BRING IT ON! The world of whisky isn’t just optimistic. It’s positively bullish. Dominic Roskrow reports It is a vast understatement to say that rarely has a New Year been more welcome than that of 2021. The second decade of the millennium began with a nine month long tsunami, as corona virus wreaked havoc across the world, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives, destroying entire industries, causing mass unemployment, and changing the way we live our lives forever. The hospitality industry had a particularly hard time during 2020, with pubs, bars and restaurants across the world forced to close their doors for long periods. Many will never reopen. International travel all but ground to halt and passenger numbers went in to freefall. That in turn ripped the floor out of the travel retail market. For smaller distilleries relying on tourists to provide cash while they waited for their spirits to mature, the year was particularly difficult. But no area was left unscathed, as producers struggled to get their casks out of their distilleries, and bottling plants were closed.
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“It only takes one bottling hall worker to test positive for the virus and all the other 30 or so employees working there have to self isolate for two weeks,” one distillery manager observed. As a result there has been a backlog of companies wanting their whisky bottled, with the larger companies ensuring that they are first in line. We’re not out of the woods yet. The virus hasn’t gone away and the fallout from it will influence events for months or even years to come. But there is light at the end of the tunnel. In mid December the United Kingdom became the first country to authorise a vaccine and began inoculating its health service employees and care workers. It’ll take time before the virus is properly tamed. And yet overall the whisky industry is highly optimistic – bullish even – that 2021 will be a succesful year, if the first 5 months are anything to go off of.
