Distell

Just general news, but we won't go into that.

No, no. then Covid sort of happened so I was still with Glenmorangie loads of samples getting sent to my house it was what a weird and amazing time what the postman was like what do you do because you just every day handing over and I was like and then I was like here have it just take it I just need that bit take it and he's like how do you mean I can't my wife is going to Divorce me if any more whisky comes in this house Arriving, arriving, arriving But then after that I got approached By a recruiter again Who'd said we have quite an exciting job And a this and a that And it was at Distell And the head of operations came on And he'd said look Got a big opportunity here and someone to look after the entire thing from start to finish.

So

Distell is what we know now as CBH, so that's Deanston, Bona Havan, Tobermory.

Deanston, Bona Havan, and obviously Bona Havan appealed to me because I'd had quite an Islay collective.

I've got Kalila, Lagaville, Leonard Beg, Port Ellen under my belt.

Um, so at 27, I was running KwaZulu-Natal for, uh, Stellenbosch Farmers Winery, and at 32, I was running the whole Transvaal, Mpumalanga, Limpopo, Gauteng, you know, that whole area.

And, um, we were busy with the structuring way Distell and SFW were combined, and then I got a phone call from Michiel to say, um, he's planning to build a bank, and do I wanna join? Um, and that hit the nerve of that passion to be entrepreneur.

That was always...

And I spoke to our people yesterday morning, uh, again, and I explained how important passion is, 'cause work shouldn't be something that you hate, or it should be...

So I started off my career in corporate finance and more specifically looking at mergers and acquisitions based mostly out of Singapore, actually.

And then I had the opportunity to return to South Africa and then join, at the time, a listed spirits business which no longer is listed, uh, that was called Distell, and, uh, worked in the M&A team there.

And yeah, really enjoyed getting stuck into the operations and learning more about the global spirits industry.

Ronan, you have the benefit of leading a global business such as CVH Spirits at a time where global businesses are uniquely positioned to be able to make the most of different markets and different market conditions.

But we're the, um...

We used to be part of Distell, a big South African entity that was sold to Heineken, and all the Scotch brands were kept together and formed into a new company, which was CVH, about three years ago.

So we're an end to end, end-to-end dedicated Scotch company.

We have three distilleries.