World Whisky Day: The Whiskies Worth Knowing Right Now

May 16 is World Whisky Day. It is a good excuse to open something you have been thinking about. It is also a good excuse to start thinking about whisky if you have not yet.

Most people assume whisky is complicated. It is not. The categories are wide. Scotland, Japan, Ireland, Canada, the US, and increasingly right here in BC. But the entry point is the same everywhere: find a bottle you actually want to open. Everything else follows from that.

Here are three bottles we would put in front of someone who asked us where to start, where to go next, and what to reach for when they are ready to get serious.

Suntory Toki  ·  $69.69 · 750ml · Japan

Suntory was founded in Osaka in 1899 by Shinjiro Torii. In 1923, Torii built Japan's first whisky distillery in Yamazaki, just outside Kyoto, where three rivers meet and the air stays consistently humid. He hired a young chemist named Masataka Taketsuru, who had spent two years in Scotland studying distillation, to run it.

What they built over the next century became one of the most respected whisky traditions in the world.

Toki is a blend from three Suntory distilleries. Hakushu in the mountains, Yamazaki in the valley, Chita on the Chita Peninsula. Each contributes something different. The result is light, clean, and deliberately approachable. Green apple. A little honey. A soft herbal note at the finish. Nothing that asks you to work for it.

It is the best-selling whisky on our shelf right now. Eleven bottles in stock. If you have ever thought Japanese whisky might not be for you, try this one first.

Glenlivet 12 Year Old  ·  $79.99 · 750ml · Speyside, Scotland

In 1822, King George IV visited Scotland and was seen drinking Glenlivet whisky, illegally distilled as most Scotch was at the time. Two years later, the Excise Act passed and George Smith became the first distiller in the Highlands to take out a legal licence.

The name Glenlivet became so synonymous with quality that 27 other distilleries started appending it to their own names. Smith spent years in court protecting it. By 1884 he had won exclusive rights. Every distillery in the region had to hyphenate.

The whisky itself is Speyside at its most reliable: stone fruit, light oak, a faint floral note, clean acidity. It is not a complicated bottle. It is a very good one. The kind that becomes a reference point. The thing you reach for when you want to remember what good Scotch is supposed to taste like.

Seven bottles on the shelf. This is the one we recommend most often to people who want a single malt they can come back to.

Stillhead Distillery Islay Cask Rye  ·  $102.49 · 750ml · Duncan, BC

Stillhead operates out of Duncan, on Vancouver Island. They make a rye whisky from Canadian grain and Canadian distillation, then finish it in Islay Scotch casks. The same kind of casks used at Laphroaig and Caol Ila. The casks carry peat smoke from their previous contents, and that smoke works its way into the rye during the finishing period.

What comes out is something genuinely unusual: a Canadian rye with a peated undercurrent. The rye spice is there. The grain sweetness is there. And underneath both of them is a faint, cool smoke that has no business being in a bottle distilled forty minutes north of Victoria.

BC distilling has grown considerably in the last decade. There are now over 50 craft distilleries operating in the province. Most of them are making decent spirits. A few are making something worth seeking out. Stillhead is one of them.

Six bottles in. Come and try it before you decide.