What does a whisky brand ambassador do? Stephen Marshall tells Rrishi Raote
The first-ever filmed advertisement for a beverage was Thomas Dewar’s whisky commercial. It shows four kilted, tipsy Scotsmen dancing outside what looks like a tiny pub. They kick their feet up for a few seconds and then they fold themselves back into the pub, presumably for the next dram. The ad, which lasts less than a minute, was projected onto a building in New York’s Herald Square in 1897. Reportedly it stopped traffic, so it was pathbreaking for yet another reason.
Thomas, or Tommy, was the younger son of John Dewar, the grocer who founded the famous distillery in 1846. John bought local single malts, blended and bottled them, and sold them under his own name. He was among the first to do so. It was his sons who took the John Dewar & Sons brand global. John Jr ran the distillery, and Tommy was the roving brand ambassador who visited two dozen countries — India (Calcutta) included — to establish the name. Partly because of Tommy’s efforts, Dewar’s White Label is still the biggest-selling blended whisky in USA, though the family company is now owned by global drinks giant Bacardi.
Stephen Marshall is the whisky’s “senior global brand ambassador”. He’s a stocky, red-bearded, friendly young Scotsman who, when he’s on publicity duty, wears a kilt and sporran. Tommy’s old commercial ended with the simple legend, “Dewar’s — It’s Scotch”. Marshall admires that economy: “That was all that people needed to know. I think I miss advertising that is as simple as that.”
This is Marshall’s fourth visit to India since summer 2010. There are priority markets, and potential-for-growth markets. India is among the latter. Here he does profile-building, which includes tasting and blending sessions and music events with bands like Indian Ocean. “I do all the education for us,” he says. Even when not travelling outside Scotland, he does tastings, bartender training, “master classes” for aficionados and so on. “I have to make sure that everybody understands that we make good-quality whisky.” (He says “whisky” with a whoosh, a heavily aspirated “wh”.)
Marshall also has a good “nose”, so he sits on various whisky judging panels around the world (Dewar’s itself has won over 300 prizes). “The key thing is to ‘nose’ everything,” he says. “If you don’t smell things you don’t have a memory bank of smells.” That memory bank is what good whisky is supposed to draw upon — the smell, for example, of a warm summer day, ice-cream, trees, flowers. At the tasting in Delhi last weekend invitees were asked to sniff a range of odour elements like heather, peat, honey, citrus rind and so on, along with a handful of different single malts — and some of Dewar’s blended whiskies.
The current master blender is Stephanie J Macleod. She has to combine up to 40 Highland single malts for Dewar’s White Label and its other whiskies like the 12- and 18-year-old blends, its Signature blend, and so on. She must assure Dewar’s drinkers the same taste and “nose” year after year, batch after batch. “Blending is an art form,” says Marshall. “This is about our ego. We want our whisky to taste the same everywhere.”
After the right blend of aged malts is done, the whisky is “double-aged” — put into casks for six more months so that the flavours are properly “married”. Only Dewar’s does this. The result, says Marshall, is an exceptionally smooth whisky, which because of its mild, “honeyed” flavour (rather than the smoky peatiness of some single malts) is suited to cocktails — and thus, presumably, more attractive to youthful drinkers around the world.