Disaster Seen As Catastrophe Looms BY LEW BRYSON
“The Iron Giant” (1999), the tale of “a gun with a soul, that didn’t want to be a gun,” as director Brad Bird explained it, is one of my favorite movies, animated or live-action. Midway through the film, in a throwaway joke, the Iron Giant cannonballs into a pond, and beatnik artist Dean McCoppin is tsunami’d onto a nearby road, beach chair and all. As he sits, dripping, doggedly reading his newspaper, we can see briefly that the headline reads “DISASTER SEEN AS CATASTROPHE LOOMS.” The headline reflects the tone of the movie: strange, unpredictable forces are at work, and our way of life may be headed for sudden changes. I’ve been thinking about that lately as I sip my evening dram. I’ve seen a fair amount of change in the whisky drinker’s milieu. At the start of my whisky drinking life, bottles were relatively cheap and plentiful, and they were just starting to get much more interesting than they had been. Age statements were becoming common, and getting older. More distillery edition single malts were appearing, and the demotion of blends was underway. A tiny number of new, small distillers were starting out. Barrel finishing was in its infancy.
Things changed a lot in ten years. There were more small distillers, there were a lot more age statements on whiskies of every type. The secondary market was emerging as collectors started leveraging lucky buys to get their next acquisition. Distillers were still putting out bargains, but some bottles were getting pricey. It seemed like everyone was doing barrel finished single malts. Ten years more? The landscape had changed again. A sea of small distillers formed, on almost every continent, and delicious contenders appeared from countries that had never been thought of seriously as whisky producers by western aficionados; Japan, Taiwan, India, New Zealand, Sweden. Grain was no longer just a commodity, it was becoming as variable and precious as grape varietals for wine. Every kind of whisky was barrel finished. Age statements were disappearing as throngs of new customers put growing demand on long-surplus stocks. Distillers expanded, built entire new distilleries. Warehouses popped up across the countryside, some of them built not by distillers, or independent bottlers, but by secretive investment groups who wanted to age the new make they’d bought. The secondary market exploded, and ‘dusty hunters’ went
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the whisky explorer magazine
WINTER 2024
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