It has been a very good time for scotch whisky in recent years. After a lull in the first couple of years of the 2020s when everything was down, ownership of whisky casks has generated a lot of interest, in no small part due to the fascination and mythology of many distilleries.
Many big distilleries have seen surges in interest, but the industry has seen such demand that long-dormant distilleries have either seen their maturing casks be distilled for extremely premium bottles or be reopened entirely to create a new generation of whiskies for a new generation of drinkers.
Because of all of this, it can seem somewhat unusual to even approach the question of whisky facing a threat to its very being, but because the whisky industry and the process of making whisky is, by definition, an exceptionally slow process that takes years if not decades, it is important to look for the possibility of icebergs whilst there is a chance to steer clear.
A good place to start is to look at a time when the whisky industry did face an extreme danger of, if not dying, then at least becoming a much smaller niche market.
Rot In The Whisky Loch
Most of the bust periods for whisky have either been the result of factors way outside of the control of the industry or when larger conglomerates in the industry have lost sight of what makes whisky such a special drink.
There were obviously a lot of closures around the time of the two World Wars, particularly the Second World War, but there was not a lot the whisky industry could do to directly prevent the Blitz.
Distilleries therefore needed to focus on the war effort, whether that meant drastically scaling down production or shutting down entirely and using the manufacturing resources to construct other wartime products.
However, the early 1980s whisky loch was the fault of bigger distilleries, and a lot of the blame can be placed at the feet of what is now Diageo.
At that point it was known as The Distillers Company Limited (DCL), starting out life as a trade association before rapidly buying other distilleries whenever there was a crash in the market.
From the 1950s until the 1970s, the vast majority of whisky was made for blended consumption, with blends being by far the most popular whisky spirits market compared to single malt.
This led to rampant production of the types of whisky desired by DCL’s blenders, but it backfired when the triple whammy of taste changes, an oil crisis and a huge recession led to a surplus of whisky so significant it was nicknamed the Whisky Loch.
It was so bad that DCL faced a hostile takeover bid by the Argyle Group (later Safeway UK, now part of Morrisons), which was only thwarted by a bizarre reverse takeover by Guinness, which later became the subject of one of the biggest fraud trials of the 20th century.
The share price was illegally inflated to enable the relatively smaller Guinness company to buy out DCL for £4bn and was such a huge case that affected so much of the scotch whisky market that it took nearly 15 years for both the case and the market to resolve itself.
However, even this was not enough to defeat the whisky industry, and it will likely take a cataclysmic world event that makes distilling impossible for whisky to truly cease to be.