It's Friday - it must be wine...

So, after last Friday's revelation that there might be a secret wine trail afoot I headed off in search of today's blip and found this stone carving 'round the corner.

Now I've got my glasses on I can see that the stone head is Bacchus or Dionysus and those are grapes on and around his head.

"RS & Co Ltd" are, in fact, Robertson Sanderson & Co Ltd and they were wine merchants here in Leith (they also made the famous "Mountain Dew"whisky.)

It seems that around the 1890's a lot of wine merchants were looking to scotch whisky as the next big thing. Following a poor grape harvest in France, cognac was scarce on the ground and so whisky was being touted as the perfect after-dinner alternative.

Arthur and Fred Sanderson joined the board of the Glenkinchie Distillery along with some other Leith-based wine and spirit merchants. The Sandersons were tasked with distributing the whisky far and wide.

The first world war saw a contraction in the market for Glenkinchie Malt whisky and RS & Co Ltd eventually went into liquidation in 1919.

Wow

And I thought it was just a cool old carving.

History, it's on the walls