The Balvenie

Of all the houses I have worked alongside, The Balvenie has a particular place. Mortlach is Speyside at its meatiest. The Macallan is Speyside built on sherry casks. Glenmorangie is the Highland counterpoint, and Louis XIII is patience in a decanter. The Balvenie is Speyside done slowly, by hand: the five rare crafts the maison has practised at Dufftown since 1892. Whenever I have come across them, I have recognised something of my own work.

I have admired The Balvenie for longer than the public record shows. When I think about what restraint asks of me, the William Grant & Sons house is the one I measure myself against most often. I mean how the hands move when nobody is watching, which has nothing to do with theatre. The Shin’Labo Food Pairing programme of April to May 2022 is where the maison and I met in public. What came before, the years of paying attention to what David Stewart was doing at his bench, I do not put on paper. I do not need to.

The Balvenie, in their own words

The Balvenie was founded in 1892 at Dufftown, Banffshire, a quarter-mile from Glenfiddich and adjacent to Mortlach. It has distilled continuously since 1893. The maison belongs to William Grant & Sons, the Scottish distiller William Grant founded in 1887 and still owned and run by the Grant family. That matters to me. A family house is a different thing from the corporate portfolios that own The Macallan (Edrington), Mortlach (Diageo) or Glenmorangie (LVMH/MHD).

The maison’s own marketing calls them the five rare crafts, and they are the heart of why I have measured myself against this house for so long.

Almost everywhere else in Scotch, economy, scale or modernisation has pushed these crafts out. The Balvenie has kept them. To me that is the discipline of keeping hold of the crafts that make the spirit what it is, and it is the discipline I have tried to keep with my own hands.

On David C. Stewart MBE. From 1962 to 2023, sixty-one years, David Stewart was Malt Master at The Balvenie. He pioneered cask finishing as a published technique, mentored the maison’s current generation, and kept the standard at his bench for most of a working lifetime. His successor since 2023 is Kelsey McKechnie, who trained under him. My work with The Balvenie falls inside Stewart’s tenure, and the standard I measured myself against was his.

The Balvenie × Shin’Labo Food Pairing programme, April to May 2022

The programme that brought the maison and my cooking to one table ran at Shin’Labo by James Won, Mitsui Shopping Park Lalaport KL Bukit Bintang City Centre, between 13 April and 11 May 2022. Five outlets covered it in that four-week window, in two languages.

Shin’Labo had opened on 15 February 2022, so by April the room had been running for two months. The Macallan Dining Experience had started the same day Shin’Labo opened, which makes The Balvenie programme the second prestige-spirit chapter the room hosted. The pairing format was already working, and I plated the Balvenie expressions against it in the rhythm the room had settled into.

The press record is clear. The earliest dated coverage was Goody25 on 13 April and the latest was Pin Prestige on 11 May. In between, Kings Sleeve, Moretify and Gentscode Magazine gave it serious coverage. Two outlets wrote in Chinese (Pin Prestige and Moretify) and three in English. Gentscode’s headline, An Exquisite Evening with The Balvenie — Chef James Won, became the programme’s title of record.

The format was the prestige-spirit pairing Shin’Labo had been built for. Each course was matched to an expression, with the maison’s spirit at the centre of the plate. What gave the evening its weight was the discipline of the pairing, more than the rarity of the pour.

Two houses in one Speyside town

Two of the maisons in my spirits work share the same town, and this is one of them. Mortlach and The Balvenie are both Dufftown distilleries, and they stand at opposite ends of what Speyside can do.

Mortlach is the Beast of Dufftown. Its 2.81-times distillation gives it a meatiness that the Mortlach Room at MeatMore (October 2023 to 2024) was built to honour. It is dense, structural and dark.

The Balvenie is the patient one across town. Barley grown at home, floor maltings still in use, and the Malt Master’s palate as the instrument. It glows from within where Mortlach weighs from below.

I keep them as a pair and never blur them into one. They share a town and differ in temperament. Over twelve years my spirits work has needed both the structural and the patient, and Dufftown gave me the two on the same road.

What I have tried to honour at The Balvenie

I try to be as honest about The Balvenie as I would want any partner to be about me.

I do not present the maison as my voice. The five rare crafts are theirs, kept up by their hands in Dufftown since 1892. My part is one four-week programme at one Kuala Lumpur fine-dining room in 2022, and I keep it in proportion.

I name David C. Stewart MBE because the standard I have measured myself against is the one he kept at his bench for sixty-one years. Recognising the maison without recognising the man who set its standard would leave the story incomplete.

I do not stretch the personal side. I state my regard for the maison once, at the centre of this page, and leave it there. I am precise about The Balvenie, and I am not sentimental about it.

What I practise and what The Balvenie practises are different crafts held to the same standard. The patient hand is what I have looked for in this maison, and what I have tried to bring to my own work in the years before and after the 2022 programme. That is the work I have tried to honour, and the maison that has honoured me.