The Loch and the Renaissance - Part Three: The Resurrection

How Asia Saved Single Malt - and Whether History Is About to Repeat Itself

This is the third and final article in The Loch and the Renaissance - a three-part series on the most consequential and least understood story in the history of Scotch whisky. Part One told the story of the Whisky Loch: how Scotland’s overconfidence, poor forecasting, and institutional blindness to quality led to the closure of twenty distilleries in the 1980s. Part Two told the story of the Pivot: the one stubborn family that quietly started the single malt category while the industry was looking the other way, and the Japanese company that saw value in Scottish whisky at the moment of maximum institutional doubt.

In the spring of 1994, the value of Scotch whisky exports surpassed £2 billion for the first time since the Whisky Loch crisis. ¹ It was a milestone that would have seemed almost fantastical to anyone standing in the rubble of February 1983, when twenty distilleries had been shuttered and the industry’s dominant emotion was survival. The Loch had not drained overnight. The recovery had been slow, uncertain, and repeatedly threatened by the same structural problems that had caused the crisis: an industry producing for markets it could not fully predict, in volumes it could not always justify.

What changed, between the nadir of 1983 and the sustained boom that followed, was not primarily something that Scotland did. It was something that Asia discovered.

This final article is the story of that discovery - of how consumers in Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, and China found in single malt whisky something that their own cultures recognised and valued in ways that Scotland had never anticipated. It is also, at its close, a story about the present moment: because the export data published by the Scotch Whisky Association in February 2026 contains numbers that are uncomfortable to read if you know what the 1980s looked like, and the industry is once again asking whether the lessons of the Loch have truly been learned.

What Asia Heard in Scotch Whisky

To understand why Asia became the engine of single malt’s resurrection, you need to understand what single malt whisky communicated in Asian social contexts - and why that communication was fundamentally different from anything the Western markets were responding to.

In Japan, the connection to Scotch was deep and historically specific. As we explored in our article on Japanese whisky, Masataka Taketsuru had studied in Scotland in 1919 and returned with not just the technical knowledge of distilling but an aesthetic appreciation for what Highland pot still whisky could be. ² The Japanese whisky industry that descended from his work - and from Suntory’s parallel development - produced a consumer class that understood Scotch from the inside. When Suntory purchased 25% of Macallan in 1986, as we noted in Part Two of this series, they were not making a speculative investment in an unfamiliar category. They were investing in a product whose value they understood better than the Scottish mainstream did. ³

Japan imports more than 50 million bottles of Scotch whisky annually. Single malt consistently grows as a share of that total. In Japanese bars and restaurants, the selection of single malts available - the depth of knowledge among staff, the range of expressions, the quality of the glassware and the seriousness of the conversation - rivals anything available in Edinburgh or London. This is a market that did not inherit Scotch drinking as a cultural tradition. It built expertise deliberately, from study and commitment, in the same spirit that Taketsuru had gone to Scotland a century earlier.

Taiwan is perhaps the most extraordinary story of all. It is simultaneously the world’s most sophisticated consumer market for single malt Scotch - the only place in the world where single malts outsell blended whiskies - and the home of Kavalan, the distillery that in 2025 became the first non-Scottish whisky to win the International Whisky Competition’s Golden Barrel Trophy. ⁴ A country of 23 million people has somehow positioned itself as both the category’s most devoted consumer and its most capable new challenger.

The Taiwanese whisky drinking tradition was shaped by decades of business culture in which the right bottle on the table at a corporate dinner communicated status, generosity, and the seriousness of the host’s intention. A Macallan 25-year placed at the centre of a table in Taipei was not a luxury indulgence - it was a social signal in a culture where such signals are read with extraordinary precision. The consumer who learned to evaluate and choose single malts for this purpose did so with a rigour and expertise that many Western markets have never matched.

Unlike most international markets where blended whisky dominates, Taiwan’s whisky landscape sees single malts as the leading category. The average price paid per litre of Scotch in Taiwan is among the highest in the world. Taiwan ranks as the fourth largest Scotch whisky market by value - behind only the United States, France, and Singapore - for a country whose population is smaller than Australia’s. ⁵

The data on China - still developing as a whisky market but moving at speed - tells a similarly striking story. Twenty years ago, there were a mere 300 whisky drinkers in the whole country; the number of whisky enthusiasts in China is now estimated at between 500,000 and a million. ⁶ Single Malt Scotch such as Glenfiddich and The Macallan have dramatically grown their market share in China in recent years. ⁷ And 47% of Chinese whisky drinkers belong to Generation Z - born between 1997 and 2012 - making China simultaneously the world’s most populous nation and one of the youngest premium whisky markets on earth. ⁸

Kavalan and the Completion of the Circle

The story of how Taiwan moved from consumer to producer in a single generation is the most compressed and most dramatic version of a pattern we have seen before - most notably in the Japanese whisky article’s account of how Masataka Taketsuru went from student to master.

In 2005, FMCG conglomerate King Car Group - whose products included Mr Brown Coffee and butterfly orchids, and which had been founded in Kaohsiung in 1956 as a chemical producer - decided it wanted to make whisky. Taiwan had only recently, following WTO accession in 2002, been permitted to produce alcohol outside the government monopoly. The distillery was to be built in Yilan County, in the northeast of the island, where the water from the Snow Mountain Range was clean and mineral-rich, and where the subtropical climate - averaging 33 degrees Celsius in summer, with high humidity - would, it turned out, make the production of whisky simultaneously challenging and extraordinary.

The challenge was the angel’s share. In Scotland, 1-2% of spirit evaporates from the barrel annually. In Yilan, the figure runs considerably higher - the subtropical heat accelerating the spirit-wood interaction but also the losses. ⁹ The advantage was the maturation rate: that same subtropical heat, combined with humidity and the diurnal temperature variation, meant that Kavalan’s whisky matured at roughly three times the rate of a Scottish equivalent. A four-to-six-year-old Kavalan could achieve a flavour profile comparable to a twelve-to-eighteen-year-old Scotch. ¹⁰

King Car hired Jim Swan - the biochemist and whisky consultant we encountered in our Wood Series as the pioneer of the STR cask process, and who Kavalan deployed from its earliest days as the “Einstein of whisky” - to help develop production processes suited to Taiwan’s specific conditions. ¹¹ Swan’s expertise in wood science and maturation was exactly what Kavalan needed: not the template of Scottish distilling applied without modification, but the principles of whisky science applied to a completely different climate.

The early bottles were shaped like Taipei 101, Taiwan’s tallest building - a choice that signalled from the first release that this was not an imitation of Scotland but a product of Taiwan. The name Kavalan was drawn from the indigenous Kavalan tribe of the Yilan basin.

The early years were admittedly difficult, as CEO Lee Yu-Ting has acknowledged: Kavalan knew its brand could not compete with whisky aged 12 to 21 years. So instead, they aimed to learn as much as they could and didn’t rely just on local ingredients. Malted barley was sourced from Scotland. Stills were imported from Scotland and Germany. The expertise was international, but the whisky would be Taiwanese.

In 2010, a Kavalan expression beat three Scotches and an English whisky in a blind tasting at Scotland’s Burns Night - the symbolic heart of Scottish whisky culture, on the national poet’s birthday. The result was received with some scepticism. Then, in 2015, the Kavalan Solist Vinho Barrique was named the world’s best single malt at the World Whiskies Awards. The scepticism became considerably more difficult to sustain.

By 2025, Kavalan had accumulated over 950 gold medals at international competitions, produced 10 million bottles per year, and distributed its products to more than 50 markets worldwide. ¹² It had become one of the ten largest single malt distilleries in the world by production volume, comparable in size to The Glenlivet. And in 2025 - twenty years after Lee Tien-Tsai received his first government permit to produce whisky - the Kavalan Solist Fino Sherry Single Cask won the International Whisky Competition’s Golden Barrel Trophy: the first non-Scottish whisky in the competition’s history to do so.

The American TV show Billions had already captured the cultural moment with characteristic bluntness: a character nosing a Kavalan Solist Vinho Barrique and saying “Wow”, prompting the response: “Right? The Taiwanese do it better than the Scots these days.” ¹³ This was dramatisation rather than settled fact. But it gestured at something real: that the category built on a Scottish tradition, saved by Asian consumers, and now being extended by Asian producers, had completed a circle that nobody in a Dufftown boardroom in 1963 could possibly have anticipated.

The Uncomfortable Numbers

I want to turn now from the story of the resurrection to the story of the present. Because the most recent data on Scotch whisky exports contains numbers that anyone who has read the first two articles in this series will find it difficult to read without a certain unease.

In February 2026, the Scotch Whisky Association published its full export figures for 2025. The headline: Scotch whisky exports fell to £5.36 billion, down 0.6% in value and 4.3% in volume from 2024, which was itself down 3.7% in value from 2023. ¹⁴ Two consecutive years of decline, following the peak.

The category that has driven the premium story is under particular pressure. Single malt values fell 6% globally in 2025. The Asia Pacific region - which had been Scotch whisky’s most valuable export region and the engine of premium growth - fell 8.3% in value. ¹⁵ Within that: China, the market that every major distillery has spent the last decade investing to build, saw single malt values fall 16%. Singapore fell 21%. France, the world’s second-largest Scotch market by volume, fell 13% in single malt value.

The United States, still the largest market by value, saw exports fall 9.2% by volume following the implementation of a 10% tariff in April 2025. Between May and December 2025 - the months after the tariff took effect - volumes to the US fell 15%. ¹⁶

Meanwhile, over forty new Scottish distilleries have opened this decade. ¹⁷ The spirit they are laying down in 2025 will not be ready to sell for a decade. The industry is, again, making production commitments based on demand forecasts that the current export data does not support.

The Differences That Matter - and the Ones That Do Not

The industry has not been slow to point out why the current situation is different from 1983. And some of those differences are real and significant.

The whisky industry of the 1980s was largely a patchwork of independent distilleries and family-owned businesses, making them particularly vulnerable when market conditions soured. When sales dropped, these smaller operations lacked the financial reserves to weather the storm, leading to painful closures and fire sales.

Today’s industry is substantially more consolidated: Diageo, Pernod Ricard, and Edrington own portfolios that span multiple spirit categories, and can absorb whisky market weakness against other revenue streams in a way that the DCL of 1983, whose fortunes were almost entirely tied to Scotch, simply could not. ¹⁸

The brand infrastructure is also genuinely different. In 1983, the distilleries that were closed had no meaningful consumer brand identity - they were ingredient producers, not named products. Today, a distillery like Glenfiddich or Macallan or Ardbeg has a global community of loyal consumers, independent bottler relationships, and a secondary market that creates a floor of demand that did not exist forty years ago.

And the market is more geographically diverse than it was in 1983, when the collapse of the American market had no counterbalancing growth story. Today, India has become the world’s largest Scotch export market by volume - with exports growing 15% in 2025 - and the ratification of the UK-India Free Trade Agreement, which will reduce the 150% tariff currently imposed on Scotch imports to India, promises a structural expansion of that market over the next decade. ¹⁹ India’s trajectory as a premium Scotch market is genuinely exciting, and it is a trajectory that is policy-driven as much as consumer-driven, which means it is relatively predictable.

But - and this matters - the same Edinburgh Whisky Academy historian Iain Russell who analysed the Whisky Loch crisis in detail noted that one of its most important lessons “remains relevant today: it is dangerous to rely unduly on forecasts of growth in one major market.” ²⁰ In the 1970s, that market was America. In the 2010s, that market was China. The industry invested heavily in building a Chinese consumer base for premium single malt - Diageo alone organised thirteen whisky summits across China since 2017. ²¹ Chinese single malt values fell 16% in 2025.

The structural differences between now and 1983 are real. They mean the probability of a repeat of the Whisky Loch - the kind of catastrophic, distillery-closing collapse that eliminated Port Ellen and Brora - is lower than it was. The diversity of ownership, the strength of consumer brands, and the new Indian market trajectory all provide buffers that the 1983 industry did not have.

But the structural similarities are also real. An industry that over-expanded in confident times. Export data moving in the wrong direction for two consecutive years. Single malt values declining in the premium Asian markets that have been the growth engine. A US market facing structural headwinds from tariffs that may persist. And the same fundamental tension that has always defined the whisky business: the decisions being made today about production volumes will determine what is available to sell in ten to twenty years, and nobody knows with confidence what those markets will look like.

The question that the industry is quietly asking itself - and that this series has been building toward - is whether the institutional learning of the intervening forty years is sufficient to produce better decisions this time. The industry that closed Port Ellen because it could not see the value of what it had made is not the same industry that exists today. But the pressures of the commodity business - the pressure to optimise for blending volumes, to prioritise cost efficiency, to close what cannot be easily justified on a spreadsheet - have not disappeared. They have simply been temporarily obscured by a decade of growth that made optimisation feel unnecessary.

A Note on What Cannot Be Undone

The Loch and the Renaissance series has been, in one sense, a story of recovery. An industry that nearly destroyed its finest asset, that failed to see the value of what it had made, that closed Port Ellen and Brora and twenty others - that industry recovered. The single malt category grew from a curiosity to the world’s most prestigious spirits segment. The ghost distilleries whose bottles were deemed surplus in 1983 now sell at auction for prices that dwarf almost anything in the world of wine.

But the recovery cannot be told as a simple triumph, and I have tried throughout this series to resist that framing. The recovery happened because individuals - Sandy Grant Gordon, the Macallan team, Suntory’s leadership - saw value that the institutional mainstream could not. And the recovery happened after the damage, not before it.

Port Ellen reopened in 2024, following a £185 million investment by Diageo. The rebuilding of the stillhouse used precise replicas of the original stills. ²² The team interviewed former workers and reviewed archives dating to 1896. The intention, as distillery manager Georgie Crawford has said, is to produce whisky that honours what Port Ellen was.

But the people who made the original Port Ellen - the workers whose redundancy notices arrived in February 1983 - are not there. The distillery community that was dismantled is not fully reassembled. The specific accumulated knowledge of production that those workers carried was not saved in any archive. It is, as the distillery team openly acknowledges, being reconstructed rather than restored.

This is not a criticism of the effort or the investment. It is an observation about what institutional failure actually costs - and why the uncomfortable questions about the current export data, about the forty new distilleries laying down spirit in uncertain market conditions, about the single malt values declining in China and Singapore, matter more than a cyclical blip in an otherwise healthy category.

The spirits that closed in the 1980s did not know they were building the most coveted category in the world. The industry that closed them did not know it was destroying irreplaceable assets. The lesson - the one that an industry with the memory of the Loch should carry into the present - is that what you have may be more valuable than you currently know how to see.

The Glass on the Table

I want to close this series where Devon Drams always returns: to the glass on the table, and the person holding it.

Everything in these three articles - the overproduction, the closures, the pivot, the Asian renaissance, the export data, the uncertain present - is background to a moment that happens every time someone pours a dram of single malt Scotch whisky and attends to what is in the glass. That moment is what Sandy Grant Gordon believed the world deserved to experience in 1963. It is what Suntory’s investment in Macallan was a statement of faith in. It is what the consumers of Taiwan and Japan and Hong Kong and China discovered for themselves, without being told by Scotland what to think.

At Devon Drams, we believe that the history in the glass is part of the flavour - a claim we have supported throughout this series with the neuroscience of context and expectation explored in our article on the genetics and epigenetics of taste. ²³ When you know that the single malt in your glass belongs to a category that was nearly destroyed by the industry that created it, saved by the consumers of a different continent, and now challenged by a distillery in Yilan County, Taiwan that hired the same Scottish consultant who pioneered the STR cask process - that knowledge changes what you are tasting. Not metaphorically. Neurologically.

The history is in the glass. The story matters. And the story, as this series has tried to show, is far from over.

The Loch and the Renaissance is now complete. The three articles in the series are:

• Part One: The Fall - How Scotland’s Whisky Industry Nearly Destroyed Its Greatest Asset

• 
  

• Part Two: The Pivot - The Family That Started a Category, and the Japanese Company That Believed in It

• 
  

• Part Three: The Resurrection - How Asia Saved Single Malt, and Whether History Is About to Repeat Itself (this article)

  
  

Devon Drams articles referenced in this piece

• The Loch and the Renaissance, Part One: The Fall - on the Whisky Loch, the distillery closures, and the institutional failure that caused them

  
  

• The Loch and the Renaissance, Part Two: The Pivot - on Glenfiddich, Macallan, and the Suntory investment that changed the category’s trajectory

  
  

• How Japan Took On Scotland - and Changed Whisky Forever - on Masataka Taketsuru, Suntory’s founding, and the Japanese whisky tradition that educated Asia’s single malt consumers ²

  
  

• A Billion Bottles and a Revolution: The Real Story of Indian Whisky - on India’s emergence as the world’s largest Scotch export market by volume, and the regulatory story behind it

  
  

• The Wood Series, Part Two: Beyond Oak - on the STR cask process and Dr Jim Swan’s contribution to whisky science, which Kavalan deployed from its earliest days ¹¹

  
  

• Your Palate Is Your Biography: The Genetics and Epigenetics of Taste - on how context and knowledge alter flavour perception at a neurological level ²³

• The Collector and the Drinker: A Case for Both - on ghost distillery bottles, the secondary market, and what Port Ellen and Brora’s extraordinary values tell us about institutional failure

Sources

1. Spiritory. How Scotch Exports are in 2026? From 1823 Origins to 2024 Slowdown and Recovery. Available at: https://spiritory.com/news/scotch-exports-from-1823-origins-to-2024-slowdown-and-recovery-en (Accessed: June 2026)

   
   

2. Devon Drams. How Japan Took On Scotland - and Changed Whisky Forever. devondrams.com/news (Accessed: June 2026)

   
   

3. Devon Drams. The Loch and the Renaissance, Part Two: The Pivot. devondrams.com/news (Accessed: June 2026)

   
   

4. Wikipedia. Taiwanese Whisky. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_whisky (Accessed: June 2026)

   
   

5. Taiwan Business Topics. The Blossoming of the Taiwan Whisky Market. Available at: https://topics.amcham.com.tw/2015/01/the-blossoming-of-the-taiwan-whisky-market/ (Accessed: June 2026)

   
   

6. Barley Magazine. The Rise and Rise of Whisky in China. Available at: https://www.barleymagazine.com/blog/land-of-golden-promise-the-rise-and-rise-of-whisky-in-china (Accessed: June 2026)

   
   

7. Ibid.

   
   

8. Ibid.

   
   

9. CNN. Taiwan Whisky: How Kavalan Became a Global Favorite. Available at: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/taiwan-whisky kavalan/index.html (Accessed: June 2026)

   
   

10. Taiwan Panorama. Whisky, Taiwan Style: Kavalan. Available at: https://www.taiwan-panorama.com/en/Articles/Details?Guid=8686ce48-9b52-49a4-a431-0d9d7d07ef2e Scotch Whisky Association. 2025 Export Figures. Available at: https://www.scotch-whisky.org.uk/newsroom/2025-export-figures/ (Accessed: June 2026)

    
    

11. Devon Drams. The Wood Series, Part Two: Beyond Oak. devondrams.com/news (Accessed: June 2026)

    
    

12. Taiwan Panorama. Whisky, Taiwan Style: Kavalan. Ibid.

    
    

13. Ibid.

    
    

14. Ibid.

    
    

15. UKV International. Scotch Whisky Exports 2025: Analysis of SWA Figures. Available at: https://ukv-international.com/scotch-whisky-exports-2025-analysis/ (Accessed: June 2026)

    
    

16. Scotch Whisky.com. Is a Second Whisky Loch Brewing? Available at: https://scotchwhisky.com/magazine/features/26340/is-a-second-whisky-loch-brewing/ (Accessed: June 2026)

    
    

17. The Whiskey Wash. Three Reasons Today’s Scotch Industry Could Survive a New Whisky Loch. Available at: https://thewhiskeywash.com/whiskey-articles/three-reasons-todays-scotch-industry-could-survive-a-new-whisky-loch/ (Accessed: June 2026)

    
    

18. Scotch Whisky Association. 2025 Export Figures. Ibid.

19. Edinburgh Whisky Academy. Iain Russell on the Whisky Loch of the 1980s. Available at: https://www.edinburghwhiskyacademy.com/blogs/feature/iain-russell-on-the-whisky-loch-of-the-1980s (Accessed: June 2026)

    
    

20. Barley Magazine. The Rise and Rise of Whisky in China. Ibid.

    
    

21. Malts.com. The Lost Whisky Distilleries of Scotland and the Two Who Came Back. Available at: https://www.malts.com/en-us/articles/the-lost-whisky-distilleries-of-scotland-and-the-two-who-came-back (Accessed: June 2026)

    
    

22. Devon Drams. Your Palate Is Your Biography: The Genetics and Epigenetics of Taste. devondrams.com/news (Accessed: June 2026)