► We drive 500 miles
► To try some £40,000 whisky
► Read month 3
I once tagged along with Martin Brundle for a ride. The F1 driver turned broadcaster likes to ride to a couple of the European rounds, to break up the endless flying and to give him a chance to properly exercise his motorcycle.
The BMW K1600GT is to bikes what the Bentley Continental GT is to cars; a big, weighty and charismatically over-engined triumph of technology capable of majestic progress across the face of this earth. It’s a very fast, very comfortable machine built not for local hops but for intercontinental epics, and Martin told me of the trouble he sometimes has stopping.
He’ll leave, say, Imola, with every intention of breaking for a night’s rest somewhere in France, only for the momentum of the ride – the contentment that comes, almost trance-like, with long hours on the road – to lead him to disregard the idea and press on instead, gliding onto his driveway in the small hours with a smile on his face and a visor thick with bugs.
My so far short but sweet tenure with the Bentley Continental GTC has longed for such a drive. All I needed was a reason. And while I’m no whisky connoisseur, the chance to try a £40,000 drop feels like a once- in-a-lifetime thing. I just need to get myself from the East Midlands to The Macallan estate by this evening.
The roads are wet but the sky bright as the Conti and I wriggle cross-country, join the A1 in a wall of guttural but cultured V8 racket and begin to work our way north. The roof is down, naturally, the better to enjoy one of the first fine days of the year, and the cockpit’s snug architecture does a great job of making hours of fast, top-down cruising a privilege to be savoured rather than suffered. The 85mph windblast tumbles harmlessly from the steeply-raked screen, the fold-out wind deflector banishes buffeting and the heated wheel, seat and armrests, not to mention the impressive power and clarity of the upgraded Bang & Olufsen audio, ensure complete comfort.
With Waze up on the infotainment screen, counting down the hours and pointing out the potential pitfalls, Pontefract, Newcastle and Berwick-upon-Tweed all come and go. We’re averaging 50mph and 24mpg, Spotify’s AI DJ is on a roll and the Conti now fits me like a loyal sweater. The centre console’s busy, studded as it is with clusters of buttons and rotary controls, but it’s intuitive. Makes sense, too, when you’ve rotated the touchscreen out of sight to reduce distraction.
The drive-mode controller is an ergonomic triumph, encouraging you to tweak it constantly, snapping the car into Sport for roundabouts and twisty sections before dropping everything back to full languid in Comfort. If only Custom offered the chance to independently calibrate gearbox and throttle response – instead they’re lumped together.
In the snoozier drive modes the throttle can take an age and what feels like miles of pedal travel to rouse the transmission and turbochargers. But sharpen the throttle response and the gearbox goes to high alert too, pointlessly holding third, for example, when you’d rather be in fourth or fifth.
With 542bhp under my right foot and the clock ticking, the spectacular A9 towards Inverness requires deep-breathing exercises to keep me calm. It’s thick with average-speed cameras, so there’s nothing to do but admire the views and ponder the speed at which the Bentley might naturally settle were the law not a factor. It’s such a reassuringly solid machine on the move – grippy, neutral and unerringly stable– that the answer is likely well into three figures.
Finally, turning onto the A95, the purgatory ends. It’s late afternoon now and the sunlight’s taken on an amber warmth in which my GTC, with its Cricket Ball paint and dark fiddleback eucalyptus wood, looks little short of sensational.
We find ourselves in convoy with a W12 Speed coupe, my other favourite version of the Conti GT, and the undulating, largely empty 50 miles that follow are a very welcome reminder of just how magnificent driving in the UK can still be. The landscape is Tolkienian in its over-the-top, unspoiled splendour. Glittering rivers, cool forests, sinuous hillside parabolas through which the GT works its anti-roll control system hard – they all feed into a feast for the senses made all the more delicious by the lack of sheet metal above my head.
There’s little in it, either, between the W12 Speed and my V8 S GTC. Both are capable of completing overtakes the very moment you decide you’d like to (crucial here, where a missed opportunity can mean a dozen miles behind a groaning logging truck), both monster unknown roads with ease and both are more than capable of covering more miles in fewer minutes than Waze can keep up with.
Nestled on a hillside overlooking the Spey (the distillery owns a mile and a half of the river, and the fast-flowing, granite-filtered water is a key ingredient), the 485-acre estate The Macallan calls home looks more like a rewilding project than an industrial enterprise. Heavily wooded and with very little by way of visible man-made structures – just a handsome white house perched high above the river – little looks to have changed since the distiller’s founding year, 1824.
Then, as you drive in, you clock the warehousing on the next hillside: building after building and, within them, cask after cask – 450,000 of them, each holding up to 500 litres of the good stuff. These are sherry-seasoned oak casks, sourced from an outpost in Jerez, Spain. Ten times as expensive as a bourbon cask, they’re crucial to both colour and flavour.
The Macallan range starts at 12 years old, priced from £80. The oldest is over 80. I try a dram in an old stone building no longer used for production. It’s so cold it could serve as a mortuary with very few modifications. Moments later, as the sweet, smooth liquid hits home (American oak brings the sweetness here; darker European oak gives spicy, chocolate notes) the room suddenly feels warm and cosy.
The modern distillery and visitor centre, opened in 2018 and the heart of an operation that employs 270, is breathtaking. Sunk into the hillside and invisible from three sides thanks to one of the largest double-curved, grass-covered roofs in the world, its beauty and scale are a match for the countryside in which it sits. Cavernous beneath its majestic timber gridshell roof and with a hushed, faintly reverential sense of calm, the space feels almost churchly.
The 24 stubby copper stills, key to the process of concentrating the new-make spirit and around 20 per cent of its flavour, work to produce 12 million litres per year. Contemplating who might drink the resulting whisky, where and when, is a bit much; some will likely be around, waiting to be opened, well into the next century.
Time for a dram of Horizon. Created in collaboration with Bentley, just 700 bottles of Horizon were made available (a limited run is anything under 5000 units on planet The Macallan). Like limited-run Bentleys, most were allocated before the release was even announced. And as with limited-run Bentleys, there are collectors and speculators who buy these rare and sought after bottles with no intention of ever using them as intended, heartbreakingly.
At £40,000 plus VAT it is not inexpensive, but then The Macallan holds the record for the most valuable bottle of whisky ever sold at auction – $2.74m for a 1926 Adami.
The Horizon vessel, horizontal because that is the plane through which cars move (mostly…), is undeniably spectacular – like a paused vortex in copper, wood, leather and aluminium. And the liquid within? Pretty special, even to my naive palate. Complex, rich and with an oxymoronic silken heft, it is spectacularly good. So good, in fact, that it bears comparison with the drive up.
Logbook: Bentley Continental GTC V8 S (month 4)
Price: £227,100 (£282,745 as tested)
Performance: 3996cc twin-turbocharged V8, 542bhp, 4.1sec 0-62mph, 198mph
Range: 249 miles (official), 221 miles (tested)
Efficiency: 22.6mpg (official), 24.0mpg (tested), 284g/km CO2
Energy cost: 35.0p per mile
Miles this month: 1023
Total miles: 2934
Read month 3
Read month 2
Read month 1