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IF YOU HAVEN’T already, meet Bob - an 11th-generation Nolet, the family of distillers that this year celebrates 325 years in the business. In more than three centuries of distilling – most famously Ketel One vodka – there must have been a fair few Nolets, which goes some way to explain why people refer to the man on your right simply as Bob. Regardless, it is a short list of people who manage to be on first-name terms with a global industry. Wherever you are, Bob is Bob.

Nolet (sorry, no first names in journalism), stands out from the crowd. He has a tall, angular figure – the sort that won’t abide middle-age spread, no matter his middling years. He says he measures 1.9m but you’d have to say closer to 2m if you count his curly hair. But being tall is not unusual when you’re from the tallest nation on earth – here in The Netherlands, Nolet isn’t that much more than the average. “I always think it’s because half the country is below sea level,” says Nolet. “We are tall so we have a chance.”

Remarks like that give away a subtle sense of humour. But with some people it is their position on a sporting field that provides the best read of their character. “I was always the captain and the last defender,” says Nolet, speaking of his time playing hockey and football in his younger years. Nolet is indeed the quiet leader – the type who people listen to when he speaks. He’s not fancy (“I never had the best technique”) but the straight-down-the-line type who isn’t scared of honest words and hard work.

As a boy, Nolet would spend his weekends and holidays at the Nolet distillery, on the bottling lines or polishing the copper. He was a grafter but not so much as a student – he moved from school to school, rarely spending more than a year in one place. “Teachers were trying to teach me stuff from books,” says Nolet. “I thought: ‘You’ve no idea how the business world works – you have never worked in the business world.’ I was always asking difficult questions because I thought they didn’t have the experience to explain to me how things worked.”

CHANGING ATTITUDE

Nolet admits he was a “difficult student”, which somehow seems at odds with his laid-back personality, but there’s nothing like time to mellow. Reflecting, he adds that he has a slightly different attitude towards school now he has his own children.

Nolet says he and his brother are “from the street”, by which he doesn’t mean homeless – far from it – but that he is street smart rather than university educated. Why bother with the theory when you can do it in practice, has always been his approach. And why not? He had seen his father tirelessly work to keep a struggling distillery afloat until growing it to the business it is today, producing one of the world’s best-known vodkas. “I saw my father work seven days a week at the distillery – I basically never saw him. I knew what hard work was as a child as I saw it in my dad.”

When Nolet joined the family business, he was whisked off to the US – a stronghold for Ketel One – to learn business English and work for a wholesaler. In California he was tasked with low-level operational jobs such as assembling POS displays in liquor stores in the on-trade. Most in his position would complain that the work was below him, but no, he says he found it interesting. When it was time for him to return to the Netherlands, there was no leg-up to a role with a suit – he learned the ropes from the bottom up.

“I was happy at the bottom,” says Nolet. “You see everything and you know what everyone does here. I’m part of the people who work here –not because I was born a Nolet but because I’ve done those jobs. You earn respect.”

Indeed, how many other international spirits company presidents know their way around the bottling line? Apart from his father, Carel Nolet, and brother Carel Nolet Jr, there can’t be many. This means there is an appreciation of everyone’s roles, from the cleaner to the president. During the hard times, when he was a boy, the distillery employed just 12 staff. Now there are 101 at the Schiedam-based distillery (and 20 more in the US). “That’s 101 people with mortgages and children,” he says. “You feel that responsibility.”

Nolet’s father at 75 is still very much involved. “He’s very active – he’s here every day, at weekends. He hangs out in the office. It’s his life’s work,” says Nolet. Likely one day he will be the same. The Ketel One brand is part-owned by Diageo, but it seems unlikely the remaining family share would ever be sold (“It’s a good deal for both parties”, says Nolet). Good on them. In a world of big business, this is one large brand that has retained its family line. Indeed, you get the feeling the Nolets, not least Bob, are so devoted they would have to be craned head-first out of the distillery before they left of their own accord.