WE drove past the only whisky distillery in Wales on holiday. Sitting in the village of Penderyn, on the southern edge of the Brecon Beacons, it only started distilling spirit in September 2000. Later, at our hotel on the Gower peninsula, I had an opportunity to sample Penderyn's single malt. And a very pleasing nip it is. The operation is small. The plant only produces a single cask each day. As its website reminds us: "In a world dominated by the marketing departments of multinational and multibrand companies we take great pride in our authenticity, obsessive passion and attention to detail."

WE drove past the only whisky distillery in Wales on holiday. Sitting in the village of Penderyn, on the southern edge of the Brecon Beacons, it only started distilling spirit in September 2000. Later, at our hotel on the Gower peninsula, I had an opportunity to sample Penderyn's single malt. And a very pleasing nip it is. The operation is small. The plant only produces a single cask each day. As its website reminds us: "In a world dominated by the marketing departments of multinational and multibrand companies we take great pride in our authenticity, obsessive passion and attention to detail."

Not everything that goes into making Penderyn is Welsh. Its copper still was fabricated in Prestonpans. Its casks come from American white oak. However it is so small in scale that it can still burnish its local credentials. Staff on its in-house bottling line even have time to hand polish every single bottle. The product is so rare, its owners boast, that Penderyn whisky is on strict allocation in markets outside Wales.

So it will never be a competitive threat to the global might of Diageo, whose latest rationalisation plans for its Scotch whisky interests were causing such a storm of protest before I went off on leave and are, I find on my return, still fiercely ablaze. But the nub of that argument is changing. It started with local communities reacting, with every conceivable justification, to the threatened loss in jobs and prosperity, by seeking to change Diageo's mind. That instinct stills burns bright, especially in Kilmarnock, a town that has borne much more than its fair share of painful industrial restructuring in recent decades and a place that has given Diageo's leading Scotch blend, Johnnie Walker, its core authenticity for the best part of two centuries.

But that concern has now been over-shadowed by a much bigger and thornier debate about the proper role of political action, in an open market economy, in trying to shape the outcomes of corporate decision-making. On the one hand, we have had the redoubtable Jim Sillars suggesting only the threat of public ownership of Diageo's whisky interests will make the multinational see sense.

On the other, a growing clamour of business lobbyists, led by Iain MacMillan of CBI Scotland, argues that the knee-jerk provocation from some politicians, notably First Minister Alex Salmond, risks scaring away other globally-mobile companies considering Scotland as a home for future investment.

Let's confront a few challenging realities. Scotland is littered with communities that once made their names and fortunes from iconic products they used to produce. A few weeks back I walked around the empty but listed sugar sheds in Greenock's James Watt Dock. The last sugar refinery is long gone from the Lower Clyde. The sweet smell that used to fill my childhood nostrils is a distant memory. Nowadays the regeneration company whose board I chair, Riverside Inverclyde, has just made the sheds wind and watertight, as our first step in breathing new life into them. Industrial change, however painful, is woven into all our lives. Confronting the consequences of that change is an ever-present given.

Politicians cannot stop that tide. So they should be very clear in their own minds about when and why they should seek to draw a line in that sand. Unless we are returning to much more state control of industrial policy, such lines should be drawn sparingly. Opportunism should be resolutely avoided. If Diageo had announced its restructuring plans for its bottling plants and grain distilleries last year, rather than this year, when the Glenrothes by-election was still looming and still winnable, would Alex Salmond have chosen to address a mass public rally in Kilmarnock when most of the investment beneficiaries were in Fife? We will never know. I have my suspicions.

As I pointed out in The Herald when Diageo's plans were first announced, the bigger threat, by far, has long been the risk that Diageo would shift much more of its whisky bottling and packaging capacity to its main growth markets around the world. Diageo executives with a strong commitment to the group's Scottish roots have, to my certain knowledge, been voicing such fears in private for a decade or more. Our politicians should reflect on whether the way they have handled this singularly-Scottish restructuring thus far makes that corporate option more or less likely at some point in the future.

That said, I find the warnings from CBI Scotland's Ian MacMillan somewhat over-cooked. There is no immutable global scoreboard which determines whether footloose industrial capital will choose this country or that in which to invest. These decisions are always a complex aggregate of at times unrelated calculations and impulses. Decisions on where to put down industrial roots have even been tipped in Scotland's favour, on occasion, by a multi-national CEO with an appetite for playing all Scotland's premier golf courses. Or, as in IBM's case at the end of the war, by the ethnic roots of the company's founder.

We could, of course, tear up our open market model and start reintroducing state control of what used to be called the commanding heights of our economy. The partial state ownership of a clutch of our banks has re-awakened, in some, dreams of pursuing a radically-different industrial order. But that measure was born out of desperation not ideology. I do not sense any great popular groundswell for breaking the market mould, no matter how grievously it has failed us as far as banking is concerned over the last two years. And despite Jim Sillars' powerful advocacy, I don't expect Alex Salmond to start listing the top 100 targets for nationalisation any day soon.

Indeed our first minister has been a vociferous proponent of the open market model in recent years, promoting plans to turn an independent Scotland into a low corporate tax haven for companies just like Diageo. How he squares that with the tongue-lashing he delivered to Diageo's senior management at last Saturday's Kilmarnock rally is anyone's guess. Oh to be a fly on the wall next time he and Diageo CEO Paul Walsh can find space in their diaries for a face-to-face meeting.