NEWS
WINE-SEARCHER: MACALLAN 18YO AND YAMAZAKI 12YO ARE THE MOST WANTED WHISKIES
By Siulan Law Mathews DipWSET
20-4-2021
Source: Wine-searcher.com
According to popular wine searching website wine-searcher.com, Macallan 18YO Sherry Oak is the most wanted whisky in the past 12 months. In second and third places are two Japanese whiskies, Yamazaki 12YO and Yamazaki 18YO.
The number of Japanese whiskies have reduced from three to two compared to the year before. And 8 out of the top 10 are single malt Scotchs.
Wine-searcher.com said the past 12 months has been a tough time for Scotch when the category had to face special tariffs from the USA as a result of trade tension between USA ans EU.
USA tariffs on Scotch have only just been lifted last month, sales of single malt Scotch alone in the USA fell by one third between 2019, when the tariffs were imposed, and March this year.
Beyond USA, there is also the problem of Brexit. With the EU being Scotch's largest regional market, the increase in paperwork and bureaucracy around exporting from the UK to the EU has added to the woes of producers, as costs rise and shipments suddenly take longer to fulfil.
And while there has been promising work done on reducing tariffs to the massive whisky market in India, trade talks between UK and Indian governments have yet to actually begin.
Despite all the difficulties, Scotch remained popular, and malts remain the dominant category for whisky searches across Wine-Searcher.com, and much of that rests on the collectibility of one brand – The Macallan.
There were three Macallans on the top 10 positions in the year before, and this year there are five. The Glenlivet has been replaced by Springbank, and the Glenfiddich has dropped three places.
But the Wine-searchers.com said the biggest revelation is about style rather than brand.
While there has been a definite vogue for heavily peated malts in the past decade or so, they are not the ones people are looking for in the past 12 months.
Ardbeg is a famously smoky, peaty whisky, but it is the only genuinely heavy whisky on this list – while Springbank is a peated whisky, it comes across as more briny than smoky and definitely doesn't fit in the "peat monster" category.
Perhaps all those magazine and online articles about the virtues of heavily peated whisky haven't convinced people; the majority of whiskies on this list are from the rich, smooth and fruity end of the scale.
Wine-searcher.com also said that if they are running the list based purely on search rankings, the sixth-placed whisky should be an USD8-a-bottle Indian malt called Peter Scot. The whisky is not on the top 10 list because it is only available in one outlet in the Indian city of Goa.
(the writer can be contacted at: info@thewinechronicle.com)
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