Sweet like Wine: Love Your Dimples Even More-Chapter 69 - 43: The Mysterious Asian Woman

The popularity of single malt is a phenomenon of recent decades. In the traditional sense, Scotland whisky is a blended whisky that combines malt and grains.

This is what Westwood Fairmont believes truly tests a brewer’s blending and bottling skills with Scotland whisky.

Westwood disdains associating with those who disregard the tradition of Scotland whisky for market demands.

Based on this philosophy, when most of the distilleries in Scotland chose to launch single malt whisky to meet market needs and maintain operations, Brunschwig Distillery chose to honor and persist with tradition.

As a result, not a single cask was sold for three years.

If the whiskey market hadn’t been pressured by vodka.

Westwood’s perseverance would also be beyond doubt.

After all, each to their own taste. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

But the wheels of time never give people the option of "if."

The trend of single malt whisky did not vanish as quickly as Westwood anticipated.

The Brunschwig Family persisted for three years, not only failing to witness the market abandonment of single malt whisky trends, but also dragging the distillery to the brink of cessation, on the verge of complete collapse.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, marketing and advertising had already become synonymous with whiskey sales.

Traditional distilleries unable to withstand the wave of closures were almost all acquired by those renowned whiskey brands that focused on marketing.

Being taken over by a big brand, while receiving a substantial "transfer fee," meant the disappearance of one’s own distillery, reduced to an unknown element in a blend of marketing-oriented whiskey, losing the family’s history and legacy.

The Brunschwig Family, with five centuries of brewing history, naturally refused to accept the fate of their family’s brand vanishing.

In the struggle against being acquired, Westwood finally bowed his proud head that had remained aloft for decades, deciding to "sell off" all the stored malt whiskey from their family warehouse to secure enough liquidity to maintain the distillery’s operations.

When other distilleries were offloading at low prices, Brunschwig Distillery did not follow suit.

Now that other distilleries have survived and are about to see the dawn.

Brunschwig Distillery at this time comes out with a major clearance sale.

This egregiously breaches industry norms, angering other members of the Scotland Whisky Association.

Westwood’s desperate and reckless actions eventually led to being expelled from the Scotland Whisky Association.

Reasonably, how a brewer sells their distilled spirits, at whatever price, should be a matter of the brewer’s freedom.

As long as both the buyer and seller agree, it’s permissible.

But reality is far from being as straightforward as "in reason."

The original purpose of establishing the Scotland Whisky Association was to resist price cuts.

Since the turmoil of the whiskey market in the 1970s and 1980s, the association gradually gained regulatory control over Scotland whisky prices.

The Scotland Whisky Association operates as an extremely successful trade group, somewhat akin to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries coordinates and unifies member countries’ petroleum policies, maintaining price stability.

The Scotland Whisky Association conducts similar regulatory practices for Scotland-produced whisky, issuing a minimum price annually.

Any member distillery’s sell-off could potentially cause price fluctuations in that year’s Scotland whisky market.

This minimum price exists to prevent any member from "selling off," which is the very foundation of the association’s existence.

This is just like the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, where there are annual quotas, neither producing too much nor too little, deciding what output maximizes member countries’ interests.

The conflict between Westwood and the Scotland Whisky Association thirty-seven years ago was no secret.

Openly selling off, openly being expelled.

The struggle, which began flamboyantly, abruptly ended in the massacre of Westwood Brunswick’s family of nine.

The family’s last master of brewing and his heirs all perished, and Brunschwig Distillery, without even starting its final struggle, collapsed alongside the family’s centuries-old brewing legacy.

Just last month, Hieronymus Brunswick, who left ten thousand bottles of whiskey to Summer Fairmont, passed away. He was Westwood’s brother.

The only survivor of the family massacre.

Hieronymus was born with severe disabilities and never brewed even a single bottle of whiskey himself.

Even if he had the desire, his condition did not allow him to engage in the physical work related to brewing.

What happened thirty-seven years ago wasn’t kept a secret; it was merely forgotten over time.

Hieronymus didn’t want the efforts of the Brunschwig Family across centuries to come to naught, yet he couldn’t find a "successor" with brewing talent willing to assist him.

Beyond the inability to continue after the distillery’s collapse, more importantly, he lacked the ability to brew Brunschwig Whiskey himself, and he had no one he could trust.

Unable to accept the devastating reality of his brother’s family being wiped out.

Unable to change the fact of the distillery’s collapse.

Hieronymus spent eighteen years guarding the halted Brunschwig Distillery, stagnant and drifting through life.

Until the arrival of a mysterious woman from Asia, gifted in brewing, yet of unknown origin.