The Friday Thing #704

Thanks for the feedback on Alchemy last week – Rory’s book saw a wee uptick in sales on Amazon, I hope.

The Friday Thing #704 continues a bit where things left off last week with Alchemy as it happens. I gave a presentation to my peers today and it was a bit of a daunting task given the presentations that had come before me. Despite my natural inclination to tell a story, I decided to take some inspiration from Rory and build on the lessons from his book. I started things off with this photograph of the 1972 Moon Shoe from Nike. 

This was my entry point in to talking about the notion that we don’t value things. We value their meaning. The shoe sold at Sotehby’s for $437,500. It was designed by Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman for the 1972 Olympic Trials and one of 12 pairs ever made and the only known unworn set. I wove in a bit of Bansky to illuminate the fact that scarcity raises the value of everything, making the point that his limited edition art prints that once sold for ￡65 now sell for tens of thousands of pounds – but only if they’re from the editioned runs of his works. Of course, you can buy a copy for $30 on Amazon should you choose.

There were a few other examples and perhaps I’ll share the full presentation here in the coming weeks, but these two lessons got me thinking about whisky. I mean, it doesn’t take a lot to get me thinking about whisky on a Friday evening but specifically, I was thinking about The Scotch Malt Whisky Society (SMWS). This membership organization was founded in Edinburgh in 1983 and is a good example of valuing things and scarcity. What’s more, stories lie at the heart of their business.

My story (or history) with SMWS goes back to 2001-ish. The Microsoft team I was a member of at that time had a number of customers in Edinburgh and our team lead had decided to organize a series of customers visits and combine this with a team building offsite. The offsite itself was held in Leith, at the home of SMWS. I remember we huddled into a small meeting room and dutifully went through the business of the day – technical updates, account reviews, planning for the year ahead – that sort of thing. When the meeting concluded, we retired to a cavernous lounge space in which the six of us were the only guests. In the corner of this large room was a small bar with a lot of green bottles and not much else.

As we settled into the plush Chesterfield sofas, a young fellow strode over and asked us what we’d like to drink. I say young fellow but at the time, I was a relatively young fellow myself and I gauged this chap was only a few years younger than me. He passed around a list of drinks that was basically comprised of whisky, whisky and whisky. It’s worth pointing out that at this tender age, I was not a fan of whisky. At all. I flipped the page over and thought to myself it’d likely be a bit rude if I asked for a beer. Thus, I scanned the menu a bit deeper and, in that moment, my fondness for whisky (of the single malt variety) was formed. You see, the society doesn’t offer whisky’s of branded distillers that you may know. There is no Glenfiddich or Balvenie or Bowmore on their list. That’s because the society was formed by a group of friends who loved whisky and had decided to club together to purchase individual casks from more than 140 malt whisky distilleries across Scotland – which they bottle and sell to members via their private members rooms. Each green bottle is given a unique, two-part numerical identifier. The first part of the number represents the originating distillery and second part the individual cask from which the bottle was taken. Thus 7.12 is twelfth cask bought from distiller number seven. The identity of the originating distillery is not made public (though over the years, these numbers have been decoded). Bottling this way means that the number of bottles available from each cask can vary – as single casks by their very nature only produce a limited amount of whisky. The result is that once cask 7.12 and it’s resulting bottles are gone – they’re gone. They will never exist again. Scarcity – check.

However, it was not scarcity that originally drew me in to the world of whisky – it was the tasting notes on the menu I was reading and the labels of the bottles as I later found out. As our waiter looked over me and awaited my order, I scanned the list looking for some refuge from this array of numbers. And there I found it – in the description of one bottle whose contents apparently tasted like “a quixotic mixture of chocolate and tobacco ash that has been ground into the leather seats of an old Jaguar car”. Sold to the whisky newbie from Liverpool.

This dram was brought back to me in a lovely crystal glass with a pipette to add drops of water and I took a sip. Honestly, it could have tasted like tree bark but at that moment, it was glorious. I’d been seduced, not by the value or even the taste but simply the meaning. I’d grown up around cars and had a vague memory of a Jaguar with leather seats so that’s what I bought in that moment – a memory.

I went on to become a member of the society and have spent many a good evening in their tasting rooms in Edinburgh and London and have built a small collection of their whisky’s. Though I now have a better sense of what I like and what I don’t in my whisky (peated…ugh), I am always seduced by the tasting notes – and now the rarity of some of the bottles.

Here are a few recent examples to alight your taste buds – even if you don’t enjoy whisky you have to admit, they sound amazing, right? 

What’s my point in all this? It’s really about telling a story – which I didn’t do in my presentation today directly, but perhaps did indirectly. Because scarcity + meaning is a magical storytelling mix that SMWS have absolutely nailed. 

Now, I’m off to pour a drink. I’ll report back next week on which cask it came from

Cheers & Happy Friday

-Steve