Edinburgh, 1998. Kirsten Grant Meikle, 23, is in the kitchen of her father’s house with two friends who are visiting from South Africa. The friends begin to quiz father and daughter – they want to know about the world of Scotch whisky from two members of an industry dynasty that began with William Grant and the foundation of the Glenfiddich Distillery more than a century earlier. But there’s a problem.
“It was at that point that I realised that I didn’t actually know that much about any of it. I remember thinking how embarrassing that was,” Kirsten Grant Meikle muses in 2023, reflecting on the incident. “My dad brought out three bottles from his sideboard, and lining them up, he began an impromptu tasting, much to the delight of my visiting friends. We tasted Grant’s Standfast, The Balvenie 10 Founder’s Reserve, and a Glenfiddich Pure Malt. That was my very first whisky educational session.”
For Grant Meikle, this was the moment that sparked a prosperous career in the drinks industry, and eventually brought William Grant’s direct descendants back to the Scotch whisky company that took his name.
Despite his family history, Grant Meikle’s fatherBrewing Company, and later through city pubs in which he had an interest.
