Scotch whisky has never been the only game in town - ask anyone from Ireland and they’ll tell you that whiskey was first made on the Emerald Isle! Historical arguments aside, it’s certainly true that Irish whiskey was dominant in European markets before the 20th century. 

However, a furious (and unsuccessful) legal battle with the Scottish blenders and grain distillers in the early 1900s over whether or not grain spirit could be called whisky was followed by the concurrent catastrophes of the Great War, Prohibition in the USA and the political fallout from the Easter Rising and the Irish Civil War. These factors all contributed to the woes that crippled the Irish whiskey industry in the 1920s and 1930s, leaving space for Scotch whisky to capitalise and build a market-leading position in the whisky industry over the last 100 years.

The American whiskey industry was also very badly damaged by the own goal of Prohibition, obviously, but at the same time Canadian whisky was thriving and the modern Japanese single malt whisky industry was being born with the construction of the Yamazaki distillery in 1923.

In recent decades the Irish whiskey industry has gradually recovered since the nadir of the 1970s and 1980s - when for some time there were only two legal distilleries on the whole island - and is today enjoying a sustained period as one of the fastest growing spirits in the entire global whisk(e)y category.

American whiskey is also on the up, with the easy-going rock’n’roll style of Jack Daniel’s and Jim Beam burnished by the mystique of the closed distillery Stitzel Weller, and the popularity of the new wave of craft distillers generating a surge of interest in bourbon and American whiskey in the last couple of decades. 

Japan, meanwhile, has its own fabled lost distillery in Karuizawa, and the success of the Japanese whisky category in Western markets and international whisky awards since the turn of the millennium has been phenomenal. Japanese single malt whisky in particular became so popular in the last decade that today many of the most popular Japanese whiskies have had to be temporarily discontinued while the country’s two distilling giants Nikka and Suntory build up their stock reserves once again.

The revival of the traditional whisky-producing countries’ fortunes has been heartening for whisky fans, but today single malts and blended whiskies are being produced all over the world, with whisky distilleries cropping up in countries that have never made the spirit before. 

At the end of the 1990s and in the first few years of this century a trickle of new whisky distilleries in countries including Sweden, Finland, Wales, England, Denmark, India, Taiwan and Australia began producing single malt whisky which complied with the rules for Western markets.  At the same time, many distillers of brandy, eau de vie and other spirits in European countries such as Germany, France and The Netherlands began making whisky alongside their traditional output.

These new wave whiskies were met with great enthusiasm by the new wave of whisky fans, and the trickle of new distilleries soon became a tidal wave of its own.  Nowadays, each new edition of Ingvar Ronde’s essential Malt Whisky Yearbook contains dozens of new malt whisky distilleries in exotic places, with the 2023 edition of the book listing whisky distilleries in South Korea, Brazil, Iceland and Hungary among many other previously unlikely locations. 

Nothing is certain in the whisky industry except for rising prices and the continued inexplicable popularity of wine finishes, but it seems very likely that this trend will carry on for at least the medium term. The tsunami of new malt whisky distilleries in every corner of the globe shows no signs of slowing down.

Not all of these new whisky-making ventures will be a success; many will fail through simple market forces as competition heats up. There’s no doubt, though, that the best of these new whiskies can stand toe to toe with - or even surpass - their Scottish rivals in terms of quality, as evidenced by the success of whiskies from non-traditional production countries at international awards events such as the World Whisky Awards and the International Wine and Spirits Challenge. 

In other words, this is a very exciting time to be a world whisky fan, with the quality of single malt whisky from these new world distilleries getting better every year, and more and more aged expressions due to hit the market in the next decade or two. As Ingvar Ronde says, “I don’t think there has been a better time to be alive if you love whisky.”