The smallest event can set us on our path. A chance encounter, a favourite book narrated to us as a child, or a popular culture icon that we’re desperate to imitate. For Meghan Ireland, it was a double-page spread in a magazine. She might not remember who it was about, but the subject lit a fire in her that burns just as brightly many years later. “I was like wow, that’s what I want to do,” she says – eyes as wide as saucers – in the back room of the WhistlePig farm-cum-distillery in Vermont. The Whisky Advocate feature on a female Master Distiller showed the second-year Chemical Engineering student and “total chemistry nerd” a career she hadn’t previously considered open to her. “I got super determined after that,” she says. After cutting her teeth in a craft cider role, Ireland joined WhistlePig, or “the playground for distillation” as she describes it, which was under the inimitable stewardship of distilling icon Dave Pickerell. “He was just an amazing guy,” Ireland says. “Big personality and incredibly smart. He was always pushing innovation and experimentation and that’s something that has really stuck with this company.” Pickerell’s untimely passing in 2018 sent shockwaves across the industry, and many still talk about the role he played in the craft spirits revolution and subsequent rye whiskey revival. Many twittered about the fate of WhistlePig without the great man and his boundless creativity. This speculation only intensified after his successor’s short spell at the helm of the company. Today, Emily Harrison and Meghan Ireland head up distilling and blending at WhistlePig and, if their enthusiasm and first whiskeys are anything to go by, then those naysayers were very wide of the mark. “Dave gave us the ability to kind of run wild and create different experimentation options,” Ireland says. This creative energy is palpable in Ireland’s words and evident in everything the team has produced to date. “To this day my CEO asks me on a weekly basis, ‘What’s your new idea? What are we trying this week? What’s the new concept?’ He is always pushing, and he is always asking.” For some, this relentless pursuit might be draining, but it seems to have the opposite effect on Ireland. “To actually be able to explore and experiment with different options has been awesome.” Since its inception in 2015, WhistlePig has gone from a slightly obscure project to a formidable force on not only the American whiskey, but global whisk(e)y, stage. To get the brand off its feet, Pickerell and founder Raj Bhakta were very transparent about the fact they sourced whiskey from elsewhere in Canada. Today, the distillery is making strides in becoming a truly farm-to-bottle rye whiskey. “As much as we can, we want to produce a product that is ours fully,” Ireland says. “We are excited about releasing more and more of our own stuff to show off to the world what we can do here in Vermont.” The 500-acre former dairy farm is in a unique position – conceptionally and geographically. While the land may be fertile and the agricultural produce is verdant, the soil and water are both incredibly hard. As a consequence, the team has continually experimented, adapted and learned the best ways to use its triple terroir – grain, water and wood – to its advantage. “It makes who we are,” Ireland says. “You’re starting with very simple ingredients – rye and water. So, they are going to make up a big part of your flavour profile. I think terroir is huge in any distillation process.” Another huge part of the innovation at WhistlePig and the thing that really excites Ireland is the single finish programme. The Whiskey Blender has carte blanche to pick barrels and make one-off products. Part of her role, and one you sense she relishes, is finding the barrels. Ireland scours barrel libraries and leans on her contacts for anything new and exciting that appears on the market. There’s little she won’t try at least once. “I’m willing to put whiskey into anything,” Ireland says with those wide eyes. “I’m always looking for something different and unique. It’s fun to see when it’s going to hit that sweet spot between under-finished and over-finished.” She has been experimenting with Triple Sec and apricot brandy barrels, and a “couple of different wine finishes” are all maturing when we speak. The way the stills are designed (by Pickerell) allow for flexibility and are perfect for experimentation on both the front and back end. As with any experimentation, there have been some less successful outcomes. “I did a coffee barrel that was awful,” Ireland says, stifling a laugh. “It was bad. I was thinking like Irish Coffees and I thought it could work really well. People drink whiskey and coffee together anyways but that did not turn out good.” She hasn’t abandoned that idea just yet though. “I do think there are some adjustments that I could make and potentially still get a good product on that line of thought, but our first try was not there.” In terms of unicorns, Ireland says there are a couple of different Californian barrels she’d like to try and she’s trying to get her hands on a rosé barrel. “Not a lot of rosés are barrel-finished,” she says. “But I think that would be super interesting and a lot of fruity flavours would come into the whiskey potentially.” For the time being, the Whiskey Blender is experimenting with the many barrels she watches over. “I’m going out pretty regularly and pulling samples and trying to hit that point where I think we get the best flavour out of the different barrels. I’m getting to continue to push the boundaries of what we can put whiskey into.” One suspects it won’t be long before Ireland’s story inspires a whole new generation of chemistry nerds. Browse all available WhistlePig whiskeys or read more Editorial 

Since it stormed onto the whiskey scene in 2015, WhistlePig has rarely been out of the headlines. Success, tragedy and villainy have all befallen the zero-generation distillery in its short history. We talk to the bright new light at the Vermont-based innovator

WhistlePig's bright new light on the next chapter in the Vermont-based rye whiskey innovator's history after a period of flux and front-page stories.

The story behind WhistlePig Rye Whiskey

WhistlePig: behind the headlines 

Waterford founder Mark Reynier speaks to Gavin Lucas about his obsession with terroir, traceability and transparency – and how his radical approach is driving unprecedented scientific research into the flavours derived from barley grown on different soil types

Waterford founder, Mark Reynier, discusses his obsession with terroir, traceability and transparency – and how his approach is driving pioneering research 

FONDATA: The Waterford Revolution

The Waterford Revolution

Mark Reynier is angry. After decades of shouting into the wind, his landmark Terroir Project – which scientifically proves the existence of terroir in whisky – has landed, and largely been derided or ignored by his peers.   “We have known this all along,” the founder and CEO of Waterford Distillery says. “There is a defence [in the industry] that terroir can’t exist in whisky because too many terrible things are done to the barley that negate it.”  Reynier is in the process of penning a “stinker” of a rebuttal to the latest dismissal of the academic study when we speak on a gloriously sunny, spring Islay morning. “It depends on whether you want terroir to exist or not,” he continues. “Of course it bloody doesn’t if you’re buying shiploads of [barley] in from the Ukraine. Who are you kidding? Open your eyes.  “But to deny it outright. To attack the message, attack the messenger, and destroy my reputation and everything. That’s why I have to do the Terroir Project, because I needed to be able to say: ‘You’re wrong, leave me alone.” When he joined the drinks industry in 1980, single malts represented 0.1% of sales and the national drink had become an industrial dog’s dinner, according to Reynier.    “I think everything went wrong, in my book, in the early ‘70s with the oil crisis, shutting down distilleries, recycling wood to cut costs and then adding [colour] at the last minute and chill filtering the whole thing to buggery,” he says.   He talks of an “age of innocence” before the ‘70s “when wood mattered, and barley actually tasted of something”. This halcyon period, coupled with his 20 years in the wine world, have influenced every decision he has made since. After 11 years polarising and challenging perceptions of age, peat-level, raw ingredient, and wood style at Bruichladdich, Reynier wanted to push the envelope even further with his next venture, Irish single malt distillery, Waterford.   “There is an enthusiasm in Ireland with the glass half-full as opposed to the Scottish half-empty,” Reynier says. “There is baggage in Scotland, even in Bruichladdich, with colleagues saying ‘ach no, you can’t be seen doing that. We’ll be laughed at.’” Absolute traceability is the goal at Waterford and this begins with the barley – looking back to that pre-1970s golden era, with varieties such as Hunter and Goldthorpe, trying to find flavours that have been bred out. Part of the Terroir Project has shown the two parent varieties from which all modern varieties are now propagated are too close together. “It’s like having a brother and sister as the source genetic material,” Reynier says. “For 50 years it has all come from the same bloody parents. And it wasn’t chosen on its flavour.” If confronting the Scotch and Irish whisk(e)y industry’s traditional wisdom wasn’t enough of a challenge, Reynier took up the mantle for rum in 2020 with the construction of the $20 million Renegade Distillery in Grenada. “I think rum’s problem is that nobody knows what real rum should be,” Reynier says. “Sixty countries make rum and it’s made from all sorts. There’s no uniformity, anything goes. So, everything does.  “For me, Renegade is a really simple question that we are seeking to answer and, no surprise, it is about terroir,” Reynier says. “It is about growing cane on different terroirs to produce different flavour compounds.”   In terms of other spirit categories Reynier has already got a remarkable gin to his name with Bruichladdich-produced Botanist. Most recently, he has toyed with the idea of agave, but fear of lawlessness and excruciatingly long harvests are battles he does not wish to tackle, yet.   “If a harvest of grapes fails one year or if a harvest of barley fails one year, then well fine, you’ve got the next year but with agave you haven’t. I think if I ever did anything it would be a Mezcal based on agave genetic modification to make it fruit more than once every 15 years and growing more of it. But that’s a bloody long-term project.” One suspects it won’t be long before that seemingly insurmountable challenge lures the tour de force that is Mark Reynier.  Browse all available Waterford whiskies and Renegade rums or read more Editorial 

With two single malts about to launch and a study at long last proving terroir in whisky exists, Waterford CEO Mark Reynier should be cock-a-hoop. Holly Motion finds out why that isn’t the case  

Waterford's Mark Reynier on his mission to produce single malt whiskies with a sense of place in Scotland with Bruichladdich and now in Ireland with Waterford

Waterford CEO Mark Reynier on terroir in whisky

Mark Reynier uncensored

The spirits market is booming. In October 2019, a bottle of 1926 Macallan FINE+RARE 60-Year Old became the most expensive bottle (of either wine or spirits) ever sold at auction in the world, going for £1.5 million – £300,000 more than the same whisky had sold for a year before.  That record may not have been broken yet, but it’s likely only a matter of time. There was a 33.37% increase in the volume of single malt Scotch whisky sold at auction in 2019, with 143,895 bottles sold, worth close to £58 million – a 41.54% increase on 2018. Over the last 10 years, rare whisky has outperformed every other alternative luxury asset, with 353% growth to 2020 Q2. “The rare whisky market has performed phenomenally well over the last decade, outperforming many other categories. We’ve seen growing demand in premium whisky from clients globally,” says Craig Norton, our Managing Director for the UK and Ireland. In five years, we’ve seen the number of spirits buyers rise by 601%, with spirits sales in the same timeframe growing by 698%.  It’s an exciting time for whisky, with a growing international audience as Scotch whisky exports rise (105% in the last 10 years), especially in developing markets like China (up 323% in 10 years). There are also an increasing number of younger consumers diving into the category nose-first; Sotheby’s first online spirits auction last year saw 42% of buyers aged under 40.  The market has so far been dominated by a handful of the biggest names in single malt Scotch, with The Macallan representing an astonishing 40% of the market by value; however
Japanese whisky isn’t far behind. A bottle of 55-year-old Yamazaki sold for HK$6.2 million (US$795,000) in August last year, setting a new record for the category.  The now-closed Karuizawa has become a cult name among collectors, and had something of a halo effect, as our Head of Spirits David Walters said, “Japanese whisky is still going crazy. We sold the Karuizawa Pearl Geisha 37 Year Old (56.9%) pre-release for £12,500 in bond; just a year later it was going for £24,800. The most expensive single bottle of whisky we’ve sold was a Yamazaki 50-year-old (2011 release), for £170,000.” The last two to three years has, however, seen a shift, with a new focus and interest on not buying just bottles but whole barrels or casks. “The ability to personalise or customise single cask bottling has proven extremely appealing to clients,” Norton says, “However, it’s not simple. Barriers can be a lack of understanding of value, the process of maturation or
reselling, or gaining access to the market.”  “The challenge can be guaranteeing provenance,” explains Walters. “Our preference is always to work directly with the distillery.” The IWSR estimates the value of the Scotch whisky cask market at $40 million – and forecasts a trend for cask sales in other categories, such as Bourbon, rum and other US whiskey. While occasionally we see more mature casks (such as a mature Macallan Sherry butt we sold last year, for £600,000), it is more common to see casks as futures, much like en primeur.  Given the long-term timeframe for producing fine whisky, with the first product often not released for five or 10 years, cask sales have fast become a way for the rising number of new distilleries to build revenue in their early years. It is rare for casks to be sold after the first year of production, however, making them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get in on a new distillery – one that may just be the next big thing. It’s this excitement, Walters says, that should attract buyers who are also in it for the journey. Naturally, “founders’ casks” – as they are known – are finite in supply, adding to their appeal for collectors. The spirits market remains dominated by single malt Scotch – with Brora, Karuizawa, Dalmore, Bowmore and Springbank amongst the most collected names – but consumers are branching out. “We’re beginning to see collectors diversify their portfolios,” says Walters, “discovering premium and collectable rums.” He highlights the popularity of Caroni – a Trinidad distillery, no longer in production, that has parallels with Karuizawa – and Hampden, in particular. Fortunately, Covid seems to be having little impact on sales. Even in the last year, the
market has seen 12% growth; as Knight Frank reports, “Anecdotally, drinkable investment classes have always down well in a downturn, perhaps as their owners have looked to drown their sorrows.” In fact, IWSR data shows that “between 2008 and 2012, global prestige-plus
spirits (generally $100+) grew 82% in volume, and almost 230% in value, [reinforcing]
the resilience of high-end spirits after economic challenges”. Nevertheless, our advice is always to buy only what you are prepared to drink – a worst-case scenario that few wine or spirits lovers find much of a burden. Browse all whiskies or read more Editorial

The spirits market has seen a decade of astounding performance – but what is happening, and what should you be looking to buy? 

The spirits market is booming. We take a closer look at the spirits market and explore what is happening, and what should you be looking to buy 

The spirits market overview 

In high spirits: market overview

“I can die happy now,” Jon Bonné chuckles to me. The writer spent almost a decade as the wine guy at The San Francisco Chronicle, and is now Managing Editor at Resy, having spent time at Punch, writing for Noble Rot, Decanter and many more in between. His latest book, The New French Wine, was released earlier this year and The New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov dedicated an entire column to singing its praises – something he almost never does.  The hefty, two-part tome has been a long time in the making – almost a decade, in fact. The idea was a frivolous suggestion, casually agreed to over one too many drinks (“unsulphured Gamay in Oakland – as one does”) with his editor in 2014, soon after the publication of his seminal The New California Wine. But what was conceived as part of his quest for “the next thing”, to build on the momentum of his first book, rapidly spiralled.  “It's very hard to see a bigger picture of French wine because it is so overwhelming,” Bonné tells me over Zoom. Initially he’d envisaged a few trips, a project that would take a couple of years – but it “kept growing and growing and growing”.  “There was this much bigger story that I was sort of stumbling into,” the writer says. He gradually realised that there was an “enormous meta transformation” taking place across France – and this is what the book wrestles with. As he writes in the book’s introduction, “I imagined the new French wine would be about the undiscovered country – the cracks between known places.” But as he soon discovered, the new French wine was everywhere – and it took him nine years to piece it all together.   The work is split into two separate books – The Narrative and The Producers, the former the story behind the reference guide that forms the latter. The Narrative is a deep dive into the face of France and its winegrowing today, broken down by region, with break-out essays on topics such as natural wine, farming and the appellation system. It’s a rich tapestry of stories, interjected with the frank and striking photography of Susannah Ireland and occasional illustrated map by Francesco Bongiorni, reminiscent of Art Deco postcards.  For Bonné, the “new France” is about postmodernism, about “wilful rejections of the b******t of the past”. It’s about a (re)focus on site, about producers seizing their destiny and hunting for a more sustainable approach – in the vineyard, winery and beyond – although it’s far from that simple. “To understand French wine and to love it, you simply have to embrace its messy, self-contradictory, and, yes, complicated postmodern reality,” he writes. He points to Muscadet and Beaujolais as two of the most exciting and representative regions of this movement – both having entirely reinvented themselves within a generation. Producers here, he tells me, are “doing the work and focusing on terroir and technique and farming”, while Champagne “has completely transformed its vision of what its wine should be”.  Change is most importantly, however, “an inclusive force” – and looking at who did (and didn’t) make it into The Producers, Bonné’s definitive gazetteer of the nation’s movers and shakers, shines a light on this. It’s not a list of the vignerons he loves, it’s a pain-staking selection of those he deems significant and meaningful in the context of the movement – encompassing both more traditional names and those on the fringes. Take the Bordeaux chapter; you’ll find Pétrus, Lafleur and Pontet-Canet, as well as many less conventional, smaller and often natural-leaning properties such as Clos 19 Bis or Ch. Julia – with “Benchmarks” and the more up-and-coming “Names to Know” highlighted.  It’s fascinating – and fun – to see these two, seemingly opposing strands of France’s wine scene woven together. When I queried the inclusion of these elder statesmen of French wine, he highlighted how, for him, Pontet-Canet perfectly exemplifies the change in France today, with the forward-thinking Tesseron family handing the keys to previous cellar master Jean-Michel Comme to do “radical, radical s**t”.  Bonné deliberately chooses to champion those who have revved the engine of broader revolution – and those who reflect that revolution’s values. When it comes to Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, for example, he describes how they “upheld the moral pillars of Burgundy and winemaking” and “use their power for good”; whereas one top Pauillac estate he vehemently tells me is “perpetuating the worst practices of the Bordeaux trade”. For him, “wine is a consumable” and, as 21st-century consumers, “people have a right to explore the values of producers”.   While Bonné certainly likes natural wine – and many of the movement’s figureheads feature in the book, he is far from an evangelist. When he first started thinking about the book, natural wine was different; “It hadn’t quite catalysed into this very specific cultural beast,” he says, a cultural beast born in Hackney, Bushwick or Paris’s 11th. He talks about the movement’s “sense of tragic fashion” and how, with its clique-y nature, it has “baked in its own expiration date”. There were, he tells me, producers that didn’t make the cut – those who act as a “cautionary tale” for natural wine. “There are wines that can be delicate to being transported. And then there are wines that are just f***ed up at the source,” he says frankly.   His outlook is broadly positive for France, the nation’s ongoing revolution and its vignerons, but the book also acts as a call to arms of sorts, for: “The enforcers of the old ways will be forced to adapt, or they will perish,” he writes.  It’s not a perfect book. With a work of this size (over 860 pages and 600,000 words), it is almost inevitably slightly out of date by the time it is printed – especially with the pace of change today. Lafleur’s entry, for example, talks of Acte but not Les Perrières. I’d also have loved to have captions for each of Susannah Ireland’s images, knowing where – and of whom – they were taken. But these are quibbles.   I can’t pretend to be unbiased. Bonné is one of my favourite wine writers. There’s a lightness to his phrasing, with dry humour and a palate that I tend to identify with – although I’d argue he’s become a little more funk-friendly over the years. His writing is intelligent without being arduous. Perhaps it’s because, like Andrew Jefford, he was and is a journalist first. What really fills his writing is a sense of joy, of almost gluttony – it’s still filled with the excitement that so many wine writers seem to lose, as they tire of bottle after bottle of exceptional wine. He’s still easily absorbed by the stories that make each one different. For me, he doesn’t fit neatly into the critic box, even though it’s a term he uses to describe himself repeatedly in our conversation. “The notion of a critic has devolved to a place where you are simply handing out numbers,” he explains, but to him his work is about “criticism at a deeper level”. It’s about “being able to dive into the culture and come away with the insights and interpretation, and explain why certain wines really do matter”.  And it is this that makes The New French Wine stand apart. It isn’t just a wine book; wine is the lens through which Bonné observes a broader cultural shift. Whether you agree with everything he says or not, it’s a joy to read, hold and look at. It’s a book that will prompt conversation, prompt you to uncork bottles, prompt you to consider quite how complicated – and endlessly fascinating – France’s wine scene is. And is there anything more French than that?  The New French Wine: Redefining the World’s Greatest Wine Culture (Ten Speed Press) is out now.  Read more Editorial 

Ten years after The New California Wine was published, Jon Bonné has published a new book – an epic tale of France’s revolution. Sophie Thorpe caught up with the author to talk about his ambitious project to capture The New French Wine

We sit down with Jon Bonne, the wine writer and author of The New French Wine, to find out more about his second book

Writer Jon Bonne on The New French Wine

Facing up to The New French Wine: Jon Bonné

It is hard to imagine The Balvenie without David Stewart MBE and vice versa. The story of each one is so entwined with the other that it’s nigh on impossible to unpick where one starts and the other ends. Since joining William Grant & Sons in 1962 as a whisky stocks clerk, Stewart has gone on to become of the most well-known and respected names in the Scotch whisky industry. He is, for many, the pioneer of cask finishing, and his achievements are far too numerous to list. When the incredibly humble man “hangs up his boots” after a 57-year-plus career, Kelsey McKechnie will become the youngest-ever female Malt Master. “Everyone always jokes and says do I feel the pressure and what does it feel like getting into a role like this. There definitely is an element of pressure around it but it’s funny, you really don’t feel it. I enjoy this role and I love being here. I’ve been very lucky, so I’m saying ‘let’s ride it out for as long as we can’,” the 29-year-old says with unfettered excitement. The Malt Master role is a very different one today than it was in the 1960s, something McKechnie and William Grant & Sons Master Blender Brian Kinsman continually rib Stewart about. “Obviously, way back in the ’60s we had very little to nose,” Stewart says in a flash. When he joined the family-owned business under Master Blender and Balvenie Malt Master Hamish Robertson, Glenfiddich and The Balvenie weren’t being bottled as single malts and Grant’s Standfast blend was the company’s bread and butter. Today, the triumvirate nose samples from Ailsa Bay, Girvan Distillery, Kininvie, Glenfiddich and The Balvenie. From the new-make spirit to mature samples, bottling runs to all the vat samples, everything produced at the William Grant distilleries in Scotland and Ireland passes under the noses of Kinsman, McKechnie and Stewart. This equates to approximately 40-50 Scotch, Irish whiskey, Bourbon and rum samples per day. There are a number of parallels in Stewart and McKechnie’s stories, which they don’t even seem to realise. Both started in very different roles and eyed an interesting opportunity to nose spirits. Through serendipity and, one suspects, a tremendous amount of inherent skill and hard graft, the two found their way into the nosing lab. And once faced with row upon row of whisky samples, the pair knew in an instant that they found their calling. “I always say I have been very lucky,” McKechnie says. “I’m such a firm believer in timing. I came into the team at a time when I had built up enough technical process skills to understand how whisky is produced and carry out analysis, and do all these different things and apply it to blending.” In 2018, Kinsman and Stewart approached 26-year-old McKechnie to ask if she would be interested in learning all things regarding Balvenie and eventually moving into the Malt Master role. She’d been with the company for almost four years at this time, working her way from the lab to the whisky stocks team, from the Lowlands to the beating heart of the business in Speyside. So, what does it take to become a Malt Master and what did the two whisky patriarchs see in the young female scientist at the infancy of her whisky career? According to Stewart, one of the biggest things is the nosing aspect. “We can identify what’s right and what’s not, just by nosing the whisky,” he says. “And that’s what takes the time to learn.” Stewart had already been through the process of training a successor with Brian Kinsman from 2001 to 2010. It might be hard for some to fathom why this apprenticeship takes the best part of a decade, but so much of the role is about instinct and the finest of margins. In the same way Robertson brought in samples for Stewart – albeit not quite as many – all those years before, Stewart to this day brings in spirit samples for Kinsman and McKechnie. “Really, it’s nosing together; pointing out things,” Stewart adds. “I bring in samples from different cask types and different ages. Brian just worked with me and gradually he took over and I was doing less and less.” When asked if she thinks she has a natural gift, McKechnie says it’s curiosity above anything else that’s required to be a good noser. “I think everybody just needs to be curious enough to want to nose. Most often – apart from a few people where it is genetic and there’s one reason or another that they don’t have a sense of smell – I actually think so many people will be fantastic nosers.” And the difference between Joe Bloggs and the youngest-ever female Malt Master? The word association piece, according to McKechnie. “So often we’ll see when people are starting up that they can nose something and they can say ‘this is different’. So we do difference nosing. We have one glass and we’re just nosing it against another and saying ‘pick up the difference or not’ – it’s often easy for people but they can’t put into play what they can pick up.” Like any other skill, McKechnie says it takes years of practice and fine tuning. “It’s like using a different language,” she says. “To remain fluent, you need to continually keep nosing and to be able to relate those words to what you’re picking up in nose and taste. I actually think everyone has a gift, if that’s what you want to call it, or the ability to do it. It’s just about really working out what flavour this is and what do we call it.” Sometimes tasting notes for spirits and wines can be a little, shall we say, creative. For this reason, at William Grant & Sons, free words are banned. “We’re really strict about what people can call the different spirits,” McKechnie explains. “It could be too easy for somebody to say ‘this smells like a walk in the park’ and we can find ourselves in a bit of a pickle.” When starting out, as a professional or merely an appreciator of spirits, this word association piece can be a barrier, according to McKechnie, but it shouldn’t be. “There is no need for whisky to be intimidating at all,” she says. “For me, I think it’s because people are so passionate about it. It gets everyone a little bit puffed up – I’m guilty of it as well. But there really is no need for it at all because it really is such an open area that there isn’t one strict answer so I’ll always say that to people – if you are new to it, make sure you get lots of water in there because whisky is just such a flavour bomb. I think people don’t really know what they’re nosing because there are 50-100 different flavours coming at you at once.” So, do the three professional nosers ever disagree? “Because I’ve only ever learned to nose and blend from David who has learned from Brian and vice versa, we don’t often butt heads or have a difference of opinion –  but it does happen,” McKechnie says with a coy smile. Rather than being daunted by the spectre of the longest-serving Malt Master and Kinsman – who has racked up a fairly daunting 24 years in role – McKechnie seems energised by the legacy and is visibly thrilled at the prospect of one day imparting this knowledge to her own apprentice. “I think it would be a massive compliment to be able to give someone the knowledge you have gained,” she says. “I really like the thought of actually one day being able to train someone.” When it comes to the future at The Balvenie, McKechnie says they have “many things bubbling away in the warehouses” and they have “a few more Balvenies tucked up our sleeves”. But, on a personal note, “it’s working with Brian and David day-in-day-out and gaining more of the understanding about what makes Balvenie so unique. Understanding more around the stock model and that 50-year horizon and ensuring that I’ve got the skills to make sure the next 50 years is looking good and that we’re not laying down all the wrong things.” The Balvenie maintains a lot of the traditional whisky-making traditions. It is the only Scotch whisky distillery to grow its own barley, use traditional floor maltings and keep coppersmiths and coopers on site. Rather than being gilded handcuffs, these ties to traditions allow the team to experiment at the point of distillation and Stewart has spearheaded a number of trials that have come from the maltings throughout his career. “I think if there is one thing that David has ever taught me, it’s about how important innovation is,” McKechnie says. “We always talk about the fact we’re the home of cask finishing. It was something that was second nature in David’s role until people started calling it innovation. “And it’s something that we always want to pass on. We’re constantly thinking about what’s next and how can we do something unique and what exciting things we have in the distillery that we could release and bring to everyone. “Obviously the Scotch Whisky Association is pretty strict, in a good way, so that no-one is going to mimic us, but we also like to push the boundaries a little bit and say, what can we really get away with here?” With a glint in her eye and an unmistakable enthusiasm in her voice, you can’t help but feel The Balvenie, when it comes to honouring tradition and driving innovation, is in very safe hands for the next 50 years and beyond. Browse all whisky or read more Editorial

David Stewart MBE is the longest-serving Malt Master. Kelsey McKechnie is the youngest female Malt Master Apprentice. Holly Motion speaks to the two Balvenie record-breakers about passing the baton, the weight of a legacy, and what it really means to lay down stocks for the next generation

Balvenie's longest-serving Malt Master David Stewart MBE and his successor Kelsey McKechnie on upholding tradition while driving innovation at the distillery.

The Balvenie, making of a master

The Balvenie: the making of a master

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