BACARDI has announced plans for a #2m distillery visitor centre at Aberfeldy in Perthshire to promote the Dewar's whisky brand which it acquired from Diageo last year.
The Aberfeldy distillery was built by whisky baron Tommy Dewar in 1896 to provide fillings for Dewar's White Label blend.
The US-based drinks group now wants to promote it as the spiritual home of Dewar's, which is one of the world's top 10 Scotch whisky brands, selling nearly four million cases a year.
Diageo continues to package Dewar's under contract at its Leven bottling plant in Fife, but Bacardi said yesterday it would announce new arrangements for bottling the product in March.
Bacardi is widely expected to build a new bottling plant on the site of its London Road warehouse in Glasgow. If this emerges as the chosen solution, Bacardi's small bottling plant in Coatbridge, which packages about one million bottles of William Lawson whisky per year, is likely to close so that all operations can be concentrated on a single site.
Neil Boyd, the marketing manager of Bacardi's John Dewar & Sons Scotch whisky subsidiary, said an announcement about new bottling arrangements would be made ''within the next three weeks,'' but he declined to say what form these would take.
Bacardi held discussions with Diageo last year about buying its Strathleven bottling plant in Dunbartonshire, which has been earmarked for closure, but these were broken off in December.
Boyd confirmed that there was little room to expand Bacardi's Coatbridge plant, which employs 50 people, while there was plenty of space available at the London Road site in Glasgow. But he refused to be drawn further.
Bacardi is under pressure to decide soon on new bottling arrangements for Dewar's because the US Federal Trade Commission has determined that Diageo must stop packaging it under contract by June 2000.
Bacardi bought Dewar's, four malt whisky distilleries and two gin brands from Diageo for #1.15bn last year after EU and US regulators forced Diageo to sell these assets as their price for approving the merger of Guinness and Grand Metropolitan.
Boyd said the Aberfeldy centre would feature a Dewar's brand heritage centre with state-of-the-art inter-active displays besides offering the standard distillery tour followed by a tasting session.
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