The long sherry cask

For many people, The Macallan is the single-malt house every other Speyside house is measured against. It was founded in 1824 on the Easter Elchies estate, and for two centuries it has built its spirit around sherry-cask maturation. From February 2022 to February 2024, I ran a twenty-four month Dining Experience with the maison at Shin'Labo. It included the Harmony Collection Rich Cacao flagship and, at its high point, the official launch dinner for The Macallan × 007 special edition, one of the maison's most important launches of the period. I hosted that dinner at Shin'Labo and produced a large body of video and written content for it.

The maison

The Macallan was founded in 1824 on the Easter Elchies estate at Craigellachie, Speyside. Two centuries on, sherry-cask maturation is still the thing the house is built on. Many Scotch houses use sherry seasoning as one technique among several. At The Macallan the cask is the structure of the whisky, and everything else follows from it.

The maison publishes the principles it holds itself to as the Six Pillars: the Spiritual Home (Easter Elchies), the Curiously Small Stills, the Finest Cut, the Exceptional Oak Casks, Natural Colour and the Peerless Spirit. These are working constraints, and the house has worked inside them for two hundred years.

When I cook for The Macallan, I cook to those six. The age-statement releases, 12, 18, 25, 30 and the rare releases beyond, each want a different pairing, and I have tried to respect the differences instead of treating the range as one whisky. A Macallan plate is built for the sherry cask. A generic Speyside pairing would flatten what the maison has spent two centuries making.

The Dining Experience at Shin’Labo, 15 February 2022 to 14 February 2024

The Dining Experience ran at Shin’Labo for twenty-four months, from 15 February 2022 to 14 February 2024. At the time it was the maison’s longest dining engagement in Malaysia, and it is one of the longest of my own career.

Two other programmes ran in the same room. The Krug Chef’s Table had moved to Shin’Labo in February 2022 (it was Asia’s only Krug Chef’s Table at the time), and the room also carried wider whisky and cognac work. Running Champagne, Cognac and sherry-cask Speyside side by side in one venue for two years was the hardest cross-maison work I have done.

The programme closed on 14 February 2024. That happened to fall close to my own Mérite Agricole conferral that year and to The Macallan’s bicentenary. I did not use either as marketing.

The Macallan × 007, the official launch dinner at Shin’Labo

The high point of the twenty-four months was the official launch dinner for The Macallan × 007 special edition, which I hosted at Shin’Labo. The 007 edition was among the maison’s biggest releases of the period: the Bond franchise meeting Speyside heritage, in a bottle that had to do justice to both.

The dinner was where the maison’s Malaysian audience first met the edition. I wrote the menu around what the bottle brought to the table: the cocktail-bar world of the Bond character, the sherry-cask house style of The Macallan, and the yōshoku room at Shin’Labo, which gave both an unexpected partner. Beyond the dinner, I produced a large body of video and written features to support the launch, and the maison has kept drawing on that material since.

The 007 launch is the centre of my Macallan record. It was the most concentrated piece of launch work the partnership produced, and it shows what a Dining Experience can do when the maison and I treat a launch as a shared chapter instead of a 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 pastry chef of El Celler de Can Roca. The Macallan’s Whisky Maker, Polly Logan, searched the maturing stocks for casks with rare chocolate notes to make a whisky that pairs with the richest chocolate.

The presentation box was made from cacao husks discarded in chocolate-making, so a by-product found a second use. The same circular thinking ran through the bottle and the box.

Edrington Malaysia allocated ninety-four bottles of Rich Cacao to Shin’Labo over the programme. An allocation that exclusive, to one venue, for two years, shows how seriously the maison took the partnership.

What the work carries forward

The Dining Experience ended in February 2024, when Shin’Labo’s spirits and Champagne programmes closed. The Macallan, like Mortlach and the Krug Chef’s Table beside it, is a closed chapter. What I keep is what the work taught me: that sherry is structure, that each age statement is its own expression, that a plate should meet a whisky on the whisky’s terms, and what it takes to build a launch dinner for a release the size of the 007 edition.

Additional film