If you happen to regard yourself as a whisky fundamentalist, you may want to plug your ears. Many of the rarest and most acclaimed single malts and blends don’t actually come from Scotland or Kentucky anymore. Over the last decade, Japan has slowly and methodically come to dominate the category, sweeping awards and earning record prices at auction. As the third largest producer of whisky on the planet, it now even outranks Ireland.
Japan’s single-malt tradition dates back to 1923, when Shinjiro Torii established Yamazaki, the country’s first malt-whisky distillery, but it owes an even greater debt to Masataka Taketsuru, who moved to Scotland in 1918 to learn the art of distilling and returned to found the Nikka brand in 1934, which has influenced the country’s craft ever since. But…
