Nearly all other leading Scotch brands are already part of larger groupings Glenmorangie is one of the last remaining independents. The Sixteen Men of Tain would be greatly disappointed if this didn’t dictate a corresponding premium.¿ Berkeley GroupThere was much celebration among investors when Tony Pidgley, the managing director of Berkeley Group, announced a couple of months back that he planned to free up some £1.4bn of capital for return to shareholders by getting out of conventional housebuilding to concentrate instead on the supposed growth market of apartment building on brownfield inner city sites.Yet there is always some wretched fly in the ointment, and in his case it has turned out to be the size of the related remuneration package. The most likely buyers would be Glenmorangie’s two existing international distributors, Bacardi and Brown-Forman Group, the maker of Jack Daniel’s whiskey in the US. The latter company already has a 10 per cent share stake and boardroom representation.The cost of buying out these distribution arrangements may act as a poison pill to other potential bidders, but even so a decent auction is expected. Whisky is, after all, only a superior form of rocket fuel, however much the Scots like to dress the spirit up with all kinds of extraordinary attributes.Yet the experience of Macallan, which sold for 26 times earnings before interest and tax, shows that Scotch can still command some fancy valuations.

Apply the multiple to Glenmorangie, and you get to a figure of more than £300m. Glenmorangie, moreover, is a considerably more desirable property than Macallan. While Scotch whisky as a whole may be in gentle decline, a victim of changing drink fashions and a more general, health-inspired aversion to spirits, single malts are still a growth sector. Luxury brands of this type can look forward to strongly growing demand as the developing regions of China and India lift themselves out of poverty.What’s more, there are big synergies to be had for rival trade buyers, not in the product itself, of course, which cannot be replicated or uprooted from its traditional home, but in bottling, warehousing and cooperage. Nobody believes that a Scotch whisky brand could change hands for such a staggering multiple. Bernard Arnault paid more than 100 times annual sales for the privilege of owning Chateau d Ychem, producer of one of the most highly sought-after Sauternes.

A lively auction is anticipated.There is an element of trophy asset about a famous drinks brand. It is only once in a blue moon that a drinks brand of such quality comes on the market, and if the Macdonald family has got bored with owning it, there are plenty of others who would dearly love to add it to their drinks cabinet. Which is rather what NM Rothschild, the bank retained to sell the company, and the vendors, the controlling Macdonald family, hope might happen.Glenmorangie’s biggest selling point as a business asset is its scarcity value. For those that know their Scotch from their bourbon, this is the birthplace of Scotland’s most famous Highland malt, Glenmorangie, and for a mere £300m it could be yours.If this seems rather a lot to pay for a business with annual sales of less than £70m and earnings last year of only £6.5m, just think of the purest Scottish spring water, the mists that roll in from the northern seas, the leaping burn, the heather-filled hillside, the malting barley, fired from primeval peat, the mystique, the nose, the care that goes into each wondrous dram – aach, it’s enough to make you fair lose your senses.

The present dual-domiciled structure will remain in place with the assets 60 per cent attributable to the Dutch company and 40 per cent to the British. On the other hand, the company will move to a unified board with joint chairmen, in the manner of that other Anglo-Dutch goliath, Unilever. Whether that will be enough to satisfy investors, or indeed begin the long march back to peer group competitive rates of reserve replacement, remains to be seen.The Shell supertanker seems to have such difficulty in changing course that by the time it eventually manages it, the oil may well have run dry altogether, and the world will instead rely on some other energy source.¿ GlenmorangieOn the banks of the Dornoch Firth in north-eastern Scotland lies the tiny town of Tain, from whence comes a most glorious nectar, distilled and matured for centuries by just 16 keepers of its secret recipe according to ancient procedures and methods. As previously trailed, a $120m out-of-court settlement has been reached with the SEC.