How The Macallan mastered the long game

This month’s issue of Whisky Business, City PM’s monthly look at the world of whisky, takes a look at The Macallan and its unique ownership structure.

The Macallan is one of the most iconic Scotch whisky brands, having carved out a niche for itself at the luxury end of the market.

Bottles have consistently broken records at auction, notably The Macallan 1926, which itself has set three world records. In 2023, The Macallan Valerio Adami 1926 sold at Sotheby’s for £2.18m – a record it still holds to this day. 

Founded by Alexander Reid, a barley farmer and school teacher, in 1824, The Macallan was one of the first licensed distilleries in Scotland after the introduction of The Excise Act of 1823.

The distillery was acquired by Roderick Kemp in 1892 and on Kemp’s death in 1909, the Roderick Kemp Trust was established to secure the future ownership of Macallan.

Reformed as a private limited company in 1966, the trust was acquired by Highland Distillers, which was in turn acquired by Edrington, owned by The Robertson Trust.

Today, The Robertson Trust remains Edrington’s principal shareholder and has given £396m to charities in Scotland.

Rachel Walters, operations director at The Macallan, attributes the brand’s success to its focus on quality, continuity and its ownership structure. “It’s a sense of carrying on a baton, of standing on the shoulders of giants,” she says. “I’m laying down whisky for let’s say the 2040s, 2050s, and onwards.

“But the only reason that I can serve amazing 40, 50, and 60-year-old whisky today is because my predecessors didn’t bottle it as a three-year-old. They kept it, made the effort in quality casks, quality barley, and quality production. In a funny way, it’s a very calming thing to think of it that way.

“I just want to keep that red thread of quality consistency going,” she adds. 

While most businesses are focused on hitting short-term targets, quarterly reports and 12-month outlooks, whisky producers still have to plan with a multi-decade horizon. 

The Macallan has become a master of this art, thanks, in part, to its ownership structure. The Robertson Trust doesn’t have shareholders to impress, and after barely two centuries in the business, it knows the industry’s cyclicality all too well. 

“This is my third cycle of ups and downs,” Rachel says and “it makes you more sanguine about the whole thing.” However, throughout the peaks and troughs, the brand hasn’t stopped growing. “If I draw a trendline through The Macallan’s growth back from the beginning, it’s really steady,” she adds. 

The operations director puts this growth down to the relentless focus on the quality of the liquid in the bottle rather than marketing campaigns.

“You wouldn’t normally put somebody like me in charge of a brand home or a brand like The Macallan. I’m a process chemist, right? My expertise, if I have any, is making whisky. I’m not a brand person,” she explains. 

This was a “very conscious decision” by the group to prioritise the foundation of quality. “My job is to make an exceptional whisky, have exceptional hospitality, bring people to it, and then we can have fun with it afterwards.” 

Still, having fun with the brand is something the team takes quite seriously, with releases such as The Macallan Diamonds Are Forever 55th Anniversary Release and the James Bond 60th Anniversary Release as part of the brand’s 007 collaboration. 

“The whisky is sort of tall, dark, and mysterious—a bit like Sean Connery. We play with it, but the actual liquid has to be darn fine. It has to be; otherwise, you are overpriced rather than exceptional, and that’s not where we play.”

“People will buy one bottle off a fun marketing proposition, but once they’ve tasted the liquid, if the liquid doesn’t merit it, they’re not going to go back and buy a second,” she adds.

In 2018, The Macallan opened its new distillery and visitor experience in Speyside.

Built at a cost of £140m, the distillery is designed to offer a high-end visitor experience while respecting and blending into the landscape of the Speyside region and it has since won multiple awards, including the RIAS Andrew Doolan Best Building in Scotland Award (2019), and it made the RIBA Stirling Prize Shortlist (2019). 

“The explanation for our production process, our craftsmanship, and why it’s different—the best way to land that is to bring people here and show them,” says Rachel. That’s why The Macallan’s home is so important for the brand. “What we’ve got here is a factory. It’s a very, very beautiful factory, but it’s a factory, and we just open our doors and show them what we do,” Rachel says. 

“People don’t appreciate that the reason why whisky is here is that the northeast of Scotland has this funny little microclimate. That’s why it’s so fertile and such a great barley-growing area,” she explains.

“We are in one of the lowest rainfall areas in the entire UK…because we’re sheltered by the Cairngorms and kept warm by the Gulf Stream, we’re dry, and the landscape is spectacular,” she concludes.

Well worth a visit to get behind the scenes of this storied brand.