ScotchTalk Vol. 3 - Japan Tops the List

Dear Readers, I point a finger to this article in Fortune: 

http://fortune.com/2014/11/04/the-best-whisky-in-the-world-isnt-scottish

which notes that the latest edition of Jim Murray's Scotch Bible (2015), a sherry cask Yamazaki single malt from Suntory tops the list, and nothing from Scotland even cracked the top five (!!). 

Many whisky bloggers and drinkers have seen this coming for some time. Scotch distillers have been moving away from transparent age-dated offerings, instead deciding to release opaque batches with clever names but without age statements. 


One of the "tricks" with the age on a Scotch bottle is that it represents a floor - a 12 Year bottle means that everything inside the bottle has been aged for 12 years ... and possibly for more. Very good bottles will have some amount of very old casks in them, which tempers the youth and adds a lot of complexity and texture. 

So therefore the big downfall of No Age Statement (NAS) Scotch is that there is necessarily very young whisky mixed in, possibly as young as the law allows - a scant three years. Young whisky is unmistakable: brash, harsh, jagged, in your face, combative, restive, impatient, and not yet fully flavorful, since it hasn't had time to absorb the flavors from the wood casks.

Smoky whiskies can hide these undesirable qualities beneath thick layers of peat and smoke - Ardbeg 10 Year and Laphroaig 10 Year are perfect examples, tremendously smooth at high alcohol percentages, masking the brashness with smoke and allowing only the good flavors to creep through. 

But it's been an open secret for a while now that distillers seem to be running low on the old casks of the highly aged whiskies. As the years go by, the proportion of young, impetuous whisky gets higher and higher. The complexity gets lower and lower, the flavor decreases, the unpleasant effects become pronounced. 

This is perhaps most commonly commented on with Aberlour A'bunadh and Ardbeg Uigeadail; both bottles are NAS, and both can be dated with codes present on bottle or box. Bloggers and commenters across the internet have sworn that the old batches are rich, luscious, full figured, and the new ones are thinner in flavor, in texture, less complicated. 

And now Scotch has fallen from Jim Murray's pantheon of whiskies, replaced by a superior Japanese dram. What to make of this? Will this be a wake up call, following the recent narrow vote against independence, pushing the distillers to distinguish themselves on the world stage? Has the purchase of virtually every major distillery by the Big Faceless Corporations changed the game for good? Will Japanese single malts and small batch bourbons continue to dominate the whisky reviews in the near future?