Tasmanian Whiskies
While there are now over 30 distilleries making whisky in Tasmania and more planned, only a small proportion have bottled whisky for sale at any given time. Even the larger distilleries are struggling to maintain an offering on their websites with many expressions quickly “sold out” after release. The intention of MyWhiskyJourneys is not to compete with individual Tasmanian distilleries – rather the objective over time is to establish MyWhiskyJourneys as a “shop window” for Tasmanian whiskies for both Australian and international buyers. We also feature exceptional Australian whiskies from other than Tasmania, under "Other Australian Whiskies".
Tasmanian whiskies on the MyWhiskyJourneys website are either current offerings or historical bottlings.
As we build up relations with Tasmanian distillers, and as those distillers begin to bottle the casks that have been maturing since they began distilling, we plan to provide access to an increasing range of current offerings on the website. In the meantime, most of our range is what might be called historical – they are no longer available on the website of the distillery in question and can only be found with difficulty in the secondary market. The relevant bottles are labelled as such.
Obviously, there is no surviving whisky from the island’s first distilling years (1821 - 1838). Indeed, there are very few bottles from the early years of Tasmania’s re-emergence as a whisky producer in the 1990’s and, given the boutique scale of production even at the larger distilleries and the tendency to bottle on a one-off single cask basis, rarity and uniqueness have quickly become significant features of the Tasmanian whisky scene. And so scarcity quickly replaces availability as supplies of a particular expression are exhausted, only to be replaced by another variety which all too quickly also joins the ranks of the obsolescent or dearly departed, whichever way one wants to look at it.
A few years ago, I started to put together for a few friends and myself a carefully selected collection of Tasmanian whiskies. These were mainly single cask bottlings from the better known distilleries, nearly all of which have long since left the conventional market place and which have consequently increased significantly in value. We provide a controlled selection of these whiskies in the hope that all or some of them will be of interest to Tasmanian whisky disciples. Where we have more than one bottle, only one bottle of that particular expression will be allowed per customer.
The images of the distilleries are based on original drawings made specifically for the website by artist, Rachael Morrice-Bower.
