The furor over this has been extreme, as it is widely seen by many as a way for distillers to lower the quality of the final product (without necessarily lowering price). Along with this is a move by distillers to release new No Age Statement (NAS) expressions, to better manage their inventories. Given the recent resurgence of whisky consumption, there is now much talk of aged whisky shortages.
In reality, they are a sign of cost – the longer that barrel has sat on some rack, the more it has cost the producer to store it (and so, the more you are likely going to pay for it). With lots of excess inventory sitting in warehouses slowly aging, the whisky industry began pushing higher defined age statements as a sign of quality. See this post for a good example of just such a case.Īs an aside, the cachet built-up around higher age statements was largely cooked up during a period of significant down-turn in the whisky market. And technically, ALL the whisky in there could be well over 12 years old for that matter. So your bottle could contain only a miniscule amount of 12 year old whisky, and be heavily biased toward much older whiskies. Wait a minute, I hear you ask – so what does that age statement (e.g., “12 year old”) mean on my bottle of single malt? It certifies the minimum age of the youngest whisky that went into that vatting. Typically, the individual malt whiskies that get “vatted” together have been aged for varying amounts of time, in barrels that previously contained different types of spirits to start with (see my discussion here of where whisky flavours come from). 😉 Maker don’t like using the word blending in this context, since a “blend” is the short-form name for a specific combination of different styles of whiskies (as I will explain below). Of course, those are just fancy ways of saying blending. In fact, pretty much every “single malt” you can buy (aside from some limited individual cask expressions) is produced by “vatting” or “marrying” together dozens to hundreds of individual barrels of whisky. Note the distinctions inherent in that qualification. In fact, what a Scottish “single malt” actually means is that it is only malt whisky, prepared in the traditional way, and produced by a single distillery in Scotland. Most people naturally assume that “single malt” means just that – a single whisky from a single barrel.
In an effort to provide a cachet (and justify a higher price), single malt whisky has undergone several decades of extensive “higher quality” branding.
This is our first lesson in how the marketing machine that barrels over (pun intended) the whisky world has distorted people’s understanding of this product. So it may therefore surprise you to learn that almost all “single malt” scotch you will find in your local liquor store is in fact a blend of many different individual whiskies. Many will certainly agree that the greatest diversity of flavour comes the traditional, single pot-distilled, malted barley form of whisky, aged for extended periods in oak barrels (aka, the classic Scottish single malt). If there is one persistent meme that seems to have firmly inserted itself into the minds of everyone with even a passing awareness of scotch-style whiskies, it is that single malts are of perceived higher quality than “blends”.
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