Comment: Raise your glasses to an industry that’s winning

Secondly, a growing, aspirational middle class in emerging markets from Asia to Africa provides upholstery against any short- to medium-term headwinds in more mature whisky markets.

These underlying positive dynamics are giving confidence to the makers of Scotch to invest substantially in their operations, the latest evidence being Pernod Ricard’s announcement that it is pumping a further £40 million into its Chivas Brothers whisky subsidiary.

Chivas, Scotland’s second-biggest whisky business, is expanding four of its Speyside distilleries, including Glentauchers and Tormore.

The company, whose brands include Ballantine’s and the Glenlivet, is also lifting the shutters at its Glen Keith distillery, which was mothballed 12 years ago. Together with the opening of a bottling hall at the company’s plant in Paisley, it is a powerful gesture of faith in the industry’s prospects and particularly demand from abroad.

It comes on the back of official figures released in March that showed Scotch sales surged 23 per cent to £4.2 billion in 2011, a time when the UK and much of the eurozone was economically treading water at best.

Exports to the US topped £600 million for the first time, French exports grew 27 per cent, and exports to Singapore, a distribution centre for much of Asia, rose 44 per cent.

The good news is that there is nothing discernible on the horizon to curb the rise of Scotch. This outperformance is being achieved against what most would agree is a particularly unhelpful consumer backcloth in the UK and the eurozone.

When we, eventually, emerge from what has been a four-year downturn, that can only provide another tailwind for the industry. Chivas’s solid investment is likely to be replicated elsewhere because the Scotch sector clearly has both earnings resilience and visibility.

Get on the running shoes for a marathon

HERE we go again. If the eurozone is ever to get over its financial crisis it looks as if it is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. Yesterday the interest rate Spain is paying on its sovereign debt lurched upwards to 6.7 per cent.

Crucially, this punitive rate is knocking around the levels at which Ireland and Greece had to turn mother’s picture to the wall and humbly ask for international bail-out money.

Jitters seized the markets yesterday at the prospect of the eurozone’s fourth-biggest economy flirting with a bail-out. The Madrid stock market struck a nine-year low and the embattled single currency fell to two-year lows.

In short, the eurozone picture looks dark again.

If Greece leaves the euro it would be a big blow to the EU project, but it would be dwarfed in the potential for turmoil by any Spanish bailout.

Meanwhile, the knock-on effect of nervousness about Spain was for Italian sovereign bond yields to move above 6 per cent for the first time this year, investors fleeing to the safety of UK gilts and German bunds instead.

In an effort to soothe fevered financial market brows, the party line from the Spanish government is that there are no plans to seek a bail-out either for government debt or the crisis at the country’s fourth-largest financial institution, Bankia.

But the markets are hard-nosed sceptics. They typically believe that governments would naturally tend to say the reassuring thing right up until the moment the reassurance is shown to be little more than a bluff.

For the UK watching from the sidelines? It’s a case of strap in again for the bumpy ride.

Hampton courts his shareholders

CUT us some slack, guys. That was the message from Royal Bank of Scotland chairman Sir Philip Hampton to investors ostensibly, but really the government (with its 82 per cent holding), at the group’s annual shareholder meeting in Edinburgh yesterday.

Hampton in summary: much done, much still to do, and stop banging on about bonuses.