Dr Jim Swan

Jim Swan was born on Christmas Day, 1941, in Cockenzie, a fishing harbour on the coast east of Edinburgh. He belonged to the first generation of scientists to bring modern chemistry to whisky-making, and once he started, in the boom years of the 1960s, he never really left the subject. Fifty-two years, from what happens to spirit between the barley and the glass, to how it matures in the cask.

He joined a laboratory a few miles from his family home, in 1965. It was not a whisky-only lab; crisps, soft drinks, soup, biscuits and all the new consumer goods looking to build a stable taste profile were studied. That's where he learned gas chromatography and sensory analysis: how to break a spirit down into its chemical parts, and how to train a palate to describe a flavour precisely enough that someone else, tasting blind, would land on the same word. Just as importantly, he learned how to put both to work fast enough to meet a company's deadlines.

From 1970 his focus was on whisky as he became part of a Scotch whisky research consortium. That work took him to American oak forests and Spanish bodegas, and later to a new generation of distillers making single malt in places it had never been made before. That was where he became an educator too, passing on what he'd learned to the people who would carry the work forward.