ONE FOR THE ROAD
A damp, woody scent lingers in the air as we ascend in the lift. “It smells like a forest,” I remark. “A whisky forest,” says my guide, a soft-spoken man named Makoto Sumita. The doors open and it becomes clear what he means. There are stacks of casks, thousands of them, stamped with dates and filled with liquid that will be blended, bottled and sold around the world at increasingly high prices. I close my eyes and inhale deeply: the air is sweet and vaguely fruity. I’m breathing evaporated whisky. “That’s the angel’s share,” says Sumita. “We lose 3 per cent per year.”
We are in one of the warehouses of the Suntory Yamazaki distillery, the oldest whisky distillery in Japan and the producer of some of the world’s most acclaimed single malts. Sumita has been a manager here for decades and he’s never seen it so busy. “Because whisky sales are so good, the distillery is working at more
