Diane Stuart on The Macallan, David Carson and the Instinct Behind Mastery.
Some crafts are governed by rules. The good practitioners learn them. The very good ones develop an instinct for knowing when to stop following them.
Diane Stuart knows a thing or two about both.
The Macallan Whisky Maker is currently holding court in Sydney as the whisky house brings its collaboration with artist and graphic designer David Carson to Artspace in Woolloomooloo. At first, a whisky maker and a designer might seem to have little business in the same sentence, let alone the same room. Carson has made a career out of unsettling visual conventions. Stuart works in a discipline built on precision, consistency and an almost unreasonable attention to detail.
The common ground is less obvious, and considerably more interesting: Both are concerned with what happens when knowledge becomes instinct.
Carson's work has never been particularly obedient. Typography breaks apart, images refuse their assigned places and legibility becomes something to negotiate. Stuart's materials are quieter - spirit, oak, aroma and time - but they demand their own form of interpretation. Her job is not simply to identify what is in a glass. It is to understand what those individual elements might become when brought together.
Her route into whisky makes that distinction especially revealing.
Growing up in Speyside, Stuart first entered the industry through a summer job as a distillery tour guide. She then studied forensic science at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen before joining the Scotch Whisky Research Institute in Edinburgh as an Analytical Scientist. There she became a sensory panellist, eventually taking responsibility for the panel and becoming more deeply involved in flavour research. Further qualifications followed, including a Diploma in Distilling and a Postgraduate Certificate in Sensory Science.
Forensic science and whisky making may not appear to share much beyond a fondness for laboratories, but Stuart sees a genuine connection. Both involve evidence, observation and reconstruction. In forensic work, the task is to work backwards from traces and fragments to understand what happened. In whisky making, the clues are aroma, flavour, texture, maturation and the character of the cask. The conclusion is rather less dramatic, thankfully, but the investigative instinct is familiar.
Stuart joined Edrington in 2017 as a Trainee Blender, becoming an Assistant Blender before taking on the role of Master Blender for Naked Malt in 2020. She joined The Macallan in 2022 and now works within its Whisky Mastery Team across stock assessment, vatting, new releases and technical operations.
It is a profession in which experience accumulates quietly.
The Macallan's story reaches back to 1824, while its distinctive character is closely tied to the exceptional European and American oak casks seasoned with sherry in Jerez. But history and good materials do not make decisions. Someone still has to taste, compare, assess and decide what belongs together.
Wood does its part. The whisky maker has to pay attention.
That attention has changed Stuart's understanding of patience. Whisky is an unusually effective antidote to the modern conviction that everything should happen immediately. A cask cannot be hurried because a deadline has appeared in someone's calendar. Maturation is not a project plan. It is a process in which waiting is not dead time but part of the work.
There is something almost unfashionable about that.
Stuart's career has also taught her that individual casks can develop distinct personalities. A whisky maker spends enough time assessing them to recognise their differences, and particular casks inevitably become memorable. But attachment has its limits. Sentiment cannot be allowed to make the final decision. Whisky is not a rescue animal.
Her work on The Macallan Distil Your World Mexico demonstrates another side of that judgement. Inspired by her journey to Mexico City, the whisky was conceived not as a literal attempt to put a city in a bottle - which would be an ambitious undertaking even by Macallan standards - but as an interpretation of its energy and complexity through flavour: A whisky maker is not simply preserving ingredients; she is translating experience.
The first whisky that genuinely moves you can therefore become more significant than the first whisky you can accurately describe. Stuart's perspective suggests that the emotional memory of a whisky is inseparable from the circumstances around it - where you were, who you were with, what you expected and what surprised you. Tasting is partly chemistry, but memory has a habit of turning up uninvited.
And then there is the perennial question of science versus instinct.
Stuart's scientific background might suggest that evidence should always have the final word. Her experience has made the relationship more nuanced. Science provides the framework; sensory judgement fills in what cannot be reduced to a measurement. When the two appear to disagree, instinct is not an escape from expertise. It is expertise operating at a level that is difficult to put into a spreadsheet.
Which is rather close to the problem David Carson has spent his career exploring.
A designer and a whisky maker work with completely different materials, but both understand that rules are most useful when you know why they exist. Carson challenges convention by disrupting visual order. Stuart works within a highly controlled process in which small variations can have significant consequences. Neither approach is careless. The freedom comes from knowing the structure well enough to recognise when something unexpected deserves attention.
Getting something wrong is part of that education.
For Stuart, a mistake is not necessarily a failure so much as another piece of evidence. An unexpected result can reveal something about a spirit, a cask or a combination that a successful result might never have exposed. In a discipline built around comparison, the wrong answer can occasionally be useful - provided you notice it.
This may be one of the less glamorous truths about mastery. It involves an enormous amount of getting things wrong, remembering why and trying not to do it quite so badly next time.
Time adds another complication.
Working with whisky for years inevitably changes one's relationship with it. Most of us experience time as something to spend, save or lose. For a whisky maker, it is part of the material itself. You learn to observe it rather than fight it. A whisky that is not ready cannot be persuaded by enthusiasm.
The philosopher Michael Polanyi called this kind of accumulated understanding tacit knowledge, i.e. knowing something without necessarily being able to explain every step of how you know it. A musician hears that a performance is wrong before diagnosing the note. A cook reaches for an ingredient without conducting a feasibility study.
A whisky maker smells and tastes.
Then decides.
That is also why the collaboration with Carson feels more considered than its apparent incongruity suggests. Mastery Beyond Reason, the idea underpinning The Macallan x David Carson: In The Studio, is not really an argument for abandoning reason. It is an acknowledgement that reason has limits - and that craft begins to become fascinating precisely where measurement stops being sufficient.
At Artspace on 11 and 12 September, Carson's original works, immersive installations and hands-on creative experiences sit alongside guided tastings and Stuart's whisky masterclass. It is an encounter between two kinds of maker, each approaching their material from a different direction but arriving at a surprisingly similar place.
After everything Stuart has learnt about whisky, there is still plenty she does not pretend to understand completely.
That, perhaps, is the point.
A craft becomes less finite the deeper you go into it. There are always new interactions between spirit and wood, new sensory discoveries, new casks that behave unexpectedly and new reasons to reconsider what you thought you knew.
The temptation, after enough years of expertise, is to think mastery means having the answers.
Stuart's career suggests something more interesting.
It may simply mean becoming better at knowing which questions are worth asking.
And having another dram while you think about them.
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Words by AW.
Photo courtesy of The Macallan.
