It is all about following your nose
Kirsteen Campbell is the first woman in charge at the famous distillery in the Scottish highlands.
So the first thing you need to know about Kirsteen Campbell’s job is that she doesn’t sit around and drink all day.
The master whisky maker for The Macallan, one of the world’s most prestigious producers of single malt and located in the highlands of Scotland, instead spends a lot of her time actually smelling the whisky. This is also not as glamorous as it sounds as it comes with quite a few conditions.
This story appears in the August issue of WISH, out on Friday, August 4 with The Australian.
“We do put some rules in place in the sample room,” Campbell explains to WISH about where she and her team of eight smell – or “nose” to be technically correct – the thousands of whisky samples every month taken from sherry-seasoned oak casks where the precious liquid is being aged.
“There are no perfumes or aftershaves allowed in there, no strong scented soaps or hand lotions because it can interfere with your ability to nose the whiskies. I also don’t like having coffee because coffee for me is quite a strong flavour and it can linger. So I wait for the end of the day to have one.”
Despite these rules and regulations, Campbell truly enjoys what she does. She is the first female master whisky maker for The Macallan and was appointed in 2019 after 12 years working for parent company Edrington and its other whisky distilleries The Famous Grouse and Naked Malt. This followed a degree in food science and a general inquisitiveness for how things are made.
“I love nothing more than going into the distillery and the sample room and nosing all the samples and getting to chat to the team,” she says.
“My role has so much variety, no two days are the same. As well as being involved in lots of things day to day, it’s also very strategic. “A key part of my role is also assuring the future. Planning Scotch whisky is several years in the making because the spirit we are putting in the cask today is not going to be consumed for at least 12 years. There also has been five years of planning for those casks so it’s actually a 17-year-lead time.”
The Macallan was one of the first legally licensed distilleries and is located in Speyside, in the north-east of the highlands on the River Spey.
It was founded in 1824 when barley farmer and school teacher Alexander Reid was persuaded to apply for one of the new licences issued after the 1823 Excise Act was passed (a nice way for the government to get in on the burgeoning industry).Its whisky has achieved some of the highest prices in the world, with bottles selling at auction for millions of dollars.
This has included a bottle of the 60-year-old The Macallan, originally distilled in 1926, which sold for US$1.9 million at a Sotheby’s auction in 2019.Campbell also grew up in the highlands of Scotland, on the north coast, so whisky was always in the background given where she lived and her nationality.
“My dad, who is no longer with us, loved whisky, so it was always something that was there, and there were a few distillers in the area, not as many as where The Macallan is located in Speyside, but they were there,” she says.
But the master taster didn’t start appreciating whisky until she was at university studying food science. “The Famous Grouse whisky was having a food fair and they were serving Ginger Grouse, which is the whisky served with ginger ale and lots of lime, and that was the first time I had tasted whisky in that way,” Campbell recalls. “It had always been neat or over ice, so that was a real eye-opener for me as it allowed me to see these other approaches to drinking whisky.”
Campbell started her career in a lab at a whisky distillery, and it was there she did her first nosing test. “I realised then I was quite good at it,” she says. “I am Scottish so I’m not going to be overly boastful about it, but I definitely have a natural ability for it and I have a fascination for the complexities of flavour and flavour science. I knew this is the way I wanted my career to go.”
To get a job nosing for a whisky distillery, you actually have to take a smell test during the interview process as it is a combination of natural aptitude and on-the-job training. Campbell says all her team have learnt over many years to be able to tell whether the whisky is maturing in the right style for the right type of cask. They take samples from specific casks, mix it with water, and then smell it.
“As a team, we are looking at thousands of cask samples a month,” she tells WISH over Zoom from Scotland. “And we then begin to build the flavour profile of the overall whisky, so we are calling in different types of casks, sometimes different ages, bringing them all together.”One of the whiskies Campbell and her team are working on is
The Reach, a rare single malt that was created in 1940 during World War II. It is the oldest whisky ever released by the distillery, coming from a single sherry-seasoned oak cask and bottled in a glass decanter. Only 288 decanters of the whisky have been released – only one into the Australian market – and each will retail for more than $240,000.
And this is where one of the downsides of Campbell’s job comes into play –her friends may hope she brings a bottle of The Reach to the next dinner party.
“I am always expected to bring whisky and there is a high expectation of which whisky I am going to bring as well,” she says, laughing.
