When it comes to ultra-luxury spirits, Japanese whisky remains a juggernaut. Worth US$3.86 billion two years ago, according to market researcher Spherical Insights, it is expected to shake off the stagnancy of the spirits industry at large with a compound annual growth rate of 9.2% and become a US$9.32 billion market by 2032.
No single brand has done as much to fuel that expansion as Suntory Holdings. Its founder, Shinjiro Torii, pioneered the category outside Osaka in 1923, when he laid to barrel whisky modelled after the Scottish tradition (hence the lack of “e” in the spelling).
Ninety-one years later, a sherry cask expression of single malt from the same distillery was judged the best in the world by the Whisky Bible, igniting a firestorm of premiumisation and collectability (and shortages) that has yet to abate. The latest in line: Hibiki 40 Year Old. And we scored an exclusive first taste.
The US$35,000-a-bottle limited edition was unveiled at an evening gala in Paris on Oct 2, and Suntory is touting it as the most precious blended whisky in its 101-year history. It’s Hibiki’s oldest age statement to date.
The Hibiki label was launched in 1989 as a marriage of malt whiskies from Suntory’s storied single malt sites — Yamazaki, outside Osaka, and Hakashu in the forested foothills of the Japanese Alps — along with grain whisky from Chita, the company’s column still workhorse just south of Nagoya.
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Each of its age-statement blends relies on a different cask style to be the “lead actor” of the ensemble. Often this is referred to as the “heart malt”; it is not necessarily the highest percentage by volume in the blend (since that’s almost always a grain whisky), but it sets the tone or top note.
Hibiki 21 leans heavily into the dark fruit tones of sherry-seasoned Spanish oak puncheons, among the largest vessels used to mature whisky. Hibiki 30 leverages the sandalwood aromatics of Japanese Mizunara oak. The heart malt of Hibiki 40, however, was matured in American white oak. It is responsible for the whisky’s sunburnt orange hue and the honey and clove complexities of its elegant body.
Moreover, Yamazaki replaced all of its pot stills in 1988, so the whisky laid into barrel between 1978 and 1983 “can never be replicated — it has a unique identity”, says Taki Nakatani, global brand director for Suntory’s whisky portfolio.
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And while there’s nothing explicitly unique about lengthy ageing in American oak — it is the go-to vessel for most old Scotch on shelves today — at Yamazaki the cooperage in question is often crafted into 480-litre puncheons, which allow for a softer, more gentle maturation over the decades versus the more aggressive approach of a standard 200-litre first-fill bourbon barrel. The smaller the barrel, the more contact the ageing spirit has with the wood and the more flavour that is extracted.
Then there is the secondary malt component of lightly peated Hakashu, adding a layer of smoke that’s counterbalanced by the floral, ester-rich elements of Chita. Grain whisky produced at that distillery in the late 1970s and early 1980s accounts for the majority of the blend’s volume.
So, how does it taste?
Taken together, there is an almost unnervingly delicate nature to Hibiki 40. Orchard fruit aromas only reveal themselves in the snifter after the 86-proof liquid is allowed ample time to warm in your hand. A coda of toasted coconut and cacao is all but a distant whisper after the sip. Suntory’s chief blender Shinji Fukuyo actively admits to courting this subdued result. And as steward of Japan’s oldest caches of malt and grain spirit, he was afforded a breadth of options with which to achieve it.
“I would like people to enjoy the pure aroma that has been sharpened over the years,” he says, hoping to bring to mind “the tranquillity of old temples and storehouses and the nostalgic warm feeling that accompanies them”.
Call it a conceptualisation of weathered beauty, rather any outsize tasting note. And with only 400 faceted decanters of the expression coming to market globally this month, it will cost US$35,000 ($46,045) — at least — to contemplate. When Yamazaki released its oldest-ever expression back in 2020, the 55-year-old whisky wore a US$27,600 price tag, and you had to enter a lottery to buy it; today you’re looking at over half a million dollars.
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After celebrating its centennial last year with a trio of limited-edition one-offs, Suntory timed the Hibiki 40 Year Old to be a bold declaration of what the next hundred years have to offer: big, old, expensive offerings.
Fukuyo has hinted that there is enough mature stock to supply even older blends in the years to come. This follows nearly a decade of pullbacks on age-stated expressions (Hibiki was an early adopter of non-age-statement blends, replacing its 12- and 17-year offerings with Harmony, back in 2015). And his employer has openly proclaimed that a greater flow of age-statement single malts will come online by 2027.
Meanwhile, the Japanese whisky industry is taking strides to better define itself. In April, self-imposed labelling standards went into effect, mandating that anything sold as “Japanese whisky” must be distilled in Japan.
Nevertheless, Nikka — Suntory’s main competitor in the category — is commemorating its 90th anniversary with the release of Nine Decades, a blend of malt and grain whiskies dating to 1945, some of which was sourced from the Ben Nevis distillery in Scotland. As such, the US$3,000 bottle will be sold simply as a “blended whisky”.
In 2021, Diageo took a minority stake in Kanosuke, a craft distillery outside Kagoshima. One of the brand’s top-selling products today is Hioki Pot Still, a US$120 bottle of non-age-stated whisky built from malted and unmalted barley in the Irish tradition.
Enthusiasts will probably never agree on a single style to epitomise the category. But given the trends as far as collectability goes, it looks like a bottle of Japanese whisky that costs as much as a compact SUV may be, on the whole, pretty cheap.
