Its a no-brainer for Black Bottle Whisky to hire Jani-Mari Swart of communications agency DKC to co-ordinate a relaunch of their Back to the Beginning Transformation at the Cape Town Club tomorrow as Swart is Afrikaans for Black. While Black Bottle is so named as it was originally presented in a black bottle, when it was launched by the Graham brothers in 1879 in Aberdeen, another Speyside distiller, Glen Grant, should consider bottling a limited edition of 1978 spirit in honour of Byway Makalaga, the batman of Major James Grant. As master distiller Dennis Malcolm (below), in town to launch his barrel of 1963 spirit at the Pot Luck Club on Tuesday noted “the Major had a lot of connections to South Africa through big game hunting.”

“He once brought back a live trophy, Byway Makalaga who became his butler.” Byway never returned to Africa and in a small way, this is a repeat of the Saartjie Baartman story. Dennis used to clean Byway’s chimney and every day Byway would lunch at the local hotel. Byway died in 1978 and it doesn’t take a marketing mogul like Reg Lascaris to realize that a special bottling from a 1978 cask would be a sure fire hit with collectors and black diamonds.

After all, local distributor Edward Snell brought in 12 bottles of Dennis’s 1963 50 year old from the 150 produced. One was used for tastings. One for the road show and eight were snapped up by local collectors and whisky lovers at R150,000 a pop. The market for old whisky is clearly there, as is the story. Could there be a more fitting way to remember Byway, a child snatched from the dusty bosom of Africa and taken to cold and rainy Aberdeen which strangely enough, voted strongly to remain in the UK last week. Just like Byway, then.