“Whisky of Highland Park’s age and quality doesn’t just belong to one moment or one person,” he says. “It’s cumulative. You’re always both the inheritor and the custodian.”

That word “cumulative” feels important. Succession in whisky is not a clean handover of a finished thing. It is a handover of work still in motion. The person arriving inherits casks, systems, wood policies, stock plans, habits, house style, internal memory, and consumer expectation. They also inherit decisions whose logic may have been formed years before they arrived.

Watson describes the job as emotional, not in a sentimental sense, but because the timescale makes it impossible to think only about yourself. “You’re making choices on behalf of the future,” he says. The whisky he works with today was laid down by others. The spirit he helps shape now will become somebody else’s inheritance.

That makes the manner of the handover matter. Watson had already worked near Motion during his time with the Famous Grouse before spending six months focused directly on Highland Park. There were files, records, stock notes, and what he describes, with affection, as an almost comically large handover spreadsheet. But the more valuable inheritance was less easily documented. It was watching how Motion thought.

Motion passed on “standards and patience and consistency and creativity all in the right measure”. He also left Watson with one sentence that still seems to sit at the centre of his decision-making: “If it’s not right, it doesn’t go in.”

Simple, yes. But perhaps that is why it matters. In whisky, where the pressures of stock, schedule, volume, and commercial expectation are always present somewhere, the inherited right to say no is not a small thing. “If you have to put the brakes on, if you have to go and find something else, if you’re not happy with it, it doesn’t go,” Watson says.

This is the less romantic side of succession, and probably the more important one. It is not only wisdom passed down in poetic phrases over drams. It is the practical discipline of slowing something down, rejecting a cask, protecting natural colour, defending flavour, and knowing when consistency is not boring but essential.

At the same time, Watson is careful to resist the idea that a distillery is ever the work of one person. That may be how the public story is often told, but it is not how whisky is made. He talks about the people malting barley, running the stills, managing production, planning stock, and assessing thousands of samples.

“No distillery is ultimately the work of one person alone,” he says. “The whisky in the glass is a result of a team and a process and a philosophy.”

This complicates the Succession-style fantasy of one powerful figure leaving the throne and another taking it. The title matters. The palate matters. The judgement matters. But the whisky is held up by something larger: accumulated craft, repeated decisions, and the quiet competence of people who may never appear in the
launch photography.

Still, the successor has to act. They cannot just admire the past. Watson talks about Highland Park as something rooted in Orkney: heathered peat, floor maltings, sherry-seasoned casks, natural colour, balance, texture, complexity, and a sense of place that is more than branding. His job is not to make Highland Park into something else, but nor is it simply to preserve it in amber.

“Style’s not accidental here,” he says. That may be one of the most useful ways to think about what a successor inherits. A house style is not merely a flavour profile. It is a chain of decisions, made deliberately and then remade, protected and adjusted, over time. The difficult part is knowing which parts can flex and which must not.

Watson draws a distinction between the core range and new product development. With the 12- and 18-year-old whiskies, his ideal is almost invisibility. “Ideally, people wouldn’t notice the difference between my 12-year-old and Gordon’s 12-year-old,” he says. That is not a lack of ambition. It is the ambition appropriate to that part of the job.

Elsewhere, there is more room to move. New releases allow him to explore the stocks, excite drinkers, and begin to show something of his own judgement. Even then, he is not looking for disruption for its own sake. Asked how he might leave his own mark without turning it into a thumbprint, he talks first about listening.

When asked whether he feels more like an author, an editor, or a custodian, Watson reaches for a different image altogether. “I see myself as a gardener,” he says. It is a lovely metaphor, and better than the grander language whisky can sometimes employ. A gardener does not invent the soil or the weather, and cannot hurry the old trees. But they are not passive either. They tend, prune, protect, experiment, and plant for a future they may not fully see.

For Watson, one personal contribution may be texture. Asked what he would hope Motion recognised as his work in a Highland Park five or ten years from now, he does not talk about revolution, a new era, or a dramatic stylistic turn. He says he would love Motion to taste it and think: “You really nailed the texture on that.”

Texture, Watson says, is too often overlooked. In Highland Park terms, he is interested in sweetness, syrup, unctuousness, heather honey, the way smoke, fruit, and cask influence gather in the mouth. It is a revealing answer. His authorship, at least as he describes it now, is not about shouting over the past. It is about finding one more way for the whisky to become itself.

Dr Rachel Barrie offers a very different kind of succession story. As master blender for Brown-Forman’s Scotch single malt distilleries — Benriach, the Glendronach and Glenglassaugh — she joined in 2017 after Brown-Forman acquired the BenRiach Distillery Company. The predecessor in that public story was Billy Walker, one of Scotch whisky’s most-respected modern figures, who had helped build the reputations of those distilleries before moving on to his next chapter at the GlenAllachie.

But Barrie does not frame that transition as grand theatre. By that point in her career, she was already deeply established, with decades of experience across the Scotch Whisky Research Institute, Glenmorangie, Ardbeg, Bowmore, Auchentoshan, and Glen Garioch. Walker had largely moved on. From her perspective, the absence of a long, formal handover was not a weakness. It allowed her to get on with the work.

That work was considerable. Brown-Forman was new to Scotch. The portfolio contained three distinct single malts, each with its own stocks, style, expectations, and future potential. Barrie spoke about the task in terms of consistency, quality, and making the whiskies ready for growth. Not flattening them into one house signature, but formalising and strengthening the businesses so each distillery could move forward more clearly.

This is a useful counterpoint to Watson’s story. At Highland Park, succession was intimate and intergenerational: Motion beside Watson, tasting, grading, explaining, handing over ways of thinking. For Barrie at Brown-Forman, succession was more structural and professional. It was about entering complexity and making it coherent: casks, styles, releases, processes, quality standards, and drinker pleasure.

She also connects those distilleries to place in a personal way. Benriach, the Glendronach and Glenglassaugh sit in parts of Scotland tied to her own childhood and memory. That matters, because it makes her inheritance more than a spreadsheet of stocks. It is geographical, sensory, and emotional, even if she talks about the work with brisk, professional clarity.

Interestingly, when Barrie reflects on succession in the deeper sense, the more formative inheritance may sit earlier in her career, with Dr Jim Swan and the Scotch Whisky Research Institute. Swan’s influence on modern whisky — particularly around wood, maturation, and quality — was immense. For Barrie, that kind of succession was not about replacing someone in a role. It was about absorbing a way of thinking: how to understand wood, how to build quality, how to connect science and flavour, and how to make whisky that gives pleasure to the drinker.

That broadens the whole question. Succession in whisky is not only the moment a famous person retires and another appears in the press release. It may be the mentor whose methods echo decades later. It may be the predecessor whose casks continue to mature. It may be the systems a successor strengthens so a distillery can grow. It may be the decision not to impose yourself too loudly on a whisky that already knows what it is.

In both Watson and Barrie’s stories, one thing becomes clear: the successor does not inherit emptiness. They inherit material already charged with intention. Casks are not neutral. Stocks are not simply inventory. They are an archive of previous decisions — some brilliant, some practical, some mysterious even to those who inherit them.

That is why the public drama of succession can be misleading. From the outside, we see one name replaced by another. Inside the industry, the handover is slower, stranger, and less theatrical. The person changes before the whisky does. The new judgement may take years to become visible, and even then it appears through liquid shaped by many other hands.

Watson says succession “should be more slow”. He is right. Scotch is suspicious of suddenness for good reason, but slow does not mean static. The best successors do not simply conserve the past, and they do not rip it up to prove they have arrived. They study it, test it, protect it, question it, and add to it where they can.

Near the end of our conversation, Watson offers perhaps the clearest answer to what happens after a master whisky maker leaves.

“You don’t inherit a role like this to put your stamp on it for the sake of ego,” he says. “You inherit it to protect something precious and to understand it as deeply as you can, and then also leave it stronger than you found it.”

That may be the real succession. Not the job title. Not the announcement. Not even the first bottle with a new name attached. It is the slow transfer of responsibility from one set of hands to another, and the hope that what emerges later will still feel unmistakably itself.