EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN
Everything old is new again. That cheery expression once hung over Canadian whisky like a dark cloud. The old: distilleries shrank in number by 90 per cent through the second half of the 19th century. The new: history repeated itself. On New Year’s Eve 1979, while the fashion-conscious traded their bell bottoms for Jordache Jeans, Canadians sipped sweet sparkling wine while whisky bottles gathered dust. The musical drama All That Jazz (1979) hit theatres and, while Peter Allen sang, ‘Everything Old is New Again’, more Canadian distilleries merged or closed until just a handful remained.
A new century brought denim-sporting John Hall to make Canadian whisky all that jazz again. Forty Creek was not technically a micro-distillery, but Hall unknowingly lit a slow-burning, 40-mile fuse that forced governments to permit small distilleries to operate. The industry soon exploded, with a new generation of whisky makers dissipating that dark cloud for good. Names like Tyler Dyck, Ken Winchester, Barry Stein, Barry Bernstein, Colin Schmidt, Patrick Evans, James Marinus, Geoff Dillon, Gordon Glanz, Stuart McKinnon and others released first-generation whiskies that poured
