The Macallan Whisky Dinner: 70 Years in Five Drams

Five drams. Seventy years of Macallan. Fifteen seats at the table.

Macallan is Speyside’s most famous name and its most argued-over. The Easter Elchies estate, the small stills, the near-religious commitment to sherry-seasoned oak — and a house style that shifts from bright orchard fruit to something closer to dark Christmas cake depending on the cask and the era it came from.

Which is the whole point of this dinner. Tasting five expressions across seventy years is not really a tasting; it is watching a distillery change in front of you. Sherry casks are not what they were in the sixties. Neither is the barley, the fermentation time, or the pressure to release. You taste all of that, in order, in one sitting.

Dinner is built around the drams rather than the other way round — courses chosen to sit with the whisky instead of competing with it.

£325 a head, fifteen seats. If Macallan is the distillery that got you into whisky in the first place, this is the long-form version of the story.