From San Diego to Speyside: Who Is Behind Vantage Creative

1 day ago
9 min read

When I think back to my high school days, planning my future around college courses, I never would have guessed where I am today. I never would have thought my work would focus on creating enjoyment around whisky and spirits. I imagined myself in a big city, head of marketing for a cool brand, living my best life and having it all. I clearly watched one too many rom-coms as a kid.

What’s led me to creating tasting experiences and helping others build on theirs is nothing short of one miracle after another. Though many moments felt like checks on my sanity, they were the moments that brought me here.

I’m Samantha, the founder of Vantage Creative, a spirits experience business based in Speyside. I grew up in San Diego, which is about as far from whisky country as it’s possible to get. No heritage, no family tradition, no obvious route to any of this. I came in from the outside, and I think that’s exactly why I see it the way I do.

My work today focuses on creating experiences around spirits that encourage others to use their individual senses. But why, and what brought me to this point? Well, many reasons.

The first is that I have synaesthesia and hyperphantasia, which means I see colours and visual scenes when I taste spirits. I’m also neurodivergent, though I prefer the term neuro spicy. Three different but important ways of experiencing the world that make me look at things through a different lens. Secondly, I’m obsessed with whisky and spirits. Not in a get me help sort of way. In an “I’m fascinated, tell me more” sort of way. I’ve spent a good portion of my career in rooms that weren’t always sure what to do with someone like me, or even considered others like me in the first place.

Somewhere along the way I figured out that the things that make me different are worth leaning into rather than explaining away.

It took a while to get here.

The beginning of the obsession

I didn’t come to whisky through heritage or family tradition. I came to it the way most people come to things: love. Insert laugh here. But seriously, it did start with my first time in Scotland and a handsome boy handing me my first dram.

What I didn’t expect was what followed. Not the relationship (though I did end up marrying that handsome boy), the whisky. Something about that first dram put its hooks in me and I wanted to understand it properly. What was in it. How it got there. Why it tasted the way it did. Years later, while working in marketing, I jumped at the opportunity to work with a well-known spirits producer. And I fell hard. I continued that fall when I moved to The Macallan, soaking up every bit of knowledge I could get my hands on. But it wasn’t enough. Every answer led to three more questions. I was fine with that.

Today, I hold a Diploma in Single Malt Scotch from Edinburgh Whisky Academy, a Certificate in Distilling from IBD, and as of writing this, I’ll be studying for my WSET Spirits Level 3. Not because I needed someone to tell me what I was tasting, but because I want to understand what is happening in the glass and everything before it gets there.

You’re probably wondering at this point where the experience piece came in. Why not just do one or the other? Why have I split my passion between the liquid and the experience around it? Well…

I’ve always been a little picky about experiences. Even as a teenager visiting a Starbucks, being cool and getting my Caramel Frappuccino, I would be mesmerised watching the baristas and the finesse that went into making a coffee. So much so, I ended up becoming a barista myself later on. As I grew older, I’d notice more the difference between someone going through the motions and someone who genuinely cared about how the customer left. I noticed the way businesses had built a system around surprise and delight, and when places didn’t deliver on either. A rehearsed greeting that doesn’t quite reach the eyes. A restaurant host who picks up the menus and walks to the table without making eye contact. These things registered to me. They always have.

So when we ask someone to invest real money and real curiosity in a spirits experience, those details matter even more. The person who arrives at a distillery or tasting room has already chosen to care. The question is whether the experience cares back.

That connection, between how an experience feels and how a spirit tastes, is what drew me to the visitor experience side of the industry in the first place. The liquid started the journey. The experience around it is what kept me going.

The moments that built me

You still here? Great! 10 points to Gryffindor 🏆

I spent years working within some of Scotland’s most iconic whisky companies. What those years gave me wasn’t just knowledge of the liquid. It was an education in what happens when experience design is working and what happens when it isn’t. When structures got in the way of the guest in front of me, I felt it. Every time something that should have been simple became impossible, I felt it. Not with bitterness. With frustration, because I could see the gap between what was and what could be.

I’m not going to name specifics or point fingers at anyone. That’s not what this is about. What I will say is that I reached a point where I clearly understood that to do the work I actually wanted to do, I needed to do it for myself.

So I did. Vantage Creative launched in 2025, building experiences around the guest rather than around a stakeholder. No red tape. No waiting for sign-off from another continent. Just the experience, designed the way it should be.

Gaining resilience through my differences

I was hosting a tasting when it happened. The pin dropped, and I decided to stop apologising for how my brain works.

I described what I saw when I nosed the spirit. The colours and, more bizarrely, the imagery.

The room went a bit quiet.

Mostly in a way that told me they didn’t know what to do with it and were trying to digest my description. They were kind enough, but still confused. They called it creative. But there was something in that pause that I recognised, because I’d felt it in rooms where my answers didn’t fit the expected format.

I’d already been building confidence and resilience as a mentee with the OurWhisky Foundation, a non-profit that supports and empowers women in whisky, but sometimes it takes a specific moment to really bring your hard work to life. Being part of that community gave me somewhere to stand my ground. The tasting room gave me a reason to.

I thought: if I feel uncertain in a room like this, having worked in this industry for years, how is someone who’s marginalised in the drinks world, or trying something completely new, going to feel?

That thought didn’t leave me. Vantage Creative is the answer.

There’s a thing that happens when someone tastes a spirit for the first time in one of my experiences. Their shoulders drop. They stop looking around the room to check whether their answer is right. They say the thing they never felt comfortable saying in a room full of enthusiasts, and then they look slightly surprised that nobody corrected them.

That moment is why I do this.

The neuro spicy bit

👋🏻

I mentioned these earlier, and no, they’re not just buzzwords. For me, it’s taken years to understand why my blurted jokes didn’t land, or why my descriptions of things were completely different from the rest of the group. But what are these things, and why do they matter?

Neurodivergence is a term that describes brain development and function that differs from what’s considered typical. It covers a broader range of people than most realise, including those with ADHD, autism, dyslexia, and synaesthesia. It’s not a disorder. It’s a different way of processing the world, and a lot of people you’d recognise are part of that group. Emma Watson and Simone Biles have both spoken publicly about ADHD. Richard Branson about dyslexia. The list is long, and most of those people would tell you the same thing: it’s not something to fix.

Synaesthesia is where one sense involuntarily triggers another. For some people, letters have colours. For others, music has shapes or textures. Around 4% of the population has some form of it, though many don’t realise. Pharrell Williams hears colours when he makes music. Billy Joel sees them when he listens. The painter Wassily Kandinsky saw colours in sound and built an entire artistic movement around it. In my case, flavour and aroma trigger colour responses and visual scenes, every time, whether I ask for them or not. It’s automatic, it’s specific, and it means I experience a dram very differently from the person sitting next to me.

Hyperphantasia is the ability to generate mental imagery with extraordinary vividness and detail. Where some people picture a scene loosely or not at all, a hyperphantasic brain produces images that are fully formed, consistent, and almost indistinguishable from actually seeing something. It’s less talked about than synaesthesia, but researchers link it strongly to creative and sensory-led thinking. For my work, it matters because the visual response I get from tasting a spirit isn’t a vague impression. It’s a complete scene, detailed enough to describe precisely and consistent enough to come back to. It’s part of why I can talk about what I taste the way I do, and why I’ve stopped thinking of it as strange and started thinking of it as useful.

For a long time, all of this felt like things to manage. Now it feels like the blueprint.

The synaesthesia means I experience flavour differently from most people in the room. The hyperphantasia means those responses aren’t vague impressions; they’re full scenes, specific and detailed. The neurodivergence means I notice things that other people move past. I also suffer from imposter syndrome, still, even now, and I care about things more than is sometimes comfortable. The imposter syndrome means I’m always asking whether what I’m doing is good enough, which, honestly, keeps the standard high. Caring too much means that when someone leaves one of my tastings having found something they enjoy in a category they thought wasn’t for them, I feel it deeply.

And exhale...

I call it neuro spicy because that’s actually what it is. Not a deficit. Not something to compensate for. A different way of processing the world that turns out to be quite useful when your job is helping people process sensory experience. And it’s genuinely just more fun at times.

The gym, the weights, and the parallel nobody sees coming

Outside of work, I lift weights, or try to, when mum duty allows. I’ve been doing it long enough to know it requires the same kind of attention as a tasting. You have to notice your form. You have to know what you’re training for. You have to understand that the process you follow determines the result you get, and that someone training for a marathon and someone training for a weightlifting competition are both doing exactly the right thing for their goal, even though those goals look nothing alike.

I think about that a lot when I’m designing experiences. There’s no universal correct outcome. The person who comes in knowing nothing about spirits and leaves having found one thing they actually like has had a perfect experience. So has the enthusiast who came in knowing everything and left having noticed something they’d never paid attention to before. Different training. Different result. Both valid.

Why seven spirits and not one

I started in whisky, but Vantage Creative offers experiences across Scotch, bourbon, Japanese whisky, gin, rum, mezcal, and tequila. And honestly, probably more as time goes on.

It was never a plan. It was the same curiosity that got me into whisky in the first place, just following its own logic further. When I studied for my IBD Certificate in Distilling, I learned about other distillate products alongside whisky and realised something the industry rarely says plainly. The small details and differences that make each whisky unique are exactly the same process that makes every other spirit distinct from everything else. The questions are the same. The answers just smell and taste different.

So I keep asking them.

What the work actually feels like

When it works, and it does work, it’s exhilarating in a way that’s hard to describe without sounding like I’m overselling it.

When someone’s eyes light up. When they say the thing they’d been keeping quiet because they weren’t sure they were right. When the relief crosses their face and then the enjoyment follows, and you can see them recalibrating their understanding of a whole category they’d written off as not for them.

That makes me smile every time. Every. Single. Time.

Growing up a world away, with no whisky culture, no industry connections and no map for any of this, means I’ve never taken the access for granted. My life has had hard times in it, don’t get me wrong. But I know that those hard times, and that distance from where I started, are part of what shaped me into someone who notices things, cares about people’s experience of the world, and sees the spirits industry through a lens that isn’t coloured by how things have always been done.

I want to belong and create space so that others who walk into one of my rooms feel the same way.

It turns out that’s quite a good foundation for a business. Who knew?

Vantage Creative runs sensory spirits experiences across Speyside and beyond, for private groups, venue partners, and corporate clients. Seven spirit categories. No right answers. vantagecreativescot.co.uk

Your senses. Your discovery.