Last summer, along with the BBC and ITV,  we were visited by a French film crew.

The director Dominique Hennequin's team set out to make a sensitive, highly personal and evocative 45 minute documentary about Islay, its nature, people and whisky examining how they interact.  After several weeks filming it was clear this was not going to be some skipping-over-the-surface, dumbed down film. The result,  'The Secret of Whisky' will be broadcast  at 20.00 hours on Saturday 23rd March in Germany and France on the highbrow documentary channel Arte Geo 360. Hopefully it will be syndicated to the National Gegraphic channel at a later date.

I first met Dominique  at a wine festival where I was presenting Bruichladdich. He had just finished making a documentary so why not come up and film Islay? Four years later, having filmed the shark hunters of Tahiti, the secrets of North Korea, The uranium-dealing Touareg of Niger, The Loire River, the Bonobos monkeys of the Congo and the fisherman of Senegal, Islay was, er,  the obvious next choice.

The film is not just another whisky programme, but one about the interaction of the people with the landscape, the climate, the nature and its expression in whisky. The synopsis is here (in French) http://www.arte.tv/fr/Comprendre-le-monde/360_C2_B0--GEO/Cette-semaine/Les-emissions-en-mars/2496874.html