Product description
Karuizawa Distillery, commenced operation in February 1956.
Most of the early production went into the Ocean line of inexpensive blends put together by Sanraku Ocean Company, the distillery’s owner at the time. Karuizawa debuted as a whisky brand in July 1976, and was the first Japanese whisky to bear the “single malt” designation. The distillery suspended production on December 31, 2000, never to resume. Karuizawa was a tiny distillery, producing just 150,000 liters of spirit per year. In addition, the plant needed renovation and replacement of equipment, and Kirin, which took over Karuizawa’s assets in 2006, was not interested in such an investment. The distillery’s distilling license expired in 2012, and the remaining inventory, about 360 barrels, was purchased by Number One Drinks Company, most of which were released as single casks; 20 barrels were bought by Hong Kong collector and independent whisky publisher Eric Huang.
The Karuizawa presented here is a single cask edition from 2019. The whisky distilled in 1969 spent half a century in a sherry cask no. 538, and was bottled at cask strength (59.2% abv) in an edition of 347 bottles. Karuizawa holds the record for the most expensive Japanese whisky sold – in March 2020, at an auction conducted by Sotheby's, a bottle of 52-year-old Karuizawa (distilled 1960, cask # 5627) found a buyer for the equivalent of $435,000.