Peter Ross: ‘The Nose’ is not to be sniffed at

Whyte & Mackay’s master blender Richard Paterson has insured his snout for £1.5m but his passion for whisky is priceless

‘I CALL this my treasure chest,” says Richard Paterson. “It is a sanctuary for me.” Better known as The Nose, Paterson is in his sample room on the top floor of the skyscraping Whyte & Mackay building in Glasgow. The view, if one could only see it, would show the city spread out far below and long views north to the Campsies. But the blinds are kept resolutely drawn on all that. This room, which reeks strongly of whisky, acknowledges no particular time or space. Here Paterson, master blender since 1975, conducts his compositional experiments and alchemic rituals, sampling drams from different eras and areas of Scotland, some dating to the 19th century, and mixing them together in the hope of creating a harmonious, quaffable, sellable whole.

His chief tool in this endeavour is his nose which, like the rest of him, is 63 years old, though it has been actively sniffing whisky for a mere 55 of those. Paterson’s father Gus and grandfather William were both blenders, and Richard was first inducted into the art of nosing at the age of eight, during a revelatory visit to his father’s bond in Stockwell Lane. The building has since been demolished to make way for the St Enoch Centre, but the sense memory lives on in Paterson’s brain and nostrils – an overpowering smell of maturing spirit, stagnant water, damp walls and gas lighting.

Paterson’s job as a blender is to ensure consistency of taste and quality in the Whyte & Mackay product, and he is himself a remarkably consistent man. Take, for instance, his manner of dress – a uniform to which words such as dapper and natty cannot do full justice. He favours dark suits, matching silk ties and pocket handkerchiefs, silver cufflinks in the shape of stags’ heads, and shoes so highly polished that they reflect his moustache, an estimable appendage which, one suspects, acts as a sort of filtration and storage system for whisky aroma.

The nose itself is, perhaps, on the large side. It has been described as bulbous but this is a slander. It is a perfectly normal nose, at least externally, and fits perfectly into one of the tulip-shaped stemmed glasses on which Paterson insists for sampling whisky. He is a stickler for things being done just so, and has been known to jokingly threaten to kill those who commit the sin of holding these glasses by anything other than its base. He is the sworn enemy of ice cubes and finds the whole idea of “Scotch on the rocks” quite appalling. Ingenues who rush the nosing process may find themselves being clipped round the head, as Paterson – as a boy – was by his own father, and advised to slow down. The Scotland on Sunday photographer, for instance, is lucky to escape unslapped when he inhales too quickly for Paterson’s liking – “You’ve got to give it time!” he scolds. “Did you kiss your wife like that when you met her?”

This, by the way, is another of The Nose’s foibles – likening particular malts to beautiful women. Catherine Deneuve is a favourite (“real elegance and refinement, warmth and sensuality”) but he struggles, as an old-fashioned sort, to find an appropriate comparison among today’s celebrities. “Jordan?” he pulls a face, as if catching a whiff of something sour. “Too tacky.”

Watching Richard Paterson nose whisky is what it must have been like to hear Sinatra sing scales. His voice grows sultry, his eyes become distant and unfocused on anything around him. The nose burrows into the glass not once but four times – “Hello...” – sniff – “How are you?” – sniff – “Quite well,” – sniff – “Thank you very much,” – sniff. His manner is seductive, mesmeric; he’d make a good gigolo or hypnotist.

The whisky to which he is paying such close attention dates to Christmas Day, 1964. It is very rare and would cost around £500 to buy. Nevertheless, the first thing he did on pouring a measure was swirl it round so it coated the insides of the glass then tossed the precious liquid on the floor. This, apparently, ensures that the glass is free from impurities, but it also functions, of course, as a Barnum-ish bit of showmanship. Paterson likes to say that, as a result of all the expensive whisky flung on it over the years, his carpet is the most expensive in Scotland. Should times ever get tight at Whyte & Mackay, he could probably put it through a mangle and sell the wringings doon the Barras.

“What I can smell,” he explains, nosing the whisky again, “is marzipan, citrus, marmalade, hints of coffee, honey, ginger and then the liquorice notes coming in. All these things are there.”

He takes a sip, moves it around in his mouth, humming with pleasure for about 30 seconds before swallowing. “Hel-lo!”

The Nose is acutely articulate about smell. One of his favourite writers is George Orwell, and this makes perfect sense as Orwell always wrote with great precision about smell, albeit it was more often boiled cabbage and oily gin than fine single malt. Paterson, for his part, can enthuse on everything from the top note of jasmine in Chanel No 5 to the “subtle tones of baby sick” in raw spirit. Many of his own most vivid memories involve smell: shrivelled lemons and stale cigar smoke the morning after parties held by his parents; the whisky on his father’s breath as he bent over the bed and kissed him goodnight.

Paterson has terrific enthusiasm for his father’s era of the whisky business, and for his own early days, making them sound rather like a Scottish west coast version of Mad Men: long boozy lunches in Rogano clinching or celebrating deals; glamorous executives and their wives; cocktail olives and cherries, pipe smoke and Old Spice; the distillery workers taking raw spirit in their tea; and not forgetting the formidable figure of Betty Toal, charge hand at a warehouse in Duke Street, whose muscular arms, adept at hammering bungs from casks, were rivalled in strength only by the lacquer in her beehive.

In 2008, Paterson’s nose was insured for £1.5 million, and there is no doubt that it is a valuably sensitive organ. First thing in the morning, before he opens the curtains of his home in Newton Mearns, he is already developing an idea of the day’s weather based on what he can pick up with that nose. It is said that he can detect a broken bottle of wine on the pavement without leaving his bed. “Smell has dominated my life,” he says. “Even when I was in the lift with you I smelled you. It’s a habit. When a woman passes me in the street, I count one-two-three and then see if I can smell her.”

Paterson’s sample room is an extraordinary place – part laboratory, part museum, part millionaire playboy’s wet bar. The whisky in here is worth around £3m. Each day, he arrives at around 7am and starts nosing. “As soon as I walk in, it’s almost as if a veil comes down. There’s silence. And I think, ‘Now, we’re going to make history’.”

There is whisky everywhere in here, including cabinets full of dusty historical malts and blends, and shelves covered by small clear medicinal-looking bottles, labelled 1926, 1938, 1951, 1966 and so on. One tiny glass bottle contains just a few drops of pale gold fluid; it looks, to be frank, like a urine sample, but turns out to be some of the actual whisky Ernest Shackleton took with him on his 1907 expedition to the south pole. Elsewhere is a bottle of whisky recovered from a shipwreck.

Paterson was born in 1949, the year Whisky Galore arrived in cinemas. He is keen on dates and historical coincidence, and it is one of his eccentricities that he studies such things as part of his research when developing new blends. Whyte & Mackay, for instance, is at present expanding into the former Soviet Union, to which end Paterson is acquainting himself with the finer points of Stalinism. How this will, eventually, be reflected in the whisky remains to be seen, but is an interesting example of his unorthodox methods.

There is no doubt that he regards himself as an artist working at the peak of his powers. At one point during our conversation he likens himself to Jackson Pollock. Yet he was not always so passionate about the drinks business. Personal experience made him ambivalent at first. His mother, following the end of his parents’ marriage, became an alcoholic. His father was a drinker, he says, but not a drunk. Towards the end of Gus Paterson’s life, in 1994, the doctor in charge of his treatment arranged for his favourite whisky, one of his own blends, to be given to him intravenously, “a nip in a drip” as The Nose puts it. The old man, quite literally, had whisky in his blood, and for Richard Paterson – in a metaphorical sense – this is also true.

It is hard to believe that there is anyone in Scotland for whom whisky is a greater obsession than Paterson. He has given most of his life to it and is not done yet. It is his wish to retire after half a century with Whyte & Mackay, which is still seven years away, so there is plenty of nosing to be done, plenty of spirit to be flung on the carpet yet. Most of all, he wants to take the message to Scots and drinkers round the world that there is more to whisky than knocking it back or drowning it in Irn-Bru.

“Friends, Romans, countrymen,” he says, “lend me your noses.”