Whiskey's Wave Keeps Rolling - story by Don Kavanagh...

Scotch whisky: Can be made as a single malt (the product of a single distillery) or a blend (a mixture of single malts and lighter grain spirits). Produced from malted barley and usually distilled twice. Aged for a minimum three years in Scotland.

Bourbon: Made from a mixture of grain with a minimum of 51 percent corn. Double distilled and aged in charred new American oak casks, which tend to give sweet vanilla and butterscotch notes.

Rye: Made from a minimum of 51 percent rye. Double distilled and aged in new oak. A spicier, more peppery character than Bourbon.

Japanese whisky: Made in the same manner as Scotch. It is mostly sold as blended whisky, although the most famous examples are single malts.

If any one country can claim to be intimately entwined with whiskey, it is Scotland. But be careful – they spell it without the "e", for reasons lost in the mists of time. Scotch was first mentioned in the exchequer rolls of 1495, when it was noted that Friar John Cor received "eight bolls of malt, wherewith to make acqua vitae", or whisky.

The industry today is worth more than any other Scottish sector apart from oil and financial services. In 2013, exports to the U.S. alone amounted to $1.25bn.

While Scotch comes in many forms it is single malt that takes pride of place, and the sheer number and variety of malts available adds to its attraction. Flavors depend on the size of the stills, the water source, the barley, the amount of peat smoke used in malting, the barrels used for aging, and even the location of the storage warehouses.

Distilleries range in size from the huge 10.5-million-liter capacity Glenlivet to the tiny, almost unbearably lovely Edradour, home to the smallest legally permissible still in Scotland.

Two decades ago, distillers could not imagine how demand would grow for single malts and due to the years taken for whisky to mature, they’ve been chasing to keep up. Currently there is a fever of distillery building in Scotland.

It's all good news for whisky fans; whether you love the delicate, heathery whiskies of the Highlands or the smoky, medicinal malts of Islay, there is more coming down the pipeline. Eventually.

Land of the rising dram

Japan might seem an odd hotspot for whiskey production, but the Japanese have always had a taste for Scotch and perhaps none more so than Masataka Taketsuru, whose story is today the subject of a Japanese TV drama, Massan.

Taketsuru was the scion of a sake-brewing family who went to Scotland to study organic chemistry in 1918. While studying, he worked at a number of distilleries and developed a passion for the spirit – and for a local girl, Rita Cowan. The pair married over the opposition of both their families and eventually moved back to Japan, where Taketsuru helped establish the Yamazaki distillery for Suntory.

Chosen for the purity of the local water, Yamazaki was Japan’s first whisky distillery and it has repeatedly carried the flag for the local product, with the 18-year-old winning six consecutive gold medals at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition. And then the 25-year-old 2013 Sherry Cask edition was named whisky of the year in the 2015 Whisky Bible.

It's not all about Yamazaki, either – Hibiki, Nikka and Yoichi have been turning heads for a decade now and Japanese whisky's floral, lightly spicy flavors have proved so popular around the world that this industry too is suddenly ramping up production.

Beyond these four countries, whiskey's allure persists, both for consumers and producers with distillery outposts from Canada through India, even spreading to Australasia and – yes – England. That probably says everything there is to say about how far whiskey has come.

Yamazaki 12 Year Old: There's an almost origami-like perfection to the way this fits together – nuts, spice, flowers and a touch of gentle vanillin sweetness. Balanced, taut and elegant.