MACALLAN 1967- THE OLD FARM
When Alexander Reid was granted an official licence in 1824, his distillery brought a new dimension to the industrious community. Each unique label making up the Anecdotes of Ages Collection shares special stories relating to our history, community, and the beautiful natural landscape of The Macallan Estate. Early inhabitants of the Easter Elchies Estate turned their hands to crop farming at a time when techniques were primitive, transport links were poor, and famine was not unknown.
‘You won’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes,’ suggests a familiar quotation. It is unlikely the author had the horse in mind. Nevertheless, a way to appreciate how farming was practiced at Easter Elchies would be to trudge the bridle paths and fields these animals traversed for centuries. For the farmhands, extreme tenacity was required to meet nature’s demands. Until the 1930s, the only horsepower here was literal.
Sir Peter Blake’s unique label pays tribute to this past, referencing the ancient farm, the workers and, especially, the horse. Centre stage, the team on display are at once stoic and majestic. They could stand for the legions of horses that worked here, many of whom played their part as much by ferrying oak casks of whisky to riverboats and railways as they did by tilling the land. They deserve their pride of place on the bottle.
In Mary McCartney’s photo, some discreetly discarded horseshoes underpin that time in history. To a sharp eye, the gentle (and entirely natural) mist on the bottle’s shoulders is a more immediate reminder that farming at Easter Elchies continues whatever the weather.
As for the single malt within, distillation was first born as a consequence of the need to preserve. Grain that would otherwise have spoiled was preserved in a new – and unarguably improved – form. A little over fifty years since the 1967 spirit was distilled from exceptional barley and committed to its sherry seasoned oak cask, it would be hard, to the point of impossibility, to improve its historic perfection.
