as a regional category of whisky, which incorporated the modern Highland and Speyside regions. He does not use “Glenlivet” in this way. Rather, he distinguishes between “pure Campbeltown malt”, “pure Islay malt”, “pure Lowland malt” and “pure Highland malt” – the most common by far, followed by Campbeltown. Again, “Highland” can be read as a geographical term, but also retains the connotation of distillation and peat-kilning. “Pure malt” likely denotes the use of 100% barley.

In fact, actual Highland whisky was moving away from a very peated style in the 19th century. Not, as we have seen, that such a style had been intended in the first place. The advent of the railway in the late 1820s, which penetrated Speyside early on, brought new fuel sources to the region. Highland distillers were therefore increasingly able to cater to the English desire for a brandy-like product. Rather presciently, Elizabeth’s Grant’s diary entry describes her whisky as “long in wood” and therefore “mild as milk”. An early Speyside sherry-bomb?

The literary conventions of whisky are myriad and often nebulous. Having started my own whisky journey not that long ago, I’m still enjoying getting to grips with it all. ‘Glenlivet’, like so much whisky speak, represents the aspiration towards authenticity – whether or not that authenticity is real. When George IV, visiting Scotland as the first reigning monarch to do so in over two centuries, requested some Glenlivet, he was after the real deal, hot off the secret Highland stills, even as his excisemen were paid to shut them down. A detail often skipped over in the accounts of the king’s Glenlivet boozing is that, rather than dramming in the bothy, he had his whisky delivered to him at Holyrood. When all those Highland distilleries started calling themselves Glenlivets from the 1820s onwards, they were fitting themselves into a narrative of quality but licit distilling that was essentially decreed from on high, and creating a newly above-board brand, ‘Glenlivet’.

In the late 1880s, Barnard wrote: “If we have indulged too freely in the reminiscences of our trip to Glenlivet, it must not be ascribed to the potency of its whisky, but to the delight of being away, if every such a little while, from cities and the busy haunts of men.” He was romanticising Glenlivet even then. Now, when Cadenhead’s affix the word to distillery names on their independent bottlings, they too are romanticising, selling a ‘ye olde’ feel. Robert Burns – himself a sometime exciseman – would be proud.

My thanks to Wally Macaulay for sharing some photos of his collection.

¹ Image credit

² Image Credit