Bruichladdich wanted to sell Scotch without resorting to “tartan and bagpipes” clichés. Photograph by Grant Cornett

One day in 1989, a man on a bicycle arrived at the gates of a whisky distillery called Bruichladdich. The distillery sits across the road from the North Atlantic Ocean, on a wild and blustery Scottish island called Islay. The man was Mark Reynier, a third-generation wine dealer from London, who was on vacation with his brother. Their primary objective would have been clear to any passing driver: each bicycle had, strapped to its handlebars, a bundle of golf clubs. At the distillery, Reynier was hoping to achieve his secondary objective. He had grown obsessed with Bruichladdich whisky, an unheralded product known, to those who knew about it, for its unusual delicacy and complexity. He says, “It had the elegance, balance, finesse, harmony—everything I’d been brought up to look for in a great wine, and there it was in a spirit.” In his London wine shops, Reynier persuaded customers to take a chance on a distillery whose name they probably didn’t recognize, and surely couldn’t pronounce. (The locals say, more or less, “Brook-laddy.” Also, “Eye-lah.”)

Reynier was hoping to have a vineyardesque experience: a friendly proprietor, an extended tour, plenty of opportunities for firsthand research. Instead, he was greeted by a padlocked gate, a welter of hazardous-chemicals warnings, and a sign with a brusque message: “PLANT CLOSED. NO VISITORS.” He saw a worker in the courtyard and made his plea. “Look,” he said. “I’m your best customer, I’ve come from London—I’ve come all this way, and I’d love to have a look around.”

The worker’s response was even brusquer than the sign: “Fuck off.”

Reynier understood his mistake: he wasn’t a guest at a vineyard; he was a trespasser at a factory. He went back to London, and set about getting rid of his last bottles of Bruichladdich. “The illusion was gone,” he says.

Unable to visit Bruichladdich—unable, anymore, even to enjoy its whisky—Reynier devised a modest plan to save his favorite spirit: he would buy the distillery. Every year, he wrote to the parent company, and every year he was told that it wasn’t for sale. In 1994, the distillery was shut down—the industry term is “mothballed”—but the answer didn’t change until 2000. By then, Bruichladdich belonged to Jim Beam Brands, which was willing to violate the Scottish taboo against inviting outsiders into the whisky business. Reynier put together fifty investors, who paid six and a half million pounds for a remote distillery that was almost defunct. On December 19, 2000, Reynier became the chief executive officer.

Having finally penetrated the industry, Reynier embraced the role of gadfly. “The whisky industry, being Scottish, is desperately serious—up its own backside,” he says. The new Bruichladdich was cheeky, and it often promoted itself by disparaging the competition—for instance, lampooning the cartoonish imagery that whisky companies often use to make their Scotch seem Scottish. “No massive publicity budget expounding on the ‘tartan and bagpipes,’ ” the company promised. “No faux heritage or ‘where the eagle soars,’ ‘monarch of the glen’ bollocks.”

Scotland is the undisputed whisky capital of the world, producing nearly two-thirds of the global supply, and Islay is the highly disputed capital of Scottish whisky. The island has thirty-five hundred residents and eight working distilleries; there is surely no place that produces more great whisky per capita, and possibly no place that produces more great whisky, full stop. To rebuild Bruichladdich, Reynier recruited a native Ileach: Jim McEwan, a whisky celebrity who had spent his career at Bowmore, a venerable distillery that faces Bruichladdich from across a coastal inlet. Bowmore makes whisky that bears smoky traces of burning peat, which was once Islay’s main fuel source and is now the signature flavor of Islay whisky. The island’s best-known distillery is probably Laphroaig, whose flagship dram is pungently smoky and startlingly medicinal, with a flavor that is sometimes compared to TCP, a European antiseptic. In reasonable doses and proper circumstances, Laphroaig can be delicious, but its popularity is a mixed blessing for the industry, because whisky neophytes who try Laphroaig and hate it may never return.

Bruichladdich is nearly smoke-free, which is a big reason that Reynier fell for it. “Coming from a wine background, peat is an alien flavor,” he says. As far as anyone can tell, the distillery stopped peating its whisky in the nineteen-sixties, in an effort to expand into peat-averse territories like America. Unlike Reynier, McEwan loves peat, but he also loved the challenge of changing Bruichladdich’s reputation. “Bruichladdich was the most misunderstood distillery on Islay,” he says. “It was regarded as some kind of outcast distillery: you’re not a true Islay, you’re not making peated whisky.” McEwan had worked for Bowmore for thirty-eight years, which meant that he was two years away from retirement, and a comfortable pension. He saw his decision to come to Bruichladdich as an act of conscience. “It’s like the story of the Good Samaritan,” McEwan says. “The guy’s lying in the ditch, and everybody walks past him. But he’s still alive.”

By the time Reynier and McEwan were able to inspect the premises, in early 2001, the distillery had been mothballed for seven years. Even if all the old machinery coöperated, the spirit they made would need time to mature in wooden casks: the standard minimum age for a fine Scottish whisky is ten years. A revivified and independent Bruichladdich would have a new version of its ten-year-old whisky sometime in 2011—but only if it survived that long. And it might not have, if Reynier and McEwan hadn’t figured out something to sell in the meantime.

Although Islay is devoted to Scotch, the island has a complicated relationship to Scotland. Islay was settled by the Gaels and then the Norse, who ceded the “islands of the Sodors”—now known as the Hebrides—to Scotland only as recently as 1266. Even then, Islay still wasn’t quite Scottish: it became the seat of the Lordship of the Isles, a semi-autonomous archipelago that was reabsorbed into Scotland in the fifteenth century. Officially, there is a Lord of the Isles today, but he doesn’t seem likely to cause much trouble: his name is Charles, and his mother is the Queen.

Islay is one of the southernmost Scottish islands: it sits about twenty miles from Ireland, whence the practice of distilling malted barley may have spread. (The word “whisky” comes from the Gaelic uisge, which means “water”; in Scotland, unlike most other places, it is spelled without an “e.”) For modern distillers, Islay’s inaccessibility may seem like a drawback, but for their eighteenth-century ancestors it was an advantage. According to local lore, tax collectors from the mainland were easily spotted, and easily repelled. In 1794, a minister named Archibald Robertson wrote, “We have not an excise officer in the whole island. The quantity therefore of whisky made here is very great; and the evil, that follows drinking to excess of this liquor, is very visible.”

Eventually, Islay’s distillers were forced to pay tax, and whisky became a key export, produced more for mainlanders than for locals. But the island’s isolation helped the industry in a different way. With the rise of railroads, in the nineteenth century, most distillers found it cheaper to power their plants with coal; Islay stuck with peat, which is how the local whisky developed its reputation for smokiness, as well as for excellence. According to a report from 1863, Glasgow taverns often divided their whisky into four categories of ascending quality, priced accordingly: “middling,” “good,” “Islay,” and “undiluted Islay.”