Never meet your heroes, or so the old saying goes. For Gillian Macdonald, master blender and head of whisky creation at Highland stalwart Glenmorangie and Islay upstart Ardbeg, there were no such worries when she came face-to-face with Hollywood royalty in the form of Harrison Ford.
“How cool is it to meet one of the biggest movie idols?” smiles Macdonald. “I’m a child of the 80s, so I grew up watching Indiana Jones, probably more than Han Solo.”
Ford visited Glenmorangie’s distillery at Tain, about 45 minutes north of Inverness in the Highlands of Scotland, to film a series of adverts for the brand. The plot for the cheesy commercials — parts of which were also shot at nearby Ardross Castle, famous for being the backdrop to the television series The Traitors — involved Ford playing up to his “grumpy old man” persona by refusing to follow the script but then coming round to the idea after sipping his whisky.
“Before we even started filming, he wanted to go and meet all the people involved in making the whisky, all the distillery operators, to actually get to know them a bit before filming with them, and that was really key,” explains Macdonald. “He was interested in the whisky-making process and whisky in general.”
“That was the icing on the cake — he was a lover of single malt Scotch and Glenmorangie before he came,” chips in Bill Lumsden, the brand’s master distiller and director of distilling, whisky creation, and whisky stocks. “It was amazing because, in spite of the fact that he’s arguably the most famous living actor we have, he was very, very down to earth.”
Alongside celluloid heroes, Macdonald has rubbed shoulders with some of the biggest names in whisky during her 25 years in the industry. Even before she joined Lumsden at Glenmorangie, she learned the ropes from one of the legends of whisky making, the late Jim Swan, while he was helping set up Penderyn Distillery in the Brecon Beacons.
Macdonald studied chemistry at Cardiff University and joined Penderyn after taking part in a 10-week apprenticeship scheme. “Jim was phenomenal — he was a wonderful gentleman and was basically like a second dad to me through his caring and sharing,” she remembers.
“I gained so much from him as a mentor. He was the person who ignited my interest in the flavour side of whisky.”
Lumsden nods away: “When I needed to recruit a new scientist and blender for my team, Jim — who was a dear friend of mine — recommended this lady to me. I couldn’t have got a better recommendation than one that came from Jim — that was it, it was a done deal.”
Macdonald moved from Penderyn to Glenmorangie in 2012, initially as head of analytics and whisky creation, before being named master blender and head of whisky creation in 2022. She retains her link to Penderyn as a shareholder — and so keeps track of issues such as the pause in production at its Swansea site last year — and was delighted to see distillery manager Laura Davies moving to Inverclyde start-up Ardgowan before Christmas.
“Having met Bill and got on really well with him, I was excited by the exploratory side of the whisky making,” she says. “The other attraction was having two whiskies under the same house at the complete opposite ends of the spectrum, because I’d never worked with a peated whisky.”
“Or perhaps that should be you joined ‘in spite of meeting Bill’,” giggles Lumsden. Laughter is the soundtrack that accompanies conversations with Macdonald and Lumsden, who are clearly a close-knit team, but where does the balance lie in the division of labour?
“Maybe I should leave the room for that,” Lumsden jokes. “In the past, we’ve considered one of us working on Ardbeg and the other on Glenmorangie, but we don’t want to do that because we’re both interested in the whole company.”
“I’ve been involved with both brands since the minute I stepped through the door, both with the core ranges and the special editions,” adds Macdonald. She points out that their team only has five or six people, supported by a sensory panel within the wider company.
“The job you do now is pretty much the same as when you first joined, albeit an enlarged version,” muses Lumsden. “You do much more outward-facing things now.”
Those public-facing roles have included helping to promote the “A Tale of…” limited editions, with Lumsden and Macdonald photographed holding an over-sized menu to launch A Tale of Ice Cream, autumn 2024’s special release, which was finished in high-vanillin toasted oak casks to impart extra vanilla flavours.
Macdonald describes their working relationship as “instinctive”, with Lumsden explaining that they’ve worked together for so long now that they no longer need lengthy meetings to plan their next steps and instead can second guess each other. But what lessons have they learned from each other?
“I have learned from Gillian to be a little more disciplined in hitting deadlines,” smiles Lumsden. “Gillian is a lot more structured than me — I’m quite fluid, if I could use the word, I’m quite ‘creative’ in my approach.”
Lumsden jokingly suggests Macdonald has learned how to become “the bad cop” from him, sending them both into another fit of laughter. “I was going to say I’ve learned how to be more flamboyant from Bill, how to have gravitas when telling a story,” she offers.
Lumsden developed that ability to hold an audience while watching his first mentor, the legendary Sir Geoff Palmer, one of his professors when he carried out his biochemistry doctoral research at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. As well as teaching Lumsden how to tell a story, Palmer introduced him to many in the industry.
Another early mentor was Jim Beveridge, who trained Lumsden at the Distillers Company Limited (DCL), now Diageo. Lumsden followed in Palmer and Beveridge’s footsteps by appearing on the King’s New Year honours list, becoming a member of the most excellent order of the British empire (MBE).
Those storytelling skills are often put to good use when entertaining guests at Glenmorangie House, a 17th-century farmhouse lying 20 minutes from the distillery, which has expanded from corporate hospitality to entertaining paying guests too. Bought by the distillery in 1987, its traditional tweed and tartan furnishings were replaced in 2021 by garish orange flourishes created by interior designer Russell Sage, the brains behind the Fife Arms Hotel in Braemar and London’s Goring Hotel.
Soon, Macdonald and Lumsden may be called upon to perform their hosting duties at Ardbeg House too. The company bought the former Islay Hotel in Port Ellen in 2022, with the venue due to reopen under its new Ardbeg guise this autumn.
Their shared passion for flavour and innovation is epitomised in the Lighthouse, the 20-metre tall, glass-clad experimental still room opened on Glenmorangie’s site in 2021. The facility allows the pair to experiment without interrupting the flow of spirit through the distillery’s main giraffe-height stills.
Lumsden is quick to dismiss any suggestion he’s reaching the end of his career, but when asked if Macdonald is his successor waiting in the wings, he says it’s “not impossible”. Glenmorangie’s reluctance to commit to succession plans in public is understandable — the company has been here before.
When Brendan McCarron joined the business as head of maturing whisky stocks in 2014 after a three-year search, he was hailed as Lumsden’s successor, but left in 2021 and — after a spell as master distiller at Bunnahabhain owner Distell — became a consultant, most recently launching Benbecula Distillery. “Brendan still sees me as a father figure and asks my opinion on things — we had dinner a couple of weeks ago,” adds Lumsden.
“Brendan decided that I wasn’t about to leave anytime soon, Gillian was in the team, so he thought he’d try things on his own, and it’s been very successful for him. We still see each other and, of course, with him being Celtic and me being Rangers, we still do wind each other up quite a bit.”
Having learned her craft from characters such as Swan and Lumsden, Macdonald long ago stepped out of the role of protégé to become a master in her own right. She’s now sharing her decades of experience through OurWhisky, a global movement launched in 2018 by drinks journalist Becky Paskin to champion inclusion and diversity among whisky makers and drinkers.
That movement developed into the OurWhisky Foundation in 2022, which runs the Antonia mentorship programme. Macdonald is one of the mentors for the scheme and created a single bottle of Ardbeg Twenty — a whisky that used the same combination of oloroso and bourbon cask whiskies as Uigedail, which was her introduction to the brand 20 years ago — to raise money for the project through the Demeter Collection auction last year.
“I’ve had four mentees now and I’m still in touch with all of them,” Macdonald smiles. “It’s super interesting to get that snapshot of what else is going on in other parts of our industry.
“I’ve learned loads from them, too. I’ve learned how to be a little less risk-averse and a little more gung-ho.”
