Give that man a ...

TWO South Africans are living every whisky-lover's dream - owning a prize distillery in Scotland.

For seven years Wayne Kieswetter and Geoff Bell have owned BenRiach in the Scottish Highlands. The two were in Johannesburg this week to attend a whisky festiva.

Kieswetter and Bell teamed up with Scottish whisky legend Billy Walker to buy the distillery near the town of Elgin, in the northeast of Scotland.

Until they bought it, BenRiach was used to supply whisky for blends for other labels.

Kieswetter said: "It wasn't even sold as a single malt. They did a couple of hundred cases in duty free. We found some real good whisky."

The distillery, it turned out, had "stock from 1966 to 2002 and every year in-between. And it produced very good whisky".

The entrepreneurs set about turning BenRiach into a premium whisky brand with several ranges.

It has won many awards, including Distillery of the Year in the Malt Advocate Whisky Awards in 2007 and Distiller of the Year in the 2009 Icons of Whisky Awards. The latter covers all distilleries in the world.

"We were the first to launch a Speyside peat. Now it's one of the biggest-selling of our whiskies in America, Germany and Scandinavia," Kieswetter said.

In 2008 the trio bought another distillery, GlenDronach, also in Scotland, which had been mothballed from 1996 to 2002 but is now producing excellent whiskies.

"If there was a Whisky Bible Scotch Malt Whisky distillery of the year, GlenDronach would be it," said whisky connoisseur Jim Murray in the Whisky Bible 2012.

Said Kieswetter: "That, in a nutshell was why we went into it; to protect our source of blended whisky and along the way discovered something quite wonderful with BenRiach."

Another sign of their burgeoning global success is that BenRiach's sherry finish bottles won two trophies in the International Wine and Spirits Competition 2011.