A lot of the whisky conversation today centres around single malt (a proportion as high as 90 per cent sounds plausible). Emails flood the inboxes of the whisky press to highlight new malts from Macallan, Talisker, or Aberfeldy. Tastings and whisky festivals generally celebrate single malts, while social media is flooded with accounts praising its virtues. Blends are few and far between. Tellingly, even those who don’t pretend to know much about whisky will confidently proclaim that “single malts are better than blends”.
And yet, depending on the source, single malt whisky accounts for only 10 or 11 per cent of the Scotch whisky industry’s sales. That is a lot more than it once was, but it remains relatively diminutive. There is a distinct discrepancy between the copious attention showered on single malts and the importance of blended whisky to not just
