Mhairi Winters
Scotch whisky making is several centuries old, and many of its best known distilleries were built in the golden age that existed between the 18th and 20th centuries. As a rule, therefore, the modern industry rarely is afforded the chance to witness the birth of a completely new distillery. Even more rarely does it allow someone to shape that distillery from the ground up: not merely the whisky itself, but the production team, the environmental ethos, the visitor experience, and the character of the spirit that will someday represent the place. Yet that unusual opportunity fell to Mhairi Winters when she became the inaugural distillery manager at Gordon & MacPhail’s brand new ‘The Cairn’ distillery in 2021.
Winters had worked as a car park attendant at Glenfiddich during her school holidays, then went on to study Medicinal Chemistry and Brewing and Distilling at Heriot-Watt University. After her studies, she held a variety of technical and production roles with several distilleries of differing sizes and styles, such as Glenglassaugh, Balvenie and Kininvie. In all, Winters’ career in Scotch whisky had already spanned roughly twenty years before she joined The Cairn project. Now, as The Cairn’s first distillery manager and Scotland's first-ever woman to run a newly built distillery, she sits at the very beginning of a brand-new legacy.
Not much of Winters’ personal life has been communicated publicly, but she is married to a man who is also a professional within the whisky industry. They met while both were working at a whisky fair in Glasgow. In 2014, the couple moved back to Speyside to advance their respective careers in that region.
In the meantime, Gordon & MacPhail, the long-established Elgin whisky company whose reputation was built over generations, had previously entered distilling through the revival of Benromach in Forres. The company decided that a new distillery should be constructed near Grantown-on-Spey, on the banks of the River Spey and overlooking the Cairngorms. To be named The Cairn, the distillery was conceived on a much larger and more modern scale than Benromach. It would be designed not only as a production facility, but also as a statement about the company’s future; gleaming, efficient, and environmentally conscious.
For Winters, the opportunity to head up such a project was an extraordinarily rare privilege. The Cairn was not to be an inherited and historic, dusty-but-stately Victorian works with decades of ingrained habits, it was effectively a blank slate. Winters recalls that during her first months she shared office space with the building contractors themselves which allowed her to watch the distillery emerge piece by piece from the construction site, so she became intensely involved while the distillery still existed only as plans, scaffolding, copper pipe, and bare wood.
Construction of The Cairn had begun after planning permission was granted in 2019, though the COVID-19 pandemic severely hampered progress. Finally, the project moved steadily forward, and by mid-2022 the distillery celebrated its traditional “topping out” ceremony marking completion of the external structure. Winters participated personally in the ceremony, placing a bottle of Benromach whisky within the stonework alongside a young apprentice mason. The symbolism was deliberate: Benromach represented Gordon & MacPhail’s first distillery, while The Cairn embodied its future. By that point, Winters was already shaping the operational culture of the new distillery, as she began assembling her own team and helping them develop their careers. The early staff at The Cairn reflected a blend of experienced whisky workers and people entering the industry from many different backgrounds. As inaugural manager, Winters stood at the center of that effort, responsible not merely for spirit production, but also for building the human structure of the distillery itself.
The defining moment for Winters came in July 2022 when spirit finally flowed from new stills for the first time. Members of the Urquhart family, owners of Gordon & MacPhail, joined the distillery team to witness the occasion. For a whisky company with more than 125 years of history, it marked the beginning of a new chapter. Significantly, there was a striking historical patience built into the project, since The Cairn acknowledged openly that its first true single malt was not planned to appear until the mid-2030s. Yet while that whisky matured, The Cairn introduced the CRN57 series of blended malts to offer visitors an indication of the flavor direction the distillery hoped eventually to achieve. Winters described these releases as “the start of the journey,” intended to give drinkers a glimpse of what lay ahead while the distillery’s own spirit rested in cask.
Another defining aspect of Winters’ tenure has been the environmental ambitions attached to the distillery. The Cairn incorporated biodiversity initiatives, including a sedum roof intended to attract pollinating insects alongside efforts to encourage bird nesting through long grasses and nest boxes. Winters remarked that the project had inspired her to introduce similar biodiversity measures into her own garden at home; a small but revealing indication that the environmental philosophy of the distillery was not simply corporate branding but something to be embraced personally.
Away from whisky, Winters enjoys traveling, reading, and collecting old books. Those interests perhaps reveal something important about the kind of superintendent she has become. The Cairn was not created merely as a factory for alcohol production; it was envisioned as a place of experience, landscape, architecture, and storytelling, situated dramatically beside the Spey beneath the Cairngorm Mountains. Winters’ combination of technical training, operational experience, and obvious enthusiasm for both place and people have made her particularly suited to stewarding such a project.
Many nineteenth-century distillers spent their careers maintaining traditions already generations old, but Mhairi Winters instead entered Scotch whisky at a moment when she could help create a new tradition entirely. Decades from now, when bottles of mature Cairn single malt finally sit on shelves around the world, the whisky will owe much of its character to decisions made during those early years: the fermentation regime, the spirit cut, the cask policy, and the culture established by the first distilling team. Those decisions will have been shaped by Mhairi Winters herself, the woman present and in charge of a modern operation when one of Scotland’s oldest industries is carried out through its newest facility.
Sources:
OurWhisky Foundation, “Mhairi Winters & Lizzie Haw:Whisky Making is a Team Effort”, Becky Paskin, 3 April 2025, ourwhiskyfoundation.org
Contributed by Tracy McLemore, Fairview, Tennessee USA
