Yoichi 1997 Single Cask #400860 75cl / Old Nic's Dram 50th Anniversary

A Japanese single malt bottling from Nikka's flagship distillery in Hokkaido. Nikka was founded in 1934 by Masataka Taketsuru, a former Suntory employee who had studied at the University of Glasgow, and later trained as a blender at the now lost Hazelburn distillery in Campbeltown. Taketsuru opened the Yoichi distillery in the same year as establishing the company, modelling its pot stills on the long-necked design of the Longmorn stills in Speyside.

This is a rare Nikka single cask release, selected and exclusively bottled to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the arrival of Welsh writer and actor, C.W. Nicol, in Japan in 1962. Nicol left Wales to study karate in Japan, becoming a citizen in 2002. The cask was selevted by him, and while his preference in earlier life was for heavily-peated malts, his tastes at the time were for milder profiles. For this release he specifically wanted a non-peated malt matured in a refill butt, and closely monitored cask #400860 before deciding that after nearly 16 years of maturation it was just right.

The whisky was distilled in May 1997 and bottled in January 2013.