AS you may be aware, given the blanket coverage in the media and the fact it’s showing in virtually every cinema in the country, James Bond is back. But, in what may be a slightly sinister development for the Scotch whisky industry, in Spectre he’s back on the vodka.

In his last outing two years ago, the producers of Skyfall chose Scotch and gave Macallan a starring role in one scene. This brief glimpse of fame earned the brand a staggering $9 million worth of exposure worldwide, according to the research company Front Row Analytics. What Macallan paid is a closely guarded secret.

Skyfall marked the spy’s 50th anniversary, so a Macallan 50-year-old seemed like an apposite choice, especially since the film was partly shot in the Highlands. At more than £4 billion in 2012, the value of Scotch whisky exports had never been as high, so Bond appeared to be on trend. Now the spirit has slipped from its peak and 007 is drinking something else.

In the books by Ian Fleming, the spy drank a wider variety of spirits than on screen. In the films he would sidestep the Scotch and soda or gin martini he might have enjoyed in print in favour of vodka, which promoted itself as a cool, urban spirit for the modern age – much like Bond himself. Whether he reflected a trend or propelled it along is moot, but from that first vodka martini in Dr No in 1962, the great vodka wave took off.

Of course behind the scenes the owners of Smirnoff were writing big cheques to bankroll the Bond flicks. Today 007 needs something slightly more classy than Smirnoff, so I guess the producers of Spectre simply auctioned the slot to the highest bidder among the so-called super-premium vodkas. The winner was the Polish brand Belvedere, owned by the French group, LVMH.

Yet the glory days of such vodkas appear to be over. The craze for expensively-packaged, neutral grain spirit all started with Grey Goose, a brand distilled out of thin air in 1996 by the late Sydney Frank and sold to Bacardi for $2.3 billion eight years later. For a while every aspiring spirits tycoon sought to fill Frank’s boots, but the old bling doesn’t wash any more and I doubt that’s a trend even James Bond can reverse.