The Macallan, is arguably among the world's most famous Single Malts, a favourite of the connoisseurs and enthusiasts at the top end of the whisky market, referred to as the premium and the ultra-premium segments. The Scottish brand’s leadership of this category is so complete that of the 25 most expensive whiskies currently available for purchase globally, according to the longtime industry tracker Wine Searchers, 17 are from The Macallan. Of course, all these are special edition Single Malts with big names like The Macallan Lalique 50-Years old which is priced at over Rs 25 lakh a bottle, and The Macallan ‘The Reach’ 81-Years Old which retails for the Indian equivalent of Rs 24 lakh a bottle.
Of course, The Macallan is also a big player in the more affordable segment of the market as well. The Macallan Double Cask 12 Years sells in Mumbai for around Rs 10,000, but if you move up the ladder to Sherry Oak 18 Years, the price jumps to around Rs 68,000. But the rarefied world of high age, limited-edition Single Malts has largely been a creation of The Macallan, starting in the 1980s and 90s, and not many brands have been able to challenge its domination since.
Considering its exalted status in the whisky universe, it was only befitting that The Macallan kicked off its year-long 200th birthday celebration last month with a specially curated, spectacularly choreographed theatrical extravaganza, created by the Cirque du Soleil, the renowned Canadian entertainment company that combines circus acrobatics with dance and music. Staged daily for three weeks in a converted warehouse, adjacent to its ultra-modern distillery at the 485-acre The Macallan Estate in Speyside, Scotland, for an audience made up of The Macallan invitees and paying public, the stunning immersive multimedia show combined Cirque staples like aerial silk, contortions, cyr wheel, hair suspensions, flamenco, etc. with Scottish music and dance.
The specially choreographed Cirque Du Soleil which kicked of The Macallan’s 200th anniversary celebration. © Macallan
Inspired by the stories and myths of the Scottish highlands, the show’s key message is about the need for humans to reconnect with nature. The narrative follows of the adventures of Davonna, the spiritual guardian of the Scottish Highlands, and Ayla, a young colorist, and daughter of a beloved Master whisky maker, who has become detached from the natural world in her obsessive quest to recreate an elusive shade of red colour in memory of her father. Davonna takes Ayla under her wings and takes her on a journey where they encounter a series of folkloric figures culminating with Ayla reconnecting with the nature around her.
Starting with an interactive first part where the performers mingle with the audience, followed by a proscenium performance, the show has been cleverly curated to target every sensory aspect of the audience: sight, sound, touch and culminating in taste and smell in the form of a bespoke Single Malt whisky dram in glasses placed on a Tree of Life that the guests are invited to partake on the stage at the end. “We are a very playful brand,” says Jaume Ferras, the Creative Director at The Macallan, “and this show is about our connection with nature in Scotland, staged in a manner that is playful, positive and uplifting. Cirque du Soleil was a perfect partner for this.”
The Macallan 1926 60 YO Valerio Adami which was auctioned by Sotheby’s for a record $2.7 million last November. © Getty Images | Tristan Fewings
Considering its expansive scale and the scope of its message, it is, not surprising that the Cirque show was in development for nearly five years. And though the current run ended on May 31, the The Macallan’s deal with Cirque du Soleil is a ‘multi-year collaboration’ and Ferras does not rule out more shows, or the fact that it could be staged in other parts of the world.
The Cirque show is only one of the many events that have been planned for the brand’s year-long bicentennial commemoration. “When we looked back at our archives, we couldn't find a fixed date when the founders were granted the distilling licence in 1824, so we decided to make it a year-long celebration,” Ferras says. The celebration will have an Indian connection as well. Ferras says that The Macallan is in talks with an Indian ‘artiste’ for doing something that ‘captures the richness of Indian creativity’, but he wouldn't reveal any name or details.
An extremely rare complete set of The Macallan Red Collection of 6 bottles including a 78 Years Old bottle, the oldest ever released by The Macallan, at an auction in October 2020 © Getty Images | Michael Bowles
Ferras is a long time admirer of this country and its craftsmanship. A Spanish national, who speaks with an accent that is a cross between Iberian and Scottish, Ferras has steered The Macallan's creative direction for more than a decade. “India is so powerful in terms of colour and details,“ he says, “It is unique because of its originality. Nothing is copied from elsewhere. That is why I find it inspiring,” he says.
But like other Scotch whisky companies, The Macallan has its eyes more focussed on the commercial side of the Indian market. "We need to get better commercially in India,” Ferras says. The country, as is well known, is now the world’s largest market for Scotch in terms of volumes, and the fifth largest in terms of value. As the Scotch Whisky Association, the main Scottish trade body representing whisky makers, said recently, “India overtook France to be the industry’s largest global market by volume for the first time - the volume of Scotch Whisky exports to India have grown by more than 200% in the past decade alone. India is the largest whisky market in the world but Scotch Whisky has just a 2% share of the Indian whisky market. The SWA believes that reducing the 150% tariff in India could increase the value of exports to the market by £1 billion over five years.” Much of this, of course hinges on the new government in India concluding the Free Trade Agreement with the UK, which has been under negotiation for more than 10 years.
The Back Story
Now part of the Glasgow-based The Edrington Group Ltd, a privately run international spirits company whose stable includes other brands like Highland Park, The Famous Grouse and London Dry Gin, The Macallan was founded as one of Scotland's earliest licenced distilleries by a barley farmer and teacher by the name of Alexander Reid in 1824.
The Macallan’s award winning ultra-modern distillery building in Speyside with its rolling roofscape that blends into the surrounding. © Alamy
What was unique about Reid’s distillery compared to the several others in the Speyside area was its size. He refused to go along with the conventional wisdom of creating large, high-volume copper stills, which are at the heart of the distillation process, preferring instead to make his stills much smaller. The short and squat nature of the stills, he theorized, allowed for maximum contact for the spirit with copper, leading to a more full-bodied distillate, which is then matured in oak casks. Two centuries later, The Macallan continues to use the same shape and size stills that Reid designed, calling them the ‘curiously small’ stills. It is one of the hallmarks of its distillery, one that still sets it apart from other whisky producers in Speyside.
But more than Reid, it was Janet Isabella Harbinson, the daughter of Roderick Kemp who took over the distillery in 1892, who shaped the future of The Macallan in the manner that we know it now. After the premature death of her father and husband, Harbinson assumed control of The Macallan in 1918. The impact of her actions, especially in the areas of distillation and maturation processes, are still being felt at The Macallan, more than a century later. Much of The Macallan’s reputation in the last four decades, especially in the thriving secondary market, has been built around the whisky that she distilled and stored away in sherry casks for maturing in the 1920s, particularly in the year 1926.
Since the mid-1980s when some of these casks were first opened, what they found inside in terms of matured whisky has been invaluable. Bottled and sold as high-aged special editions of The Macallan, these whiskies have been fetching world record prices ever since. A bottle of Macallan Valerio Adami 60 Years Old 1926, for example, sold for a world record price of £2.1 million at a Sotheby's auction in London in November last year. All the 17 The Macallan whiskies that feature in the Wine-Searcher list cited earlier are from the same vintage. Not surprising then that in the company’s official history Harbinson is talked about as the “essence and personification of The Macallan today.”
The inside of the distillery with its `curiously small’ copper stills © Alamy
Following Harbison’s death on the eve of World War II, her descendants proved to be equally prescient in their approach to business, particularly during the war years, which are considered to be the toughest decade for the Scottish whisky industry. After the UK government imposed restrictions on the production of whisky to save barley to feed the public, anticipating food shortages, most distilleries had to either shut down or dig into their cellar and prematurely sell whiskies that were stored away for aging before the war. The owners of The Macallan, though, made the prudent decision not to touch their maturing stock and somehow rode out the tough times without much damage. It was a decision that would pay handsome dividends later to future generations of owners.
The initial post-war decades were largely uneventful for Macallan-Glenlivet, as the brand was called then (it was changed to The Macallan in the early 1980s). As a brand, it remained largely unknown even outside of Scotland until the 1970s, which saw the arrival of the Shiach brothers, Peter and Allan, the grandnephews of Janet Harbinson, at the helm of the company. They made some important decisions that laid the foundation for The Macallan’s worldwide renown and success. The most important of these was the move to refocus The Macallan as a Single Malt brand, rather than a maker of a variety of whiskies like what everyone else was doing. This turned out to be a groundbreaking move that would be emulated by many other Scottish whisky brands in the subsequent years.
The other major decision was to hire a team of smart advertising executives to create advertising and marketing strategies to help sell Macallan outside of its traditional market of Scotland. The hundreds of clever ads the team created and strategically placed next to the popular daily crossword in UK national newspapers like The Times made The Macallan a well-known name across England.
But the marketing strategy extended beyond the UK, into other markets like the US, and through other innovative mediums including films. Allan Shiach, who took over as the Chairman of the company in 1978 after the premature death of his elder brother, had a parallel career as a successful screenwriter for films and TV under the name of Allan Scott. He had become well-known in Hollywood, working for big-name directors like Nicolas Roeg, Peter Bogdanovich, Danny Boyle, and others, with credits that included films like The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Castaway, Shallow Grave, and the more recent OTT hit The Queen’s Gambit. So, not surprisingly, films became a crucial part of the company’s consumer outreach. Bottles of The Macallan whisky were strategically first placed in Nicolas Roeg’s famous 1973 film Don't Look Now starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. Since then, The Macallan has been seen in more than 90 films and TV series, including famously, in the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall, where the bad guy Javier Bardem offers Daniel Craig a drink saying “Fifty-years-old Macallan, a particular favorite of yours, I understand,” before killing his betraying accomplice Bernenice Marlohe.
The films provided worldwide exposure to The Macallan. Combined with its ongoing advertising efforts through other mediums, this helped propel sales of The Macallan open in big overseas markets, particularly in the US and Europe, where its revenues jumped several folds in very little time. It not only helped The Macallan survive the whisky industry recession of the 1980s (known as the ‘whisky loch’) on account of the oversupply that led to the shutting down of many distilleries, but also established itself as a global brand.
Allan Scott's film legacy continues to be a big part of the brand's outreach effort even now. In the words of Jaume Ferràs, “Films are in The Macallan’s DNA”. In recent times, he himself has commissioned some on behalf of the brand. A short film called ‘The Spirit of 1926’ directed by BAFTA winner Mike Newell (of Four Weddings and A Funeral fame) charting the life of Janet Harbinson and starring Emily Mortimer had a theatrical release last year. ‘Roots,’ a song specially composed for The Macallan’s 200th birthday by the famous British singer-songwriter Emeli Sandé, had a companion film starring the Scottish actor David Tennant.
Another major move by Allan Shiach in the 1980s that helped elevate The Macallan Single Malt as a global luxury brand was to open up its cellars and launch high-age special editions of vintage whiskies sitting in its maturing casks. The Anniversary Malt 25 Years Old and 50 Years Old were launched in 1983. And in 1986 came the big one, in the form of The Macallan 1926 60 Years Old. The story is that the then Managing Director of the company, Hugh Mitcalfe, chanced upon the famous cask no. 263 while sorting through the company’s cellar inventory. It was discovered to have an ABV above 40% despite maturing for 60 years. It was nosed for quality, which was found to be perfect, and 40 bottles were produced from the whisky in the cask.
The Macallan’s more affordable range, which is the mainstay of its product line © Macallan
Despite the demand from whisky collectors and connoisseurs, the bottles were only selectively released in the market over the next two decades. The first special release came in 1989, when 12 bottles were sold featuring a label designed by the famed British pop artist Sir Peter Blake. A further 12 bottles were released in 1993, with a label painted by Italian pop artist Valerio Adami. One bottle was released in 1999, hand-painted by the Irish artist Michael Dillon. The rest were released as part of the Macallan Fine & Rare series launched a few years later.
This collection of bottles from the 1926 60 Years Old were trendsetters in many ways. They have been breaking records for the world’s most valuable whiskies from the earliest days, when in 1987, a bottle sold at a New York auction for £5000, an unheard-of figure in those days. Four years later, in 1991, a Peter Blake label bottle from the same collection broke that record by selling for £6375, and five years later a Valerio Adami label went for £12,000. In 2017, a Michael Dillon bottle surfaced at a Christie's auction in November 2018, where it sold for £1.2 million. The same year, another bottle, this time one from the Fine & Rare lot, sold for £1.5 million. Most recently, in November last year, the Valerio Adami label cited earlier bettered that record.
Though these auction prices do not directly benefit The Macallan, the rub-off on its brand reputation is beyond measure. Over the last three decades, it has helped transform The Macallan into a dominant global force in the world of luxury single malts. Sales have surged not just of its high-age limited edition releases like the Red Collection, Classic Cut, Tales of The Macallan, The Reach, and others, but more importantly, of the affordable offerings in its Classic Range and Travel Exclusives.
The staggering auction prices and the returns they have provided to collectors have also ensured that the various limited editions of The Macallan are the backbone of the thriving global secondary market for super premium whiskies. This is the market where people buy and sell whiskies as an investment. It is not something that makes Jaume Ferràs happy. “We are not involved with the secondary market and we don't understand it,” he says, “and it breaks our heart to see that after all the effort that we put into crafting a great whisky, people buy them not to drink and enjoy, but to store them away as an investment.”
A stunning example of this is the fact that no one really knows if any buyer has ever opened and tasted a bottle from The Macallan 60 Year Old collection from 1986. When Kirsteen Campbell, The Macallan Master Whisky Maker, did a nosing of The Macallan 1926 Adami that set the world record last year, ostensibly to check the authenticity of the bottle, her verdict about the whisky was keenly awaited and much talked about. “The whisky,” she said, “had an incredible depth of character – rich dark fruits, black cherry compote alongside sticky dates, followed by intense sweet antique oak, which for me is a recognizable note of such aged Macallan. It was a very special moment to experience this iconic 60 Years Old single malt.”
Six Pillars of The Macallan
The foundation of The Macallan’s success is based on what it calls the ‘six pillars’. The first one is, for obvious reasons, the company’s stunningly pretty and verdant 485-acre estate in the heart of the Speyside whisky region of Scotland. Barley has been grown here, and whisky has been distilled since 1543. In 2018, the company opened its ultra-modern distillery and visitor center, which has the look of an installation art piece. Spread over 22,000 square meters, it is an award-winning marvel of architecture with a green, rolling roofscape that blends with the rolling hills of the surrounding areas.
The beautiful steel-and-glass interior encloses The Macallan's second pillar — the 24 copper ‘curiously small stills’ which visitors can admire from a viewing gallery around it. As every visitor to the distillery is told pointedly: “Their unique size and shape give the spirit maximum contact with the copper, which provides the rich, fruity, full-bodied flavors characteristic of The Macallan”.
A 1967 picture of The Macallan cellar with its ageing sherry casks © Getty Images | Marka
Nearly 80 percent of The Macallan’s character, flavor, aroma, and color comes from the sherry-seasoned casks made from European and American oak in which the whisky is aged. Hence, the next three pillars of the brand’s success start with these exceptional oak casks, each of which takes over five years to make by Spanish coopers using traditional techniques. The seasoning of these casks with sherry wine happens under expert supervision in Jerez, Spain. Finally, the natural color that these sherry-seasoned casks impart to the whisky during maturation can vary depending on the color of the wood, from light oak to dark mahogany.
The relationship between Spanish sherry makers and Scottish whisky companies like The Macallan goes back over 200 years. The English in those days had a particular liking for Spanish sherry, a fortified wine, which was shipped to England in wooden casks.
The Scottish whisky makers discovered a great use for the casks that were discarded after the sherry was bottled in England. They found that if they aged their whisky in the ex-sherry casks, it took on a whole new character in taste, aroma, and color. The char left over in the casks (from the toasting process employed in their making) filtered out the rough edges in the taste of the whisky. The higher-proof whisky was also able to coax out the sherry absorbed by the wood and mix with it, giving the maturing whisky a rich new flavor and color.
As a result, sherry cask maturation became a standard practice across the Scottish whisky industry. The situation, however, changed in the 1950s and 60s when sherry started getting shipped in steel and synthetic containers. Around this time, the Spanish government also made it mandatory for sherry to be exported only in bottles.
For Scottish whisky makers, this presented an existential threat. The sherry casks were their lifeline, the crucial source of the flavor profile of their whiskies. While many of them shifted to American ex-bourbon casks permanently, others traveled to Spain to source sherry casks directly from sherry makers.
The latter option, however, did not last for too long. Declining sales of sherry around the world made Spanish winemakers cut down on making new casks. At the same time, they were reluctant to part with their used casks because casks can be used repeatedly for aging sherry for many years.
As a result, companies like The Macallan were left with no choice but to move towards a long-term solution to the cask shortage—manufacture their own casks. The company now sources its own wood, both European and American oak, and gets its whisky casks made by traditional Spanish coopers in Jerez. It has also formed a partnership with Bodegas Grupo Estevez S.L., the owners of the Valdespino, one of Spain’s oldest and most prestigious wine and sherry makers, to age and season The Macallan casks with their sherry. This arrangement ensures The Macallan a steady supply of high-quality new casks for the future.
The sixth and final pillar that defines The Macallan is what it calls ‘mastery,’ which it describes as a combination of the brand’s heritage, craftsmanship, creativity, and commitment to excellence. “We are unique,” says Jaume Ferràs, “because we are very loyal to our DNA, which manifests in two ways—craftsmanship in terms of ingredients, sherry casks, the way we make whisky, etc., and the playful manner in which we express our creativity. We don’t take ourselves too seriously, which is why we can have a laugh at ourselves.”
