The business of cask-strength whisky | thearticle

There was a time when – with one possible exception – I wrote more about whisky in the national newspapers than anyone else. I’d go up to Scotland half a dozen times a year and visit one

marketed distillery and one that remained obscure. That way I must have clocked up around half the hundred or so malt whisky distilleries in Scotland that were functioning at the time. This

was back in the eighties and nineties. One or two distilleries had shops selling booze, hipflasks, shortbread and tartan knicknacks, but you didn’t see very many tourists, or the

malt-spotters who now pay dearly for the chance to poke their noses through the door. On most occasions my visit abided by the same drill: a quick look at the stills and the angle of the lye

pipe, a pootle round the bonded warehouse with a detour to inspect the source of the water, a little chat with the manager (often an old ships’ engineer who knew how to service a boiler)

and finally a tasting of the ‘product’. This came in the form of a couple of ‘age statements’: a young malt of eight or ten years and an older one of fifteen or twenty. Every now and then

there was an even older one, but that came from one of ten independent bottlers like the venerable Gordon & MacPhail in Elgin. Distilleries had one vocation: to provide a characteristic

whisky that would contribute to a proprietary blend like Johnnie Walker, Long John or Bells. Malt was an insignificant part of the whisky market and comparatively cheap too. At just six

years old, an XO cognac could cost twice as much as fifteen-year-old malt. The rules laid down by Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise meant that you couldn’t taste any of the whisky lying in

the bonded warehouses, but some managers let you poke your finger into a barrel, hogshead or butt and suck them – yes, I know that might get some readers excited. If you did that you had to

keep mum about it in your article. Managers were mostly monosyllabic. When you asked the pertinent question: “What makes your malt different?”, they’d often rejoinder “Dinnae know”, pour you

another dram, or fetch a plate of diversionary bacon baps. Only latterly were some cannier characters put in charge, and I remember one who took a pipette to a cask of 1976 (the drought

year) and who marvelled at its quality. “This” he said, “will become the manager’s dram, and I’ll fill a bottle for you too.” That gentle, sleepy world has now vanished. Malt whisky is now a

big money spinner and the beardy malt-spotter with his bicycle clips can only salivate at the sight of a few bottles, now that Asian millionaires have transformed the business. Malts that

cost a couple of tenners in the old days now cost a few hundred. Take Bowmore on Islay: a 21-year old costs up to £200, a 27-year-old, £300; and 25-year-old, £800; and should you wish to buy

a special bottling of a 54-year-old it is selling at over £129,000. That 1976 I had sells for more than £1,000 now. This week I paid a call on Simon Aron of Cask Trade in his compact office

in London’s Regent Street. A former technology whizz-kid, Aron is a collector of 25 years standing who has hit on the idea of buying up promising casks full of malt lying around distillery

warehouses and selling them on to other collectors. You only have to buy the cask and Cask Trade will do the rest: look after it, bottle it and should you so desire, sell it. He sells to

collectors, who amount to 70 per cent of the trade. Aron says the desire is to possess authentic cask-strength whisky, which can be well over 60 per cent alcohol by volume when it is young,

but will depreciate in cask if the whisky is stored in a damp Scottish cellar. Malt whisky is a wonderful investment. It has increased in value by 584 per cent in the past decade, in one

year alone the price of rare malts rose by 40 per cent. The bonanza culminated in last month’s sale of a bottle of 60-year-old Macallan which topped £1.5 million. I thought back wistfully to

the launch of that very whisky in Milan a quarter of a century ago when I had a glass of it all to myself. Aron does not buy bottles, but the casks that are supplementary to blenders’

requirements. These were formerly bought and sold by a handful of independent bottlers, but the number of traders in cask-strength whisky has increased exponentially just like everything

else. “People are crazy for cask-strength whisky” says Aron. No one cask resembles another, and at a high strength, that has yet to be reduced for commercial bottling, they are experiencing

something wholly out of the ordinary. Stocks of old bottled whisky are also dwindling. Some age statements are no more. What passes for malt is often young, and dressed up with some fancy

‘wood’ finish – claret barrels, Madeira and sherry; but there is still a potential when it comes to buying casks. Many of Cask Trade’s customers are romantics who want to own the whisky,

others are purely investors. And more whisky is being made now. Since the millennium at least a couple of dozen more distilleries have opened which are not necessarily seen as an integral

part of a well-known blend. It was time to taste. Aron lined up three whiskies: a 1978 Glenlivet from Speyside at just 41.7 ABV smelling of sweet sherry, which closed with a hint of aniseed;

a 2006 grain whisky from the North British distillery which had all that pink fluffy, creamy sweetness of grain whisky when it’s good; and a lovely 2005 Bunnahabhain from Islay at 56.2 from

a first-fill Oloroso sherry cask that had me musing on sweet-smelling leather seats in a vintage Bentley. You see what Aron means when you look at the prices: buying a whole hogshead of

25-year-old Auchroisk would cost around £70 a bottle, so with plenty of margin for profitable re-sale; a barrel of 2012 Bruichladdich worked out at only £7, but you’d need to sit on it for

three to ten years before you bottled and sold it. That leaves me in the invidious position of recommending a single bottle of malt for us mere mortals, but I am going to plump for a

classic, peaty Islay malt, a Laphroaig 10-year old that keeps the flag flying at a (ahem!) modest £38.95 a bottle.