Picked for the leading position in 2019, Kirsteen Campbell describes the unique set of skills the prestigious master blender role requires
When Kirsteen Campbell tells you about the way in which she discovered how truly outstanding her sense of smell is, one can't help but think of the origin story of a superhero like, say, Spiderman or The Flash. But in other, more tangible ways, what Campbell has achieved is truly Herculean—by becoming the first female master blender in The Macallan's 200-year history.
Hailing from Thurso in the Scottish Highlands, Campbell graduated with a BSc in Nutrition and Food Science from Glasgow Caledonian University before entering the drinks industry in 2001, joining The Macallan's parent company Edrington as a whisky quality technologist before beginning a meteoric ascent through the ranks of the world of whisky: first as a master blender for Cutty Sark, then for The Famous Grouse and Naked Grouse.
In 2019, she was selected as master blender for The Macallan, one of the most prestigious names in whisky, and becoming the first woman to hold the position; there, she had a hand (literally) in creating The Reach, the oldest whisky ever released by The Macallan featuring a single malt dating back to 1940. Campbell was responsible for handpicking the cask to create the liquid—so fundamental was her involvement that her hand was one of three that was chosen to be cast in a sculpture that would lift up the prized bottle, one specimen of which was auctioned in February 2023 at Sotheby's for a whopping US$325,700.
On the final leg of an Asian tour promoting The Macallan Double Cask collection this month, Campbell stopped over in Hong Kong to speak to Tatler Dining about the essential skills for making whisky, how time factors into her craft, and what breaking the glass ceiling means to her.
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On entering the whisky trade
There's such a rich heritage around scotch. It's so well known for us at home [in Scotland]. My background is actually in food science, which I studied at university. I didn't specifically go into that thinking about a role in scotch whisky, but I was very fortunate that after I graduated, my first role was in a lab doing chemical quality control of various spirits, and that was the first time that I had my nose tested.
It was then that I realised I had that natural ability to be able to know and to pick up a number of aromas. From there, I became more and more fascinated with the world of flavour and blending. I moved into a few different roles to eventually become a trainee blender with Edrington, the parent company for The Macallan. I worked my way to be becoming a master blender for some of our other blended scotch whiskies, then in 2019 I was asked to be master blender for The Macallan which was just an incredible honour.
On her sense of smell and taste
Throughout life, people have their eyes or maybe their hearing tested, but very few people get their nose tested. So it wasn't until that moment at work that I realised I had that. It's such an important part of being a whisky maker to have that obviously sensory capability, and that's something that we look for when we're recruiting within the team. It's mandatory to have that—it's not something you can teach. You can teach the rest about how flavours are created through the whisky-making process, how they evolve, how they interact with each other, but we can't teach someone to smell something if they simply can't.
Some people might be really receptive to certain flavours in aroma and not so much to others, so once you're in the team, it's important to understand where their strengths are as well. Tasting notes are guidance for the consumer: when we write them, everyone will pick up different parts of those notes and that's just the beauty of it.
When we talk about flavour, that's a combination of aroma and taste. For us as whisky makers, we're able to make a very accurate assessment of our whisky from nosing—we nose thousands of casks in the course of a year and you can tell a lot about a whisky—but as well as that, it's important to taste and we can't taste every single individual cask.
But when it comes to the final whisky that we've created, obviously we need to do the full palate check—it's the finish and the texture of the whiskey as well that is really important.
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