What’s in a glen?

• April 10, 2008

By Francis Moran

With one foot of this agency firmly planted in Scotland but with a long and fond personal attachment to Cape Breton, the heavily Scottish-tinged northern part of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, I am loath to choose sides in a trademark dispute that earlier this week saw the Federal Court of Canada order Cape Breton’s Glenora Distillers to stop marketing its locally-distilled single malt whisky with the word “Glen” in its name, something to which Scotland’s Scotch Whisky Association had taken grave exception.

Despite the fact that place names beginning with “Glen” are as liberally sprinkled across Cape Breton — indeed, across much of Canada — as sheep on a Scottish highlands hillside, it would seem the SWA believed that using the word in the name of a whisky unduly confused the market. The Scottish distillers trade association said it had found about 30 instances where Glenora’s Glen Breton Rare Whisky was mistakenly identified as Scotch whisky, although its news release failed to provide examples and there was no suggestion the Canadian distillery itself ever did so.

The professional marketer in me was intrigued by the trademark battle but the student of Scottish history in Nova Scotia was saddened that such a turf war would ever be necessary. Atlantic Insight, a long-defunct monthly news magazine in Atlantic Canada, once dubiously assigned this freelance journalist of undiluted Irish heritage to write about the cultural legacy built up by Scots throughout Nova Scotia and especially Cape Breton in the more than 200 years since the first major wave of Scottish settlers came ashore on the Hector in 1773. In many respects, the language, music, dance and literature of the old country was more alive and vital in the new world. For example, among the sidebars to the cover story that eventually ran was a piece on an elderly seanachie, or traditional Gaelic storyteller, whose skills were so outstanding that he often was called upon by groups in Scotland itself to teach his craft in a country where the language was at that time in some danger of being entirely forgotten.

Not that I think it very likely, but God forbid they ever forget how to make whisky in Scotland; after this ruling, they’ll get a frosty welcome should they ever have to turn to their natural heirs in Cape Breton for any guidance.