If whisky is the answer, what should the question be?
Whisky’s rise depends on curiosity, not commandments
I’ve been spending time with the people behind Scotland’s whisky — distillers with hands like split oak, bartenders who treat a glass like a paintbrush, sales leaders hoping the next quarter breathes easier. These conversations are part of the groundwork for Whisky Wagon, a new storytelling platform I’m building about the people behind Scotland’s whisky.
And one question keeps tapping at me: why not whisky?
Spirited figures
The numbers are both proud and sobering. Scotch whisky exports reached £5.4 billion in 2024 — the equivalent of 1.4 billion bottles, 44 leaving Scotland every second. India now drinks more Scotch whisky by volume than any other country, while the United States still spends the most. Yet for all that strength, value slipped 3.7% on 2023, even as volume grew nearly 4%. More whisky is moving, but for less. And the industry warns that domestic tax, swallowing 70% of the price of the average bottle, is stretching producers thin at home, just as trade talks with the US and India drag on and input costs climb.
That is the business story. But whisky’s other troubles live closer to the tongue.
Too many people had their first taste as a dare. A grandfather sliding a glass of smoke across the table and telling them to act grown up. They coughed, their eyes watered, the family laughed. That was their education. Others were put off by the rules, repeated like scripture: no ice, no water, never a mixer. Whisky became less a drink than a test.
Meanwhile, other spirits slipped past. Gin with its pretty botanicals and fancy tonics. Vodka that never judged what you mixed it with. Tequila turned into cocktails of sunshine. Whisky stood apart, arms folded. Revered, respected, but too often avoided.
Yes, this is a market challenge. But it’s also a storytelling failure.
Rules on the rocks
Because when whisky is freed from the sermon, it becomes something else entirely. It can be a sip on a windy beach, the glass warming your hands as the spray comes over the rocks. It can be shared on the side of a hill with cheese and chocolate pulled from a rucksack. It can be a quiet pour at a kitchen table when words are few but company matters. Whisky is not one story. It is thousands. And it is those stories — not only the £300 bottle — that will carry it into the next generation.
Take India. It has just overtaken France to become the largest Scotch whisky export market by volume, with 192 million bottles exported last year. That growth is not coming from collectors in crystal-lit bars. It is office workers meeting friends in Delhi, middle-class families celebrating milestones, young drinkers discovering whisky in long, cold highballs in the trendy bars of Bangalore. For them, Scotch isn’t a relic or a test. It’s a way to share a moment. That is where the future lies — not in defending old rules, but in seeing whisky’s place in new rituals.
Pouring new stories
I think of a young bartender in Edinburgh who laughs at the catechism. To her, a whisky sour is a welcome, not a compromise. She says there is a dram for everyone if you let them try it without shame. Or the crofter who pours sherry-soft whisky for visitors because he remembers too well what it’s like to be put off forever by smoke.
The Scotch Whisky Association is right to push the UK Government for support — to ease the tax burden, to speed up trade agreements, to make sure an industry that supports 40,000 jobs and a vast supply chain is not taken for granted. But the industry must also look inward. Exports will rise again when curiosity does. And curiosity is sparked by welcome, not by warning.
That’s what we’ll be exploring with Whisky Wagon. The people who still believe whisky is not finished, it’s just waiting for a new invitation. The makers who shape it, the bartenders who reimagine it, the drinkers who find new ways to love it.
Because in the end, whisky doesn’t need saving. It needs opening. It needs someone to hand you a glass without a lecture attached, and to say, simply, why not whisky.
Note: This article was also published on LinkedIn.