THE corridors and offices in Inverarity Morton’s sprawling head office and warehouse in Thornliebank near Glasgow are tastefully decorated in the drinks wholesaler’s corporate colours. “I call it 50 shades of grey,” quips Stephen Russell, the company’s managing director.

Mr Russell, who has worked for the family-owned business for 42 years, has justification for being in good humour, having overseen every last detail of the firm’s £3 million switch to its current nerve centre. The project involved customising the near 100,000 square foot premises to the specific needs of the company after moving from its long-standing home in nearby Shawbridge in September 2015.

It was a painstaking process. For one, the one-time hairdressing supplies warehouse had to be adapted to provide bins for the 6,000 different product lines IM carries for its bar, hotel and restaurant customers around the country. A state-of-the-art wine tasting room and professional kitchen have also been installed on the building’s upper floors, allowing IM to entertain customers and host winemakers from around the world.

Mr Russell said the move has benefited the £70m turnover business in many tangible ways, chiefly the general quality of the working environment for the company’s 200 staff. However, he noted that the company has always been known for the esprit de corps of its staff, which has been maintained.

There were one or two challenges in the early days, though. “We did have some issues at the very start, in the first three or four weeks,” Mr Russell said. “Just with populating all our bin locations. One of the things that I think we are very good at is supplying a fantastic range of products, but that means we sell a lot of splits (split pallets), and our splits area wasn’t populated properly at the start.

“It probably took us three or four weeks to get everything [set up].”

The massive expansion of IM’s product range is among the most profound changes Mr Russell has witnessed in his time with the business, which took its current name when William Morton acquired wine merchant Inverarity Vaults in 2011.

Changing trends in the drinks industry have seen it flooded with premium products, notably in light of the explosion of the craft beer and spirits sectors. Where once IM, which lays claim to supplying more wine than any other wholesaler in Scotland, would have stocked five or six gins, its range now includes 150.

“It’s staggering,” Mr Russell said. “I only know that because one of our customers wanted to do a gin bar, and he asked me to bring along a list of the gins. What’s happened to gin has happened to Tequila, rum, vodka [and] malt whiskies.”

Though Scottish bars, restaurants and hotels have never had so many products to choose from, supplied by companies such as IM, the trading environment they operate in remains fragile.

Mr Russell steered the company through the introduction of the smoking ban in 2006, a seismic change for the licensed trade. But the effects of that change ultimately paled into insignificance compared with the downturn in trade sparked by the lower of the drink driving limit in late 2014.

Mr Russell said the lower limit resulted in drinks sales dropping by ten per cent, which was the key behind its decision to close its depot in Milnathort, though the premises was also in need of significant investment in building repairs. IM, which inherited the depot with its acquisition of the venerable wine merchant Forth Wines in 2013, said the closure resulted a net loss of 30 jobs. Those roles have since been replaced in Thornliebank.

Mr Russell the downturn in business brought by the lower drink drive legal limit, which as successive surveys have shown have had an acute effect on golf clubs and outlets in rural areas, was “gone for all time”.

He said: “I can get on my high horse with this at times, and I have to tread warily, because the government campaign when they introduced the new law was to suggest you could be over the limit the morning after with just two pints of beer. Now that has frightened people. It has radically changed drinking habits – and for all time.”

Mr Russell added: “Technically it must be possible for you to be over the limit after just two pints, otherwise they wouldn’t have made that claim, but I can’t for the life of me imagine who would be over the limit with two pints of beer [consumed the night before]. I’ve heard stories about people not having a glass of wine on a Sunday lunchtime because they are driving on the Monday – that’s the scariness of it all.”

Mr Russell described the current sentiment across the Scottish hospitality sector as “mixed”. Hotels and restaurants in thriving city centres such as Edinburgh are in buoyant mood, while community bars and rural venues such as golf clubs are finding the going tough.

Like all companies which import goods from overseas, IM has also been affected by the plunge in sterling since the Brexit vote. Mr Russell said the company’s practice of hedging against exchange rate fluctuations meant it did not have to put its prices up in the immediate aftermath of the pound’s collapse.

Mr Russell, who confesses to checking the currency exchange rate at least 10 times a day, said: “As an importer, and having competitors in the trade, we were nervous about that. We were fortunate in that we had hedged, and still tend to hedge our currency. But the reality is, everybody was faced by it. It just depended on how many people had hedged forward, and for how long.”

Asked what he would regard as a positive outcome from the Brexit talks, Mr Russell said:

“The last thing that we want are customs tariffs. But equally the last thing that French Italian wine producers [want is tariffs]. The UK is a massive market because we have no major wine production. All of the producers of Europe are going to want minimal barriers to trade.”