There is no doubt the announcement of Simon Erlanger’s retirement from Isle of Harris Distillery is a big moment for this island business.

The managing director’s exit next month, announced last week, in many ways represents the end of a chapter for the distillery.

All the way from when I started covering the dream of a Scotch whisky distillery on Harris, years before it came to fruition with its 2015 opening, Mr Erlanger has been a constant.

I spoke to the Scotch industry veteran in the early days about the aspiration of US-born musicologist Anderson Bakewell to build a distillery on Harris, and about the drive to raise funding for it. Mr Erlanger was passionate about the vision, and did a great job of ensuring the funding was secured for the project. This appeared throughout to be a labour of love, and it was also clearly a very major undertaking.

In an article in May 2012 in The Herald, I wrote: “Potential funders of the first ever legal Scotch whisky distillery on Harris have expressed interest in putting up about one-third of the £10 million investment required, the managing director-designate of the project has revealed.

“Simon Erlanger, a former sales and marketing director of Scotch whisky distiller Glenmorangie, told The Herald that a total of £10m would be required to build the distillery at Tarbert and to provide the working capital to cover costs, including barley and barrels, ahead of first revenues.

“He hopes to raise this money from the private and public sector within a 'matter of months', to enable construction of the distillery to start in early 2013 and operations to start by summer 2014.”

The distillery opened its doors in September 2015 - a little later than planned back in the spring of 2012 but a very impressive feat nonetheless.

A couple of years later, I had the........

© Herald Scotland