Last official bottlings of Karuizawa from La Maison



France-based importer La Maison du Whisky's final four bottlings of Karuizawa whisky in official Karuizawa livery are now on sale in Europe. I am afraid I might be a bit late with this news because of my personal crisis (and I am banging this out on my mobile so please excuse mistakes). My understanding is that La Maison du Whisky has had them on its shelves for a number of days now.

Number One Drinks will not be allowed to use the official labels after this shipment, so the four single casks will be the last of their kind from La Maison.  (Read this post to understand Number One's role here.) A new label has been developed for future single casks. The Noh label bottlings will continue because they are not official bottlings and The Whisky Exchange may also be putting out their own Karuizawa.

Anyway, feast your eyes:






Alongside the last of the officials, La Maison is also selling a very interesting new Noh offering. It is the first of a series of multi-vintage (1981, 1982, 1983 & 1984) releases planned by Noh. The idea came from Frapin, a small family-owned Cognac producer and one of the very few to release vintage bottlings. As well as a few standard vintage bottlings (which are subject to especially strict laws in France) for LMDW, they have also released three multi-vintages to date as a way of bottling something very close to a standard vintage, but without the paperwork. Now, the Noh series is trying the same idea with whisky.



One final tangential comment, while we are talking Karuizawa: there has been some really interesting discussion on Nonjatta recently about availability in Japan and other issues (see Stefan's fascinating Karuizawa vignette and the comments attached). My understanding is that Number One Drinks, who have bought the remaining Karuizawa stock, are genuinely bound contractually from discussing many of the issues raised, but I have few pennies worth to add to the debate of my own. (Just to be clear, I have no ties to them at all but I have been a long-term admirer of what they have done to promote Japanese whisky abroad.)

I would say this on the general issue of pricing, about which people, quite naturally, feel quite strongly: The work that goes into making these whiskies available outside Europe is very considerable indeed. Quite naturally, people in Japan and other areas have a contrary interest, but I think it is a good thing that Japanese whisky has reached a more global audience and that that is very largely down to the importers rather than the Japanese distillers.

As I say, this is very hard work. You don't just get a shipping container and pack a load of whisky to send back home. We have seen some attempts at that approach in the past and the pitfalls have sometimes been evident. I think it took Number One five years of to get to where it is now with the Karuizawa stock, which, as one insider put it to me, "is just the starting post."

On the availability in Japan issue, my understanding is that the Whisky Live bottlings will include two from Karuizawa this year, and those are very unlikely to be the last in Japan.

Comments

Three of the new single cask bottlings sold out overnight (overnight, from the Japanese time zone point of view). When I went to bed around 11pm, they had just been put up online; when I woke up (5am), three were already gone! Must have been one of the top days of the year for LMDW. Curious to see how long it will take for the bottles to turn up at whiskyauction.com.
Those single casks aren't entirely sold out: we always hold some back fir our wholesale clients to make sure they get some to customers throughout the rest of France. If we didn't then most bottles would probably sell out to collectors abroad and we wouldn't ser them again until they cropped up again, like you said, on various auction sites. It would nice to think that all of our customers buy to drink, but I'm afraid that's just not the case... Anyway, if anybidy is ever in France and looking to pick up a bottle and the normal prices, we can point you in the direction of a goid off-license who might still have some..:
Pierre W said…
Hi Stefan, I live in Switzerland, thus not too far away from France. May I ask where I might obtain a bottle? Kind regards, Pierre
There are definitely some Karuizawa bottlings coming out in Japan. We were serving a new 27-yr-old at @chotto_bar last week - I believe it was a preview of a forthcoming release that will be available in Japan. And there are two 11-year-olds being released for the Tokyo Bar Show.

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