Why Japanese Whisky Is So Good and So Hard to Find
11-12 years ago, Santa Margherita Pinot Grigio used to be $9.99 a bottle.It was a very good wine for cheap and wine hipsters loved it.Then after a string of stellar reviews in different wine media outlets it became hard to find at $20-30+ a bottle.The price, coupled with the scarcity and good reviews made it even more sought after. So production was increased.Now it is easy to find for $18 a bottle.Because it is now popular, and relatively expensive, wine hipsters turn their nose up at it.Snobs will claim for days that the ramp up in production has led to quality differences to something they tasted a decade ago, with absolutely no way of supporting that claim.I imagine the same thing happens with whisky, except whisky production is harder to increase due to aging requirements.I'm 100% sure that if Japanese distilleries find some way of increasing production and availability, whisky snobs will wave their hands and say "oh they ruined it", even if every objective means of evaluating it shows it to be spectrometrically, molecularly, and even atomically identical in every way to whiskeys back when they were rare.