My flight back from Barcelona Design Week has been slightly delayed, so you lucky people get a ten minute blog post inspired by wandering the whisky aisles of the duty free.
In short; major distilleries might be trying to make the age of scotch whisky important again. But I wonder if it is too late?
Quick backstory: over a decade ago, lots of ‘expressions’ of household names started appearing on shelves. These ‘no age statement’ (NAS) whiskies basically allowed distilleries, faced with growing overseas demand, to make their stocks go further.
This is because if you put an ‘age’ on the label, it has to be the age of the youngest whisky in the bottle. So distillers could blend different ages, make stocks go further, and increase short term sales and profits. Some NAS whiskies were great! Lots were not.
As an industry, this did an interesting thing. For the majority of drinkers buying bottles, it said ‘yeah, age isn’t the be all and end all’ of good whisky. Which also meant that new players got in, because they didn’t have to wait 10 years for aging whisky to sell it.
Fun fact – I learned sometime around 2016 (?) that around two thirds of new gin distilleries in the UK were in Scotland. This is because you can distill a big batch of spirit, turn half into gin to sell in a few weeks, whilst putting the other half in barrels to age as whisky. There are no real rules around gin. That’s why there’s lots of it.
Anyway. Now there are lots of expressions out there, but also loads of new and interesting distilleries selling whisky that’s really not that old.
Having taken down the drawbridge keeping these upstarts out, I wonder if they are trying to pull it back up again? A quick google suggests maybe.
I’m not sure that’s a viable approach in the medium term though. There’s a group of drinkers who’re younger than the ones who remembered that ‘age of single malts is *everything*’, and they are the larger maturing market. The stories of what you do, how, and why are much more important in whisky nowadays. Not just how long you can afford to keep it in a barrel.
Ah, there’s the flight. And I forgot to buy a bottle.
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