On 20th October 2021, it was announced that Johnnie Walker was to appoint a female master blender for the first time in the company’s 200-year history.
We sat down with the aptly-named Emma Walker at the launch of the brand’s latest blend, the Blue Label Elusive Umami, which she developed in collaboration with chef Kei Kobayashi to discuss the new creation and how she came to be the woman who decides what the world’s most iconic whisky tastes like.
Becoming
There is little doubt that Walker has a job that is the envy of millions.
As a master blender, she gets to experiment with whiskies from the four corners of Scotland, travels the world and, as is the case with the new Blue Label Elusive Umami, team up with one of the most acclaimed chefs on the planet.
The weight of the role certainly isn’t lost on her, and it is with a nervous giggle that Walker sets out to explain how she came to be the master blender of Johnnie Walker.
“So, my background is chemistry.
“I did an apprenticeship at ICI, studied chemistry up at Edinburgh and then I did a PhD at Sheffield because I didn’t feel like I was ready for the roles that I had been interviewing for and I wanted to learn more.
“When I finished my PhD I moved back to Fife and Diagio was a great local employer so I was looking at jobs there and there was one advertised for a project scientist.
“So I did my research and turned up and it was Jim Beveridge, Maureen Robinson, Leith Law and Caroline Martin interviewing me and I was like, ‘oh you can work in whisky? I didn’t know you could do that!’
“So for me, it was very much a lucky intervention. I’d like to bless my, well, whatever happened there.”
What’s in a name?
While the job of a master blender has sensory elements to it, Walker is more likely to have her head buried deep in a spreadsheet than a dram on a day-to-day basis.
After spending four years learning everything she could about whisky, including how you create flavour, maturation and how to manage the eye-watering number of whisky casks under Johnnie Walker management, it quickly became apparent that being good at Excel and Power BI is the real key to pulling it all together.
But Walker, who replaced Dr Beveridge as master blender, did give me some hope that, as a Peat, my surname could get me some way to bagging me a job at one of the world’s most renowned distilleries.
And to get there, I could do a lot worse than spending some time at Leven Distillery, known as Diageo’s ‘experimental facility’, which put Walker in good stead to take on her new(ish) role.
Life at Leven
“What we love about Leven is that we get to come up with ideas and try them out at lab scale to work through any challenges that there might be when we then take it to a full-scale distillery.
“A few years ago we looked at different grains and how you’d work with them, because you will have different challenges, different gelatinization, some will drain others won’t.
“So it was really an in-depth learning about how it would impact on flavour and on the process”.
They also experimented with rye and developed a process that fitted perfectly at Teaninich, a unique distillery in its absence of a mash tun.
“It’s an important step in us understanding what happens and then how do we how do we scale up? How do we take an experiment to the scale of our processes?”
How to create the perfect blend
With 11 million casks under management, explaining the art of blending really belongs to people like Emma Walker.
As new luxury releases like Blue Label Elusive Umami prove, blended whisky shouldn’t be seen as single malt’s poor cousin, but more, you might say, as a ‘super whisky’, which harnesses the power of single malt and propels it a notch further.
“When we talk about blending, we’re talking about blending different casks of whisky together to create something that is greater than some of the individual parts”, Walker says.
“So when we’re thinking about blending a Johnnie Walker, we think about a world of flavour, the flavour we get from those distillery processes, from peaty whisky to ripe fruit, cereal and also the fresh more delicate fresh fruits.
“We think about that and how that develops and how that matures and different styles of cask and what we want the end point to be and how we balance that.
“So everything is about flavour and the flavour and the texture and warmth of the individual whiskies and how they combine, how they interact”.
Blue Label Elusive Umami
Blended whisky is, therefore, about two things: the best individual whiskies and what can be achieved when you bring them together in balance and harmony.
And there can be no finer demonstration of that than the Blue Label Elusive Umami, which posseses a complexity and depth befitting of Diageo’s rare and exceptional range.
Only one in 25,000 casks succeeds in bringing this elusive character to life, delivering a long finish that has you searching for notes of honey, nuts and even steak on the palate.
It has a depth that took me a little while to appreciate at first, because the more immediate notes of blood orange and red berries can be equally appealing.
But then this is a whisky that does precisely what it says on the bottle: it remains elusive, and there are harsher fates to succumb to than waiting around for such flavours to present themselves.