The name’s Bond – whisky bond
It looks like a 007 villain’s lair, but inside is a new £140m distillery
ON a plateau of land standing guard over the sun-speckled River Spey lies a former barley field suffering from what looks like a severe dose of the mumps.
Four swollen grassy mounds lined up in a row and headed by a larger, more steeply sided bump have risen out of this fertile countryside with a uniformity rarely attributable to Mother Nature. It is immediately clear that some hand other than hers has been hard at work here.
The imagination runs riot – could this strangely bulging landscape be part of a movie set, home to the newest Bond villain? An underground lair to rival Karl Stromberg’s giant submersible command centre in The Spy Who Loved Me, or a hideout for a Teletubby’s evil twin, perhaps, hell-bent on world domination? Well, half-right, maybe.
Beneath this extraordinary turf-roofed artifice above the Moray village of Craigellachie in the heart of whisky country lies the secret subterranean home of Macallan’s £140million distillery of the future.
Packed to its uniquely designed rafters with spirit stills and washbacks rather than missile silos, it contains enough high-tech gadgetry and scientific know-how to send even Q into raptures.
Yet the brand’s owners, Glasgow-based Edrington, believe its innovative space-age approach will arm them with the economic firepower to dominate their rivals in the premium spirits market for years to come.
Furthermore, the cleverly engineered interactive visitor experience may well come to define the modern-day distillery tour, combining hands-on exhibits and audiovisual presentations to describe the whisky-making process with renewed verve and an almost devotional dedication to the brand.
One particular exhibition culminates in a bottle of Macallan rising from the centre of a whirring display like, well, a spirit reborn. The symbolism is difficult to miss.
Edrington’s chief executive Ian Curle, who might make an excellent Bond baddie with his lean features and unflinching stare, admitted that the scale and ambition of the new building – six years in the planning and more than three in the building – had thrown down the gauntlet to other producers.
‘We had a choice to make at the start of this process when we were looking at the future of the business,’ he said at a press preview days before today’s official opening. ‘Do we just build a new distillery or do we really go for it and look to build something really ambitious that will meet consumer expectations for years to come and attract tourists and boost the economy?’ Part of a £500million investment in the brand, 60 new jobs have been created by the new distillery alone and visitor numbers are expected to double once the doors are thrown open to the public on June 2. Those who pay the £15 entrance fee will be treated to an interactive tour based on The Macallan’s ‘Six Pillars’ whisky-making philosophy. Every distillery has its ancient lore to tug at the heartstrings. Macallan’s speaks to its history, the peculiarities of its distillation and maturation processes, including its preference for American oak casks.
But it is the magnificence of the building itself which truly steals the show. There is something cathedral-like about this soaring space, with its gracefully flowing lines drawing the eye ever upwards to the undoubted highlight – its mesmerising timber roof.
Made up of 380,000 individual components, it is one of the most complex timber roof structures in the world and the larger of its five mounds could accommodate the dome of St Paul’s in London.
Above the timber is insulation, a vapour control system, flexible waterproofing and an irrigation system that draws water from the Spey in summer months, all topped off with 10cm of soil and planting. There are 14,000 square metres of meadow across the five crests seeded with a mix of indigenous grasses and wildflowers.
The awe-inspiring design by renowned architect Graham Stirk was chosen following an international competition, which stipulated that the exterior must blend with the 370-acre estate, an ‘area of great landscape value’.
Stirk, inspired by the rolling hills of Speyside, used high-clarity triple glazing to allow natural light to flood in along the length of the building, while a glass end-wall offers views towards the brooding presence of Ben Rinnes.
The old distillery, a hodgepodge of ugly industrial buildings, will remain in use until the new one – the first spirit ran through the stills last December – is fully operational, in a decade.
It has the potential, though, to hit 15million litres of pure alcohol a year, compared with its predecessor’s 9million. And with rich overseas markets, increased production is the name of the game.
Of course, investing in whisky is always a gamble, as any broker will tell you, and Macallan have just made the biggest gamble in the history of the brand.
There again, 007 never could resist a wager, either.