A HOLY GRAIL. ON THE ROCKS. WITH A TWIST.
If you could drink a myth, what do you think it would taste like?
This is a question I posed to the rest of the Vanilla Factory inhabitants at our EJ offices. It was signalled, as many things are, by an email. An email from Tomatin Distillery up in Scotland who were finally releasing the holy grail of single-malt fanaticism: The Shirakawa 1958. “The rarest whiskey in the world” – and they wanted us to try it. So we did.
Words by Beth Bennett
Before I tell you the answer, I think it’s prudent to provide context. Why is this the rarest whiskey in the world? Why does it have a mind-boggling price tag? And, moreover, how can a ‘whiskey’ be a myth?
Daikoku Budoshu established Shirakawa Distillery in 1939, just North of Tokyo, with the ethos to create the finest Japanese spirits. It was then purchased, in 1948, by Takara Shuzo and the following decade saw Shirakawa thrive as one of the first distilleries in Japan to produce malt whiskey. However, dark spirits weren’t as popular an export to The West as clear spirits such as sake and vodka, so Shuzo changed the distillery’s direction and moved away from craft whiskey altogether by the end of the 60s, of course missing that boom that came about in the 80s.
By the end of the 1900s, Shirakawa was nothing more than a bottling facility and eventually closed its doors before being demolished in 2003.
However, this wasn’t the full-stop ending for Shirakawa that many thought it would be. Existing in anecdotes, fractures information, and hand-me-down whispers, rumours lingered that, somewhere a distilled cask of one of Shirakawa’s oldest batches had been moved to a location elsewhere in stainless steel tanks and was waiting to be found.
This piqued the interest of Stephen Bremner, Managing Director of Tomatin Distillery, who’d always had a keen interest in the history of Shuzo’s earlier production. Like some sort of Arthurian legend, Bremner pieced together every piece of evidence he could, crafting a treasure map that led him, in 2019, to finally unearth Shirakawa’s 1958 Single Malt.
Of the discovery, Bremner had to say: “When I discovered that the last remaining stock was distilled in 1958, I was astounded! It was a genuine ’wow’ moment as I realised very quickly that what we were dealing with was extremely rare. There are no known examples of Japanese whisky claiming to be from a single vintage that predates the Shirakawa 1958.”
Due to the confounding history of the whiskey, the process can never truly be replicated, making it a finite resource, legitimising its mind-bending £25,000 price-tag. Only 1500 bottles exist and we were fortunate enough to get the opportunity to try a small sample of one of these bottles.
Even if you were to drink this whiskey with no understanding of its historical context or the legacy it evokes in the whiskey world, you’d still get that sense of the expansive space and time it has travelled as the flavour experience is a transportive one.
The smoothest whiskey that you’ll ever drink, it starts off with a heady, wooden taste, unique to that Japanese oak, that moves over your tongue in a bold yet undemanding sort of way. It then settles, comfortably, at the back of your mouth with an almost sweet, citrusy flavour that forgoes the domineering burn found in most single malts for a lingering, playful sensation instead.
Shirakawa 1958 is full of character, eloquently balanced, and vibrant. With a mythic legacy spanning continents and generations, the multi-faceted spirit has cemented itself as a firm favourite of all of us and we’ll be holding onto the little remaining sample we have left to celebrate our most important milestones. Afterall, could there be a better drink to celebrate with?
