Stepping Inside the Johnnie Walker Vault

More than a million people have visited Johnnie Walker Princes Street, Edinburgh since it opened in 2021, but most visitors are probably unaware of a secret vault hidden beneath the building, lined with 500 cask samples of some of Diageo’s most precious single malt and grain whiskies. Entrance to this atelier is by invitation only.

This is the Johnnie Walker Vault, part of a new global platform for bespoke blends and luxury experiences tailored to the client’s desires and interests, as well as a new line of ultra-luxury whiskies created through collaborations with various cultural figures. Packages start at £50,000 (around $66,500), and only about 10 invitations are available each year.

At the end of it all, your bespoke blend is presented in a Baccarat crystal decanter, and the recipe is chronicled in the Johnnie Walker Vault archive.

Most of us won’t be able to partake, but a recent visit to the vault showed how it all works. Ahead of arriving at Johnnie Walker Princes Street, you are asked to fill out a questionnaire inquiring about your whisky preferences and favorite season, travel destination, music, and preferred culinary flavors. Master blender Dr. Emma Walker then translates these answers into a flavor brief, extrapolating how she will reflect these flavor and texture preferences in the bespoke blend. The whole experience might include an overnight stay at the world-famous Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland, a private tour of a distillery or the Diageo archive at Menstrie, or a meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant; this is a bespoke experience, it will be tailored to the desires and interests of each guest. Then it’s on to the vault.

This space, a former bank vault, is lined with four levels of shelving wrapped around the walls of its long, slender dimensions, displaying 500 glass-stoppered square bottles with handwritten labels. Each bottle contains 250 ml of whisky and collectively, they cover every hue from the palest primrose to the darkest mahogany. Dr. Emma Walker, Johnnie Walker’s master distiller, explains that these whiskies are curated from 37 distilleries, including ghost distilleries, though oddly, some of the rarest examples are the youngest. The oldest is a Cameronbridge 56 year old single grain, while the youngest is a whisky from the experimental Leven pilot distillery in Fife. (Walker is already anticipating the day when she can add young whiskies from the reopened Brora Distillery.) All these samples are drawn from casks that are still maturing, so when they’re replenished from the same barrel, the profile may well have changed over time.

Walker likes to share what she does. She describes how this place informs not only her blending for Johnnie Walker but also her approach to creating single malts. It’s a way to explore distillery character, different wood influences, and the impact of different ages on whisky. The process is invaluable to building the neural pathways essential for making great blends, she says.

Walker explains how she approaches a bespoke blend from a parcel of whisky called the “heart of the blend.” It was created with Johnnie Walker master blender emeritus Jim Beveridge, and its recipe is secret. “It’s got a lovely balance,” she notes. “It’s quite light and delicate, but it gives us a great base and has a lovely creaminess. There’s some Port Dundas in there and lots of other things.”

From this cornerstone, Walker can make very different whiskies, her creativity invigorated by drawing on a small set of the 500 samples on offer. After her choices are made, it’s all about ratios, balance, and assessing the impact of different decisions on the blend by considering how different congeners, acids, and esters play out among the other components. Normally, Walker works at a scale of 100 ml for a bench sample, which keeps the calculations easy, though when she is making final adjustments, she sometimes creates multiple variants in 10 ml samples using a pipette. There’s a yin and yang between the blender’s creative and scientific sides as she builds each prototype whisky. Walker also finds the vault liberating, as she can concentrate on making a bespoke one-off blend, and not worry about how to make 10,000 cases with the same recipe. For the bespoke blends, Walker works from a handwritten flavor brief in her notebook, with the client’s answers to their questionnaire written in black ink amid bright splashes of red showing where she has found inspiration to steer the flavor in different directions. Each note culminates in a diagram of the blend’s character, indicating the intensity of flavor in six different domains that are familiar to the Johnnie Walker blending team: creamy vanilla, fresh fruit, malty/tropical, smoke, rich fruit, and spicy.

Johnnie Walker Couture: A Related Luxury Whisky Line

Shortly after unveiling the Johnnie Walker Vault, the brand announced French designer Olivier Rousteing, the Balmain creative director, as their first cultural collaborator. The inaugural release is the Johnnie Walker Couture Expression, a series of four distinct blends co-created by Walker and Rousteing to evoke the heightened sensory experiences of different times of the year, themed around the seasons like a fashion collection. “We chose to use the same whiskies across several of the seasons, playing with proportions, textures, and seasonal notes to create four distinct expressions,” says Walker, starting with the heart of the blend for each one. All are housed in a square Baccarat decanter cradled in gold, silver, rose gold, and metallic black, designed as a visual expression of fabric draped over the contents. Each bottle is topped with a winged stopper, representing the Johnnie Walker striding man logo in flight, and somewhat reminiscent of the Spirit of Ecstasy mascot on the hood of a Rolls-Royce. Only 25 decanters of each expression have been produced for this first global release, with each bottle priced at $20,000. The full set of all four decanters labelled No.1 is on sale at Harrods, London.

Johnnie Walker Couture Expressions:

• Spring is refreshing and floral, drawn from a selection of rare whiskies including a Cragganmore 1985, Caledonian 1977, and Port Ellen 1978.
• Summer offers tropical fruit notes and includes an experimental Cardhu wine cask finish, Clynelish 1990, and Benrinnes 1988.
• Fall is textured and bold, and the blend is composed around an experimental Teaninich chocolate malt layered with smoke from a Port Ellen 1978.
• Winter is deep, rich, and contemplative, and dials up the Port Ellen, Brora, and Benrinnes 1988.