The just-released annual IWSR magazine’s Top 100 Travel Retail Brands list reveals that most of the leading brands increased sales last year as the market began to recover following 2015’s downturn. Overall global travel-retail spirits sales increased by 3.2% in 2016 over 2015 to reach 22.5m nine-litre cases. Johnnie Walker still leads the ranking with an 11.4% share of global ...

By Kurt Maitland Quoting myself and The Lost Distillery Company, “The Lost Distillery is an independent whisky company whose stated mission is ‘to create present day expressions of legendary whiskies that belonged to the craft of whisky distilling almost a century ago’.” Between Prohibition and the time of Scotland’s “whisky loch,” (i.e. the whisky crash of the 1970s) many distilleries ...

Family run, independent bottler Wemyss Malts is releasing a new range of blended Scotch malt whiskies that have been produced from the family’s private collection of maturing whisky casks. Rather than use whisky that has been purchased mature and ready to blend, Wemyss Malts has over the past decade sourced oak cask varieties to partner with single malt spirit selected ...

By Richard Thomas The two big stumbling blocks for anyone trying to get into Japanese whisky are the price tag and availability. Japanese whisky is as expensive or more expensive than comparable Scotch whiskies, and many key expressions are a damn sight harder to find. It’s not hard to see why. Japanese whisky has become wildly popular around the world ...

Choosing The Right Scotch Whisky For A Beginner By Richard Thomas Introducing a friend to Scotch whisky is far trickier than getting them started on Bourbon. While Scotch has a wide ranging palette of flavors and deep set of styles to work with, that can mean one is just as likely to accidentally turn someone off as on with a ...