The Long Sherry Cask

The Macallan is, for many, the single-malt house against which all other Speyside houses are read. Founded in 1824 on the Easter Elchies estate, it has held to one constitutional discipline — sherry-cask maturation as the spine of the spirit — for two centuries. Between February 2022 and February 2024, I held a twenty-four month Dining Experience with the maison at Shin'Labo. The chapter included the Harmony Collection Rich Cacao flagship and, at its peak, the official launch dinner for The Macallan × 007 special edition — one of the maison's most consequential pieces of brand work in the period, hosted by me at Shin'Labo and supported by extensive video and written content I produced for the launch.

The maison

The Macallan was founded in 1824 on the Easter Elchies estate at Craigellachie, Speyside. Two centuries on, the house holds to one defining commitment — sherry-cask maturation as the constitutional discipline of the spirit. Where many Scotch houses use sherry-seasoning as one technique among several, The Macallan has held it as the spine: the cask is not a finishing flourish but the structure the whisky is built on.

The maison’s published operating philosophy — the Six Pillars — names the disciplines it reads itself by: the Spiritual Home (Easter Elchies), the Curiously Small Stills, the Finest Cut, the Exceptional Oak Casks, Natural Colour, and the Peerless Spirit. They are not marketing categories. They are the operating constraints inside which the maison has worked for two centuries.

When I plate against The Macallan, I plate against those six. The age-statement releases — 12, 18, 25, 30, and the rare-release tier beyond — each ask a different pairing, and I have tried to honour the difference rather than collapse the range. A Macallan plate is plated against the sherry spine, not against a generic Speyside profile that would flatten what the maison has spent two centuries building.

The Dining Experience at Shin’Labo (15 February 2022 – 14 February 2024)

The twenty-four month Dining Experience programme ran at Shin’Labo from 15 February 2022 to 14 February 2024 — the maison’s longest committed dining engagement in Malaysia at the time, and one of the longest of my own restaurant career.

The programme sat alongside two parallel spirits-and-champagne programmes at the same venue: the Krug Chef’s Table, which had relocated to Shin’Labo in February 2022 (Asia’s only Krug Chef’s Table at the time), and the wider whisky and cognac work the room carried. Holding all three at once — Champagne, Cognac, and sherry-cask Speyside — across a single venue across two years was the most demanding cross-maison work I have carried.

The programme closed on 14 February 2024 — coincidentally adjacent to my own Mérite Agricole conferral that year, and to The Macallan’s own bicentenary. I did not surface either as marketing.

The Macallan × 007 — official launch dinner at Shin’Labo

The peak of the twenty-four month engagement was the official launch dinner for The Macallan × 007 special edition, hosted by me at Shin’Labo. The 007 edition is one of the maison’s most weighty pieces of brand work in the period — the Bond franchise meeting Speyside heritage in a release that had to honour both.

The launch dinner was the platform on which the maison’s Malaysian audience first encountered the edition. I designed the menu to sit alongside what the bottle carried — the cocktail-bar inheritance that the Bond character brings, the Speyside spine that The Macallan brings, and the yōshoku room at Shin’Labo that gave both an unexpected counterpart. Beyond the dinner itself, I produced a substantial body of video and written features for the maison to support the launch — content the maison has continued to draw from in the period since.

The 007 launch sits at the centre of my Macallan record. It is the single most concentrated piece of brand-and-launch work the partnership produced, and the clearest demonstration of what a Dining Experience programme can do when the maison and I commit to a launch as a joint chapter rather than a venue booking.

Rich Cacao — the Harmony Collection flagship

The 2022 limited-edition flagship of the Shin’Labo programme was Rich Cacao — the first edition in The Macallan’s Harmony Collection. It is the maison’s collaboration with Jordi Roca, the renowned pastry chef of El Celler de Can Roca, where The Macallan’s Whisky Maker Polly Logan searched the maturing stocks for casks carrying rare indulgent chocolate notes — to create a whisky that pairs in perfect harmony with the richest chocolate.

The presentation box itself was made using discarded cacao husks from the chocolate-making process: a by-product reborn with a renewed purpose. The maison’s circular thinking ran through the bottle and the box together.

Edrington Malaysia allocated ninety-four bottles of Rich Cacao to Shin’Labo across the programme. That allocation level — at exclusive scale, for two years, in one venue — was the weight the maison placed on the partnership.

What the work carries forward

The Dining Experience closed in February 2024 with the wider closure of Shin’Labo’s spirits-and-champagne programmes; The Macallan, like Mortlach and the Krug Chef’s Table that ran beside it, is therefore a closed chapter in active form. What I carry forward is the discipline the work taught: sherry as structure, age statements as distinct expressions each in their own right, the practice of plating against a cuvée at its own constitutional standard — and the experience of building a maison launch dinner (the 007 edition) at the weight a launch of that scale asks for.

Additional film