VERTIGO AT MACALLAN
Speyside was looking stunning as I drove north east from
Aviemore following the River Spey downstream. Muffled by a blanket of fresh, slowly melting snow the countryside shimmered under a clear, pallid sky. The sense of stillness and tranquillity were all the more acute after the journey from hell, or rather through hell. That morning I had inched and slithered my way up the A9 from Edinburgh. The roads were treacherous and at times invisible. Cocooned in the occasional white-out as if in a dream, reality would suddenly impose in the ghostly form of a van skidding sideways or a lorry lying jack-knifed beside the curb.
Perhaps I exaggerate a little, but it was a pretty stressful drive for all that. The weather reports had warned of blizzard conditions and motorists had been urged to stay at home unless their journey was absolutely essential. A trip to Macallan was hardly that, but it was not something I was going to give up lightly especially with the chance of meeting Bob Dalgarno. Bob is the head whisky maker at the distillery and, for many malt whisky lovers around the world, something of a legend. Though ‘legend’ is a description he would almost certainly hate.
But if you make a single malt as fêted as The Macallan and help select the casks and bottle its rarest expressions, the celebrity status goes with the job. Just back from a tour of duty in the Far East, he was probably taking refuge in his sample room and unwilling to come out. Or else he was stuck in a snow drift. Either way there was no sign of him.
I had been to the distillery twice before and both times I had been struck by the isolation of Macallan compared to other distilleries on Speyside. It stands aloof on the west bank of the Spey a mile from Craigellachie. It is well away from the bustle of Dufftown and the ‘Malt Whisky Trail’ whose tourist board signs are prominently displayed throughout the region. No tour buses pull in here to let their passengers bag a quick distillery on their break-neck tour of the Highlands. A visit to Macallan is a lot more bespoke than that.
One early visitor was the Victorian writer Alfred Barnard, who bagged Macallan in 1886 while researching his magnum opus on every whisky distillery then operating in the UK. It would be fair to assume that he was underwhelmed by this ‘old-fashioned establishment’ as he called it. While whole pages are devoted to distilleries that have long since disappeared including the many in Glasgow and Edinburgh whose memories lie buried beneath car-parks and supermarkets, Macallan received just seven lines. The impression is of another small-scale farm distillery that Barnard never expected to survive.
But Macallan has not just survived, it has flourished and now produces one of Scotland’s most highly regarded single malts. This reputation which was not built overnight however. Six years after Barnard’s visit it was bought by Roderick Kemp, a master distiller and part owner of Talisker on the Isle of Skye. Kemp set about rebuilding and modernising the distillery which remained in family hands right up until 1996 when it was sold to Highland Distillers for £180 million.
Ironically Highland had tried to buy it once before, back in 1898 when they made an unsolicited offer of £80,000 which Kemp turned down flat. In the space of a hundred years the distillery had burst out of the farmyard into the big time with a current annual production of almost six million litres of pure alcohol. This, together with inflation, goes a long way to explaining the quantum leap in value. But it was having such a prestigious, big-selling malt that really made the difference. The roots of The Macallan 10-year-old go back to the ’60s when the old management began laying down stocks for bottling as a single malt. They were not complete pioneers – Glenfiddich was already on the market – but they were much quicker than most to spot the potential of this new, or rather, very old category.
By having a whisky of its own, Macallan could develop a personality. Without it, the distillery was simply an anonymous production unit like so many others, whose product disappeared into blends. Unfortunately this independent company had very limited resources to promote its fledgling brand which was launched in the early seventies. Apparently the total promotional spend in year one was £25 which went on sponsoring an event for the local boy scouts in Rothes. On a slightly more glamorous note, the brand had already made its Hollywood screen debut in Nicholas Roeg’s 1973 hit Don’t Look Now. Perhaps better-known for its famous love-making scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, a bottle of The Macallan did make a tiny guest appearance. And this was fair enough since the film’s scriptwriter was Alan Shiach, whose brother, Peter, was then chairman of Macallan.
For a while the old still house with its six stills was run alongside the new still house at Macallan. In line with the rest of the industry, production kept rising and rising until the whisky loch was full to overflowing in the mid ’80s. The hang-over that followed was extremely painful and over a dozen distilleries closed. Macallan weathered the storm, but the old still house was shut down for good.
Demand has since bounced back and Macallan now appears busier than ever. Throughout the day I was there, a steady stream of lorries drove in to disgorge their cargo of empty barrels and pick up new ones full of mature whisky for transporting back to the company’s bottling hall in Glasgow.
The bustle outside is reflected inside the new still house - a square, functional-looking building of stone and tinted glass with a corrugated iron roof. It reverberates with the deep, throaty roar of a ship’s engine room under full steam - a ship that knows where it’s going. The fifteen stills are worked round the clock and operate in pairs – one medium-sized wash still feeds its ‘low wines’ – as the first distillate is known - into two much smaller spirit stills. Each pairing is run to a separate rhythm, such that spirit at different stages of distillation pours through each of the three spirit safes.
The air in the still house is heavy with the scent of new-make spirit - a ripe, honeyed aroma that defines the distillery character of The Macallan. This derives from a whole combination of factors, not least the shape and size of the stills. The spirit stills are the smallest on Speyside and by running them without a break, a fairly rich full-bodied spirit is produced.
On my tour round the stillman on duty was John Wills, an ex-lighthouse keeper who has worked at Macallan since the late ’80s. With his shift coming to an end he was able to explain something of what they are trying to achieve. “As the spirit boils up the esters coming off are the sweet fruity ones we want.” The first flow of spirit known as the foreshots, is rejected. As it starts to run clear and the alcoholic strength drops to 74 per cent, the stillman begins to collect the spirit. This is the ‘middle cut’ and the starting point is much the same as any malt whisky distillery. What sets Macallan apart is how soon the cut is terminated. After about an hour when the strength of the spirit has fallen to 68 per cent it is no longer saved. “We don’t want the heavier congeners, what I call the ‘late-boilers’”, John explains. These and other undesirables are known as ‘the feints’ and are rejected like the foreshots.
Apparently a miserly 16 per cent of the spirit flowing off the spirit stills is filled into casks. The rest is sent round the block to mix with the next batch of low wines produced by the wash stills. It is enough to make an accountant weep, but then that’s nothing compared to maturation – the next part of the whisky-making process. Think of a warehouse full of money locked away for at least ten years. It doesn’t earn any interest, instead it evaporates at around two per cent a year. This is the famous angels’ share. “At Macallan it accounts for a monthly loss of 10,000 gallons or 3.5 million bottles,” declares a sign in one of the warehouses, before adding with a certain grim satisfaction, that’s “almost half a million pounds to Her Majesty’s Government alone.” The Treasury does not get a penny of tax until the whisky is fully mature and released from bond.
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After 24 years at Macallan, Robbie Gordon, who I met earlier on my tour, knows all about the rise and fall of the whisky industry. He was there when the distillery was going flat out in the late ’70s and when it was on a three day week in the early ’80s. He also remembers the days of dramming. Nowadays distilleries are as dry as oil rigs, and anyone caught under the influence would almost certainly be fired. Back in the seventies life was rather different. Most daily jobs in a distillery, especially the dirty ones, were rewarded with a dram. Baring in mind this was full-strength spirit straight off the stills, workers must have been supremely relaxed at times. Some opted to save their dram for later and would hand the brewer, or whoever was dispensing the stuff that day, an empty lemonade bottle. Robbie reckons that “over a week you might get three full bottles.”
Mercifully no serious accident had occurred at Macallan by the early ’80s when ‘health and safety’ became an issue and dramming was phased out. So too was drinking ‘Joe’ – the popular name for the wash – the strong, unstable beer that is the half-way stage from turning barley into whisky. This flat, cloudy brew at eight per cent alcohol plays havoc with your bowels. Yet Robbie remembers one man at Macallan who always eat two pies for lunch washed down with two pints of ‘Joe’. He must have had the constitution of an ox.
In many ways the defining character of The Macallan comes from the cask. For as long as anyone can remember The Macallan destined for single malt has always been matured in nothing but sherry casks from Spain. This is what gives it its colour which ranges from dark amber to the deepest mahogany depending on age. And it is what gives it much of its nose – that rich plum-pudding aroma with traces of cloves and orange peel. For its fans the 10, 12 and even more, the 18-year-old, are sumptuous and deeply satisfying. For others, the sherry is almost too much – masking the underlying personality of the whisky in buttery, slightly rancid notes from the wood.
Now they have a choice to experience a more naked and unadorned Macallan in the shape of Fine Oak. To find out more I joined Ian Morrison in the sample room. Ian works alongside Bob Dalgarno, in the endless job of selecting which casks should be married together to ensure that the quality of all the age-statements bottled never varies. A task not helped by Macallan’s refusal to use spirit caramel to smooth out any differences in colour. The mysterious interplay between wood and whisky can vary dramatically as Ian explains. “If you cut down one tree and make two casks from it, fill them with spirit on the same day and lie them next to each other in the warehouse for ten years, one can hold whisky the colour of mahogany, the other linseed oil. Why? – we just don’t know.”
Ian is certainly aware of the importance of maturation and says 70 per cent of the whisky’s character comes from the wood. And yet he insists the new-make spirit is “the DNA or finger-print of the Macallan spirit.” This DNA is now more obvious in The Macallan Fine Oak which is aged in a mixture of Bourbon barrels and sherry casks made of American and European oak. “From a whisky point of view we had to access up to 80,000 individual casks over three years.” It has obviously been a massive project and now involves a painstaking process of selling the concept to whisky drinkers themselves. So embedded is the idea of Macallan as a heavily sherried malt with the colour to match, it is proving quite a challenge at times.
Just back from two weeks in Japan doing this very job, Bob Dalgarno, suddenly wanders in. Educating the consumer is clearly a long, slow process. “We’ve been known for one particular style and I think that’s what made Macallan unique – it was a Speyside whisky like no other.” Despite its location and the advent of ‘Fine Oak’, Bob agrees that the distillery appears to have one foot still firmly planted in Jerez - the sherry-growing district of Spain. “To be honest Jerez is almost more important now than it has ever been.”
Now aged forty, Bob has been at the distillery since he was nineteen. Above all he sees his role as preserving something precious. “People tend to think I’m absolutely bloody mad, but there’s almost a hand on your shoulder guiding you from way back. You see I’m aware of the time pressure and the speed of modern life, but as a whisky-maker you really want to stop time. You’re trying to maintain the old tradition and high standards against a backdrop of people pushing all the time.”
He won’t say who these people are, but one would guess the company accountant would be high up the list. “I don’t really care about making money,” he says disarmingly. “If the quality is good enough the reputation will sell itself. That for me is paramount. Macallan was build around that. I’ve been here just over twenty years now and it’s all been about quality and trying to hang on to that.”
Given the changes in ownership since 1996, including a few years as a publicly quoted company, the pressures on anyone trying to preserve the status quo must have been considerable at times. In recent years Bob and his team have had to become much more savvy about controlling and managing the maturing stocks of whisky in the warehouse. Juggling the competing demands from all the different expressions of The Macallan, not to mention the whisky destined for blends, must be a Herculean task. The destiny of an individual cask on the day it is filled has never been easy to predict. For a single malt it depends on what the future might hold ten or more years down the line. As forecasters know, trying to predict tomorrow’s weather is hard enough.
Whatever the eventual demand for Fine Oak, there are no plans to divert casks earmarked for the original Macallan. Like everyone else in the Scotch whisky industry, no one could have foreseen the tremendous surge in popularity in malts. “If we knew what we know now we’d have been working the plant far harder in the mid-’80s,” says Bob ruefully. But then plenty of his fellow distillers are in the same boat.
Tom’s Tastings
8-year-old Fine Oak
Pale gold in colour this is a younger, fresher Macallan with traces of fruit and vanilla on the nose. A bit sparse on the tongue and a fairly short finish.
10-year-old sherry
With its tell-tale dried fruit sherried nose, the flagship Macallan is rich and mouth-filling on the palate, drying with a trace of spice at the end.
18-year-old sherry
A rich plum-pudding malt with traces of resin, orange peel and burnt sugar. Sweet and moreish on the tongue it has a medium-long oaky finish.
18-year-old Fine oak
A light amber colour, the Fine Oak 18 year-old is more aromatic and less cloying on the nose than the standard 18 year-old with notes of dried flowers and smoked tea. On the tongue it reveals creamy, citrus flavours.
30-year-old
With its deep mahogany colour, the 30 year-old has a sweet, ripe resinous nose with traces of candied fruit and treacle. It is a big, sumptuous whisky in the mouth with a satisfyingly long finish.
Tom Bruce-Gardyne
