Think of the Scottish Borders and you tend to conjure up images of Sir Walter Scott, Common Riding ceremonies and tweed mills. What you don’t think of is whisky distillation. That is hardly surprising, since, until March 2018, the last whisky was made in the region back in 1837.
Now, however, The Borders Distillery in Hawick has reached a major milestone. After eight years of operation, it has released its first single malt.
Overseeing this significant event is managing director Giancarlo Bianchi, who arrived in the Borders earlier this year after roles as executive director of sales and marketing at Penderyn Distillery in Wales, and then as sales director for Edinburgh’s Holyrood Distillery.
However, his route into the whisky business was idiosyncratic, to say the least, as he explains. “I was born in Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, came to the UK as a student in 1991 and stayed.
“My background was as a marine geologist, working in academia, then in 2005 I retrained as a cabinet maker in Devon. I started producing single cask wooden boxes for whisky and was working on those with Penderyn in the Brecon Beacons. I was offered a job as visitor centre manager there, and during the next 13 years I covered pretty well every role in the distillery. It was a great apprenticeship in whisky making.
“I worked with the late Dr Jim Swan at Penderyn and learnt a lot from him about casks and about production, then moved slowly into sales and marketing. I wanted to spend time working at a Scottish distillery and so I joined Holyrood, where there was lots of exciting stuff going on. I was then approached by The Borders, and it was a great opportunity to start a single malt brand from scratch.”
That single malt comes with an interesting and unusual proposition. According to Bianchi, “It has accessible style and comes at an accessible price. It’s... [a] very high quality of liquid and presentation, and with an eight- year-old age statement.”
The distillery is housed in a Victorian commercial building, previously used by an engineering firm, and Bianchi explains that “We have a capacity of 1.5mla per annum, and a very cost-effective distilling model. More than 90 per cent of our spirit is filled into first-fill ex-bourbon casks, and for our first release, we re-racked stock into former Madeira wine casks to boost the sultana and raisin fruitiness, leading to whisky that is luscious and rich.”
Named The Borders Single Malt Whisky – The First Release, 10,000 bottles are available, bottled at 46% ABV and with an eye-catching retail price of £46.
In 2024, the company received a £35 million (US$43m) funding package from wine and spirits investment platform Ferovinum to support growth, and most of that money has been used to lay down stock for the future. The distillery has a warehouse facility in Hawick, with space for some 40,000 casks, but Bianchi says it has been filling up fast.
“We plan to expand rapidly in the UK and internationally with our single malt,” he says. “We have a clear focus on select markets, starting with France and Germany, followed by North America and Canada, plus Sweden – we feel we have a product the Swedes will really like — and then Taiwan.”
Beyond the initial release, next February will see the launch of three more expressions, namely an NAS bottling priced at £29.50 and two 8-year-olds, each priced at £39.
“We have a premium, accessible malt whisky brand from a new part of Scotland,” says Bianchi, “and we will also be offering single cask bottlings for £70 and a bottle-your-own distillery exclusive option. We will transition to 10-year-old age statements in two years’ time.”
Along the way to the distillery’s single malt release, two blended Scotches, namely Lower East Side and Clan Fraser, have been on offer, along with Kerr’s gin and Puffing Billy malted barley vodka, plus a number of limited-edition experimental bottlings in the Workshop Series.
These have included Malt & Rye blended Scotch whisky, made from 63.8 per cent single grain (rye) and 36.2 per cent single malt, The Long & Short of It blend, comprising single grain and batches of malt fermented for 55 hours and 150 hours, and Right As Rain, created from single grain rye whisky matured in Cognac casks and single malts aged in red wine and first-fill bourbon.
The fourth and final Workshop Series release hit the shelves last month and is named Deep Time, a bottling inspired by the pioneering Scottish geologist and farmer James Hutton, marking 300 years since his birth.
It features the same batch of spirit used in Malt & Rye, but allowed additional maturation, and Giancarlo Bianchi declares that “Deep Time is a fitting conclusion to our Workshop Series. As we close this chapter, we're also celebrating how these experimental releases have helped lay the foundations for our single malt, giving us invaluable insight into the character and potential of our spirit."
The months ahead will reveal the relative shrewdness of The Borders Distillery’s single malt proposition, but in a world where consumers are seeking better value without compromising quality, Bianchi and his enthusiastic team could just be on to something.
