Japanese distillers made a fine showing last night at Whisky Magazine’s 6th annual World Whisky Awards.

Yamazaki scooped the coveted Best Single Malt Whisky award for its 25 Year Old expression, while Nikka won the Best Blended Whisky category with its Taketsuru 17 Year Old.

This marks the second year in a row Yamazaki’s has triumphed, with their sublime 1984 vintage taking home the best single malt prize in 2011.More...

On Monday we took the train up to London for an event we’d been looking forward to for some time. London in summer is quite possibly the best combination of city and season the world has to offer, it has to be said. So we were in high spirits as we arrived at the Saatchi Gallery for a Suntory tasting entitled “The Art of Japanese Whisky”. More...

We asked a few well-known spirits/drinks writers to come up with delicious wintry cocktails using our 8 year old blended whisky, and our new cask-aged whisky bitters.

This week we’ve teamed up with Joshua Hatton to bring you the next thrilling instalment in our guest cocktail blog series. Joshua not only writes a superb blog, he is also President and Founder of the Jewish Single Malt Whisky Society based over in the good ol’ US of A. We posted Joshua a bottle of our very own 8 year old blended whisky and a bottle of our brand new and very fine cask-aged whisky bitters. More...

When we flung open the MoM shutters this morning we were greeted with the sound of birds chirping and children playing as blissful sunshine poured into the room.

We’ve earned this summer, having had the coldest winter for 31 years! Just imagine our chagrin last year, when the Met Office promised us a “barbecue summer” and instead we were given drizzle, and lots of it.

Positive Weather Solutions (who have been a tad more reliable than the Met Office and have a pleasingly optimistic name) have predicted Summer 2010 to be a record breaker, with a good chance of temperatures exceeding 2003’s high of 38.5C. This is good news indeed. More...

It’s a very dreary Friday afternoon here at MoM towers. We’ve gone from a horrid frost at the beginning of the week to a grim, drizzly day today, and we’re in desperate need of a little cheering up! Luckily we have just the thing! A consignment of the new – well ok, not that new – Yamazaki Sherry Cask - a beautifully dark whisky limited to 16,000 bottles worldwide.

Sherry Cask was launched in late 2009, and although there have been sherry matured whiskies from Yamazaki before, this has a higher outturn and is slightly more youthful – it being made of whiskies of around 12 to 15 years of age. 

Yamazaki was Japan’s first whisky distillery, and the first cask ever to be filled was a sherry cask. To this day, Spanish oak is specially selected from northern Spain, before the local coopers turn them into giant, 500 litre butts. They are then taken to Jerez in southern Spain for a three year seasoning with rich Oloroso sherry.

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With so many amazing Japanese whiskies on the market we thought we’d review one of our favourites – the Yamazaki 18 Year Old, a whisky from the more thickly sherried, savoury school of Japanese malts.

A little about the distillery…

Yamazaki was Japan’s first whisky distillery and it was built by Suntory’s founder, Shinjiro Torii, in 1923. In Japan there are only two major players in whisky: Suntory and Nikka. Between them they control almost every distillery in the country.

Because of this there is no trading of malt and grain whisky between companies (as is the practice in Scotland’s whisky blending industry). Distilleries must be as self-contained as possible, so Yamazaki houses a whopping 12 stills of different type and configuration, allowing the distillery to produce a range of whiskies.

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