The facts are easy to mis-construe.  There is certainly a boom in whisky drinking and purchases, cutting across all sectors and currently being led by bourbon.  (Rye, for all the hype, is still a sub-segment of whisky purchases and doesn’t yet post huge numbers).  Scotch whisky and Canadian are coming up right behind bourbon and in the wings are Irish and Japanese.  But the age statements that were predicated by a depressed market in blended Scotch whisky marketing a quarter century ago have drifted into American whiskey as well.  Age statements on bourbon?  An absolute rarity until recently (for years, Old Fitzgerald was the only Bottled-in-Bond (BiB) bourbon being marketed) and now its an absolute must to have a BiB in any bourbon line extension).  And while BiB concerns itself with other factors beside age, its primary value in the marketplace is its age statement.  We are long past the days of turpentine colored with tobacco and prune juice that predicated the BiB act in the first place in 1894.

The fact of the matter is this: there is more knowledge and science in whiskey making the world over than ever before.  That’s because its a bigger business than it ever was and with any large business, eliminating unknowns within your supply chain is paramount. With that comes better wood management, warehousing and maturation techniques, arguably the best it ever has been in the industry on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond.  This undermines the premise that age is the primary arbiter of quality.  Is there anyone out there telling that feels Black Art or Hedonism or Artein are inferior whiskies because they don’t state an age? Kilchomen continues to rack up major awards and it was first released as a 4yr old.  And the current Elijah Craig Small Batch is every bit as good as the dearly departed 12yr on the price/value axis.  The problem begins when you state an age on the label where the youngest is the legal age statement and you’ve sold through your current stock of your stated youngest.  You’ve painted yourself into a marketing corner, not a supply corner.  No matter how sophisticated we think we are, I almost defy 97 out of 100 testers to discern the difference between a 12 yr and a 11yr, with all other things being equal from a distillery known for quality.  And good blenders are good blenders for a reason: they know how to make an adjustment to the resultant product to maintain a quality standard.  But if marketing has tied their hands with an age statement, they’ve got nowhere to go from a product perspective.  And the resultant label change puts consumers on the defensive, conjuring up conspiracy paranoia.

What’s interesting in the current shortage scare is that its being predicated by investors and its in an investor’s interest to drive up the price of something based on scarcity.  But they’re seeing only the part of the industry that the marketers want them to see, the luxury market of rare whiskies.  There are millions and millions of barrels of whiskey all over the world aging and getting ready for bottling.  But the reality that there are less and less 40 year whiskies going for tens of thousands of dollars has no correlation on the market running out of whiskey.