"I don't think whisky will ever die. I just think people will be more selective."

– Sukhinder Singh, MD of Elixir Distillers and co-founder of The Whisky Exchange

 

Sukhinder Singh sounds like a parent when he talks about the cult silent distillery Karuizawa. “I’m a little frustrated with Karuizawa,” he says, and then immediately corrects himself. “Not with Karuizawa, but with people’s perception of Karuizawa today.”

Nothing quite escapes the seasoned palate of the 50-year drinks trade veteran: “It has some amazing whisky, though like every distillery, you have good casks and bad casks.” But the problem, as he sees it, is how bottlers have cashed in on the hype surrounding one of the most mythologised names in modern whisky culture. “A lot of companies took advantage and there was a lot of re-bottling and changing of strengths,” Sukhinder bemoaned. “People lost faith and lost trust, which really upsets me.”

 

The Karuizawa Geisha Series which became the modern face of high end Japanese whisky collecting. This March, Christie's London Wine and Spirits will put on auction two complete casks of Karuizawa whisky from Sukhinder's collection.

 

I met Sukhinder when he stopped by La Maison du Whisky in Singapore to lead a tasting of Elixir Distillers’ whiskies. At one point he brought out a surprise for us. A 50-year-old Karuizawa (which we've reviewed here). There was no ceremony to such a generous gesture. It was an earnest call to experience. If something matters this much, you should taste it and join the conversation.

 

 

If you hear how he speaks about it, the rest of his worldview starts to click into place. “There is no other malt that tastes anything like Karuizawa.” For Sukhinder, flavour is where it all begins. To him, Karuizawa should not just be something admired from a distance and discussed in auction prices and reputations. It should be understood in the glass.

He first became influential as the co-founder of The Whisky Exchange. The online fine spirits retailer-distributor has been a formative force in how modern whisky culture learned to taste and explore bottles, and a sort of early kingmaker of brands in the UK and Europe long before they were inevitable forces. They were the first to carry, and thus help consumers discover, brands such as Monkey Shoulder, Hendricks Gin, and even the Yamazaki 12-year-old.

 

 

Part of what makes Sukhinder such a singular figure, I reckon, is that he does not have to continue with this second act were it not for a sense of mission. After selling The Whisky Exchange for an estimated half a billion dollars in 2021, Sukhinder still felt compelled to pour his capital, his energy and his sense of responsibility back into whisky, as if the only satisfying outcome is to push the whisky industry closer to what he believes it can be.

I had to ask Sukhinder for a sit-down interview. He very graciously agreed.

  

Brothers Rajbir and Sukhinder Singh flanked by Pernod Ricard top executives, Nicolas Oudinot and Olivier Gasperin.

 

A Young Obsessive

Before the boom that made premium whisky a feed of bottle shots and auction headlines, it was, for the young Sukhinder, a private fixation with no obvious audience to share with. Back in the 1980s, single malt whisky was rarely talked about in London where Sukhinder grew up. Specialist whisky shops were few and far between, let alone whisky interest groups. “I started going to Scotland to learn,” said Sukhinder, who eventually found kindred spirits up north. “I would go to Scotland two or three times a year. I would stay for four or five days. I would buy stuff. I would travel all around visiting people.”

Singh was doing the kind of legwork that now feels almost antique. He tells the story as a sequence of purchases, where he might buy whole batches just to acquire a few essentials. One early dealing, Sukhinder recalls, was with an Edinburgh gentleman from whom he purchased a large collection of miniature bottlings, a decision that took Sukhinder all of ten minutes. “I actually just needed five bottles, but I had to buy the whole collection to get those five.” But the young Sukhinder was highly methodical, with a passion that funded itself: “It doesn’t matter, the rest I can sell. I might make a little profit, and then I can buy more miniatures.”

 

Sukhinder's most prized collection of whiskies range from the highly sentimental Kirkliston Pure Malt (far left), to the incredibly old Lagavulin 1883 (middle) (Source: Club Enologique's interview with Sukhinder).

 

In that same fateful visit, he noticed something that pulled him into deeper water – an old bottle of Kirkliston Pure Malt in the gentleman’s cupboard from a nearby distillery which had closed in the early 1900s. “Oh my God,” Sukhinder marvelled, “it’s a lost distillery!” Kirkliston was not a marginal footnote in Scotch history. In the late 1800s, it was one of six producers that formed Distillers Company Ltd, the powerful bloc that would eventually become Diageo. When the distillery fell silent in 1920, it did so quietly, leaving almost no trace in the modern whisky world. To encounter a bottle like this was to encounter something that predated the industry as we know it today. Sukhinder proudly clocked it to be produced sometime between 1900 and 1910.

Then came Sukhinder’s request to buy the Kirkliston. The Scottish gentleman refused. Sukhinder pressed. Please? Again, no. They back-and-forthed until an offer was made that the gentleman couldn’t refuse. “It took me an hour to convince him to sell me that bottle, but I got it in the end. I paid a lot of money.”

An hour is a long time to keep asking for something you have been told you cannot have. But the detail that matters was young Sukhinder’s certainty. He knew what he was looking at and why it mattered. The dusty bottle represented a past that had already slipped out of reach.

This was how Sukhinder obtained his first truly old and rare whisky.

And yet because Sukhinder’s passion was so ahead of trend, it felt like none of this had the warmth and understanding of a shared hobby. “It was actually a very lonely place for me. I had no one to share my passion with.”

 

The Only Person Who Understands Your Whisky

The irony is that while he felt alone, Sukhinder’s name was already moving, carried the old-fashioned way in the age before the Internet and fax machine. “Word just got around that there’s this crazy young Indian guy whose parents have a business, and he’s collecting miniatures and bottles,” Sukhinder mused.

 

Repeated visits through the late 1980s made Sukhinder good friends with the manager of the Cadenhead's Whisky Shop in Edinburgh.

 

By the time Singh’s collecting widened from miniatures into the deep end of “old and rare”, he was no longer merely chasing bottles. Many producers happily sent Sukhinder samples of their new products for tasting. Having been exposed to many high-quality new releases, the growing whisky community naturally relied on Sukhinder for purchasing advice. He even began receiving letters from strangers around the world, earnestly asking to trade or for his expertise in tracking down bottles.

One visit at a time, Sukhinder had also built a network across the industry that granted him access to liquid you couldn’t buy even if you wanted to. “If you saw how much stuff I bought over like 10 years, it’s insane,” laughed Sukhinder. Distillery staff who received special editions or commemorative bottlings would only offer them to Sukhinder. “Half the distillery managers in Scotland sold their private collections to me!”

“Some of them had some amazing old, old, old bottles,” he says. “But they would tell me that I was the only person who understands ‘old and rare’, who understands whisky and is passionate. So why would they sell it to anyone else?”

Sukhinder came to be seen as the person you called when you wanted a really special bottle to go to someone who would truly understand it. This reveals something about the whisky industry of the time. Bottles weren’t made just to fly off the shelf and hit sales targets. These were bottles bound up with memory and pride of Scotch industry workers – who strongly felt they should go to a retailer who will appreciate them and speak about them honestly. It was about stewardship, not turnover. And in that sense, Sukhinder was never just buying whisky. He was being vouched for.

In the early days before the single malt boom, whisky’s value seemed to travel through people first – through relationships, reputations, and private phone calls, long before it moves through press releases or price trackers to be noticed by the wider market. That is what makes his next memory so vivid – the first time a single malt did not simply sell, but vanish overnight.

 

The Market’s First Taste Of Hype: Black Bowmore

If the market for single malts in London seemed to move slowly in the early days, the Black Bowmore phenomenon abruptly made patience obsolete.

“The first product to have sold out overnight was Black Bowmore,” said Sukhinder. This was not just a popular whisky. It was, as he recalls it, the first genuinely interesting distillery release that appeared and disappeared in a matter of days. Around 2,000 bottles were gone in a flash, a scale and speed that were unheard of at the time. Before that, single malts would have lasted two or three years on Sukhinder’s store shelves before they sold out.

 

The legendary first edition Black Bowmore 1964 was released as an original bottling by Bowmore Distillery in 1993. Most enthusiasts had never encountered such a dark shade of whisky.

 

“When we sold out [the Black Bowmore],” he continues, “I went back to the supplier. They had none left.” So Sukhinder reacted quickly. “I went to shops and started buying back from shops… I bought over a hundred bottles because the demand I had was so high.”

 

The Golden Era of Independent Bottling

The Black Bowmore phenomenon ushered in an era of certainty for single malt producers. Sukhinder recalled, “From that, everything just really evolved. More companies started launching.”

Sukhinder has high praise for independent bottlings of this era. “I was also buying for myself from the Scotch Malt Whisky Society,” he says, before landing the verdict: “The stuff they launched back in the '80s and early '90s is legendary.”

 

(Source: Angus MacRaild)

 

“All the Springbanks came direct from the distillery. All the Glenfarclas came direct from the distillery. All the Bowmore came direct from the distillery.” And then, the simple conclusion: “They had access to really good stock and everything was just magic and mind-blowing.”

This period became a quiet benchmark against which everything else would later be measured. And it is also where Sukhinder’s impatience with modern understatement begins to make sense. He bristles slightly when people tasting familiar single malts today talk as if adequacy were enough. “They say ‘yeah, it's good.’” He almost interrupts himself. “No, it's not good. It's bloody good!”

After witnessing the best that whisky could be, Sukhinder senses a mismatch today. The best whiskies have changed, and so has the drinker’s baseline for what qualifies. As the liquid becomes less distinctive, “good” starts to pass for exceptional. That quiet shift in expectation troubles him. It is the kind of gap that later gets papered over with story, presentation, and polish, rather than fixed in the glass.

 

The £10,000 Website That Became An Accidental Tastemaker

By the mid-1990s, the ground beneath Britain’s independent liquor stores was already shifting. Rising rents, the growing dominance of supermarkets, and the steady push towards cheaper alcohol were making the traditional off-licence an increasingly hard business to sustain. Sukhinder’s parents decided it was time to step away from The Nest.

This ending also created a beginning for Sukhinder and his brother Rajbir. They would lean into one thing that most other retailers could not offer: depth, knowledge, and access to “old and rare” whisky as a specialist mail-order business. No shopfront, no prime retail rent, just bottles, trust, and a growing network of enthusiasts. The dot-com buzz arrived just as that decision was taking shape. Looking back, Sukhinder admits that he had his doubts about running his liquor business out of a website.

 

“We thought building a website is really expensive… These new companies were starting off and raising a million pounds to build a website.” But his brother’s university friend who was something of a tech whiz floated an offer that seemed too good to be true. “He would build us a website for £10,000! We couldn't believe it.” Sukhinder seems amused by how deceptively simple it sounded. “He said it was easy – he could get the package, do the design, get the products up.” Within about five months, TheWhiskyExchange.com was set up.

Sukhinder’s confidence did not rise the moment it went live. “What really scared me was: how will people find us?” It was hard to imagine anyone stumbling upon a brand-new online store at the time. “How the heck will people find us?” He laughs, because what happened next was unexpected: “On the second day of going live, we got our first order.”

The shop counter stopped being the edge of his world. Suddenly, a customer could appear from somewhere Sukhinder had never poured a dram for, never met, never talked into a bottle. But once that channel existed, his instincts applied all the same. Bring liquid to lips and let great whisky do the convincing.

Sukhinder had originally named the platform “The Whisky Exchange” because he had hoped to focus on trading in old and rare bottles. But he realised that there’s always something exciting around the corner and new bottles to discover and share with others.

 

 

Besides stocking established independent bottlers such as Signatory Vintage, Gordon & MacPhail and Cadenhead’s, Sukhinder’s team became the primary retailer to recognise quality very early on in now-respected bottlers. This era saw the start of Douglas Laing, Duncan Taylor and Germany’s The Whisky Agency. “They bottled the most amazing stuff – Bowmore 1966s and Ardbeg 1972s and Broras and Port Ellens and Glen Grants and Glenlivet. It was all ‘60s, early ‘70s. The stuff was just magic, and it just kept coming.”

 

 

It could be argued that The Whisky Exchange’s patronage made these independent Scotch bottlers what they are today. “We were buying close to 40, 50% of everything they bottled… We helped them grow and they helped us grow.”

 

 

Outside the realm of single malt Scotch, The Whisky Exchange is also credited with popularising many now-iconic brands while the rest of the UK market slowly caught up. The list pours out like a memory of work: Monkey Shoulder Blended Scotch, Hendrick's Gin, Johnnie Walker Blue Label, Aberlour A'bunadh, Auchentoshan Three Wood, Ron Zacapa Rum, Diplomático Rum, Tanqueray 10, Compass Box Blended Scotch, India’s Amrut Single Malt. There was also the memorably “rich, sherried and amazing” Cutty Sark 25-year-old. An animated Sukhinder raved, “Berry Brothers in the old days were sitting on old casks of Glen Grant and Glenlivet from the '60s and '70s. And that's what they blended into Cutty Sark 25. Of course, it's going to be good!”

 

 

Yamazaki 12 as well, so I heard, I added. Sukhinder nodded meaningfully – he had personally invested quite a bit of time to get Japanese whisky off the ground. Back in the early 2000s, Japanese whisky was a curiosity that did not command the same prestige it does today. Rather than pitching Japanese whisky as a prestige object, he treated it as a problem of unfamiliarity that can only be solved by taste.

“I explained to [Suntory] that at the moment, nobody will buy a bottle of Japanese whisky because everyone's obsessed with Scotch and they would never think of Japan for whisky. So I need to get liquid to lips,” diagnosed Sukhinder. He devised a plan which received the full support of the Japanese. Suntory gave Sukhinder 2,000 miniature bottles of Yamazaki 12, which he would periodically slip into larger whisky orders along with a flier on Yamazaki Whisky and what made Japanese single malt special.

The market responded with excitement. “After that, one in every four or five orders would include a bottle of Japanese whisky.” Consumer curiosity was ripe for shaping, “because in those days, people were interested to learn.”

 

From Retailer To Distiller

What began as a humble online portal in 1999 grew over the following decades into an internationally respected specialist spirits retailer. Business was good enough that the brothers could open The Whisky Exchange’s first physical shop in London’s Southwark in 2006. Three years later, they launched the first whisky festival of its kind in London to put on “a top-quality showcase for whisky in London” which continues annually on a much larger scale today.

 

 

They successfully combined e-commerce with bricks-and-mortar shops and a suite of annual events that have become fixtures in the industry calendar. By the time The Whisky Exchange was celebrating its twentieth anniversary, it had been lauded as one of the world’s biggest and most successful online drinks retailers and had opened multiple London shops, hosted major whisky shows, and amassed thousands of loyal customers and enthusiasts around the world. The business’s reach was broad, its brand well established, and its expertise unquestioned.

 

 

Against this backdrop, a different kind of opportunity began to take shape. Spirits giant Pernod Ricard had developed an interest in acquiring The Whisky Exchange and began making inquiries. By this point, Sukhinder’s attention was already slowly drifting towards the part of whisky that takes decades to vindicate: making spirit, not merely finding it.

 

The Portintruan Distillery site (Source: Taisuke Yamauchi).

 

Portintruan Distillery, Elixir Distillers’ Islay project, had already been set in motion by then, a long-view bet that would one day give them a home to make their own distillate. The Whisky Exchange had become a vast machine, and Pernod Ricard had come knocking more than once.

So Sukhinder made a request of his own: if Pernod Ricard wanted The Whisky Exchange, then would Pernod Ricard sell them a Speyside distillery to sit alongside Portintruan? That distillery was Tormore.

 

 

From there, the deal reads more like a new mission. While The Whisky Exchange goes to the spirits giant, Sukhinder and Rajbir remain at the helm of Elixir Distillers and Specialty Brands, committing themselves to the craft end of the business as bottlers, blenders, and now distillers. Tormore in Speyside and Portintruan on Islay become the two poles of that new ambition.

 

The organised chaos at the blending table of Olly Chilton, Elixir Distillers' Head Blender.

 

Alongside their portfolio of brands, The Single Malts of Scotland, Port Askaig, Elements of Islay, Black Tot Rum, Highland Nectar liqueur, and Tapatio Tequila (which they distribute for), Sukhinder excitedly shared about the recently launched The Elixir Trails. The inaugural series looks beyond the traditional ‘Old World’ whisky countries, with bottlings drawn from Japan’s Chichibu, Denmark’s Thy Distillery, England’s White Peak, and Washington’s Westland. It seems like a reminder that, for Sukhinder, the only real test is whether the whisky earns its place in the glass – category boundaries are secondary.

 

Sukhinder personally selected four whiskies and five rums for The Elixir Trails’ first instalment.

Reviving “Old And Rare”

Because he is such a believer in what he calls “old and rare” Scotch whisky, I could not resist trying to pick his brain on the question that hangs over everything he is now building at Tormore. If the whiskies that made him fall in love with the category tasted a certain way that modern releases rarely do, can that be brought back?

“When you're talking about what makes a good whisky, the biggest difference I find in ‘old and rare’ whisky is flavour and texture. It's just richer. All my research shows that there are two or three elements which can help produce a very good spirit, a flavourful spirit.”

The elements he comes back to are deeply traditional and unappealing to large commercial producers who prefer cost optimisation. Direct fire distillation. Fermentation managed with care rather than speed, including the right barley variety, yeast selection and micro-environment. Floor malting. These are not nostalgic flourishes for Sukhinder. They are the levers that might bring the richness and flavour of old whisky back into reach.

"Floor maltings is challenging. You can have a bit of up and down because the heat build-up in the summer is going to be very different to the heat build-up in the winter... Sometimes you get it wrong. But sometimes these imperfections can create masterpieces."

 

(Source: Distiller)

 

Still, he is clear-eyed about the problem he is trying to solve, and it is bigger than technique. It is cultural. It is about what today’s drinkers have been trained to accept as normal whisky.

“There is an element which does scare me. It scares me that the consumer has changed,” he thoughtfully paused.

“The consumers who've come in the last five to ten years have been brought up in a very different way. A lot of new style of whisky, a lot of micro distilleries or new style distilleries, the new style of sherry cask – which [tastes] very different from the old style of sherry cask. So for them, this is normal. They don't know or understand what old whisky tastes like.”

And if that is the landscape, then the work is no longer just about production. It is about rebuilding reference points. It’s about helping people understand a liquid they have never been offered.

The catch is that the methods Sukhinder believes in are precisely the ones big producers are structurally disincentivised to pursue. He does not frame it as moral failure, more as the logic of scale doing what it always does: sanding down the edges, choosing repeatability, optimising for yield.

“Everything is about efficiency, bringing the cost down. Every time I say to somebody from a big company that we will be using bagged yeast, they say, ‘But that's expensive and the yields are not good.’ And we say, ‘Who cares, because you get flavour’ – so our thinking is completely opposite.”

 

Selling The Machine to Betting On Flavour

Selling The Whisky Exchange is so often spoken about as a landmark business move that it is easy to forget there have been real people living within it. There’s still a missing hinge in the story. So it felt like the right moment to ask about how the decision felt from the inside.

And then everything clicked for me. The point of Tormore and Portintruan isn’t to simply make whisky. It is to prove that flavour can still be the organising principle for producers, even when the wider industry’s default setting is to prioritise efficiency and marketing.

“Over the last five years of [running] The Whisky Exchange, I was enjoying it less and less. The main reason was average quality whisky,” Sukhinder shared candidly. “Some distilleries have completely lost their way… They feel that they need to innovate with all these wood finishes, wine cask finishes, this finish, that finish.” But sometimes, the simplest is the best. Sukhinder insisted, “their base spirit, their bourbon cask, is better than the wood finishes!”

“That means they're doing something wrong in terms of marketing… And the ‘innovation’ is out of control,” continued Sukhinder.

 

(Source: Raj Chavda, Elixir Distillers' Creative Director)

 

Don’t get him wrong on marketing. If anything, thoughtful, imaginative whisky marketing has long been a cornerstone of Sukhinder’s own toolkit. His team is credited with designing and conceptualising a range of very memorable and coveted limited edition whisky collections – from The Whisky Exchange’s Rosebank “Roses” Series containing bottles of rare Rosebank single malt on Valentine’s Day for seven consecutive years, each release accompanied by a rose-themed poem to the “Karuizawa Geishas” sets which feature intricate geisha-themed artwork and are among the most coveted Karuizawa bottlings of today, to the Chichibu London Edition bottlings that feature bright, vibrant graphic label designs paying homage to London as a whisky city.

 

 (Source: The Whisky Exchange)

 

It all still boils down to flavour for Sukhinder’s Rosebank series. “Roses just came to mind because of the floral element, the style of the whisky, it's a beautiful, pretty whisky.” Sukhinder can’t help bringing the conversation back to the quality of liquid bottled over all else. “I felt [the whisky] wouldn't age any further… but we just felt it was really at the right time. I've always found that Rosebank tastes better when it's younger.”

“With Tormore, because it's an old distillery, we're going for quite traditional packaging.” Once again, the packaging should speak to the liquid. Tormore is, as Sukhinder describes, an elegant, fruity, floral spirit which he strongly believes lends itself to a classic ex-bourbon cask maturation regime, over richer styles such as sherry cask. His team wanted to ensure the packaging is reflective of this classic style. “We're not going for some new crazy shaped bottle,” joked Sukhinder.

The same marketing-liquid tension resurfaces here, I noted, as Sukhinder leans into the thought. “What I worry about with packaging is that, packaging could overtake liquid, as with the big brands. I believe packaging should enhance good quality liquid. It shouldn't mask liquid. I'm very conscious about that.”

“Sometimes you have packaging that you say it's too pretty to drink. What's the point?” For Sukhinder, that is where something fundamental breaks. A bottle that intimidates you into not opening it has already failed its purpose. “For us, that's in our philosophy. We can't over-package it so that nobody wants to drink it. That would just be a waste.”

It is hard not to hear an echo of his Karuizawa frustration in that diagnosis. It was about what happens when the handling of a whisky, its presentation, its decisions around strength and re-bottling, starts to take priority over the quality of liquid in the glass. The myth might survive, but no one truly gets to know how the liquid tastes.

 

The Myth of the Vanishing Drinker

 

Since late 2024, there’s also the question that keeps circling around bartenders during the quieter hours of service, often with a sense of fatalism. There is a narrative that modern drinkers are now turning against wine and spirits consumption.

Does Sukhinder see folks turning away from whisky for good?

“That’s bullshit,” he simply says. “I mean, we could partly blame bad whisky for this because you can imagine how if the last six bottles that you bought were not that good, it’s going to put you off. These things are not cheap!”

He gave a razor sharp analysis of the opportunities with the two main segments: younger drinkers and experienced drinkers.

“They are drinking what they have collected for the last few years, and they will buy later.”

“The younger generation is definitely more conscious and more about going to the gym and looking after themselves, which is good – which says to me they should be wiser drinkers. They'll drink better, but drink less” For Sukhinder, the key is in showing younger drinkers what quality whisky looks like, and the right way to make it. “There's purity in doing bourbon cask as opposed to sherry cask… you need a good spirit and a textural spirit, a rich spirit, to shine.” Popular modern whiskies often heavily rely on various oak casks to impart big, novel flavours. But Sukhinder argues, “It shouldn't be a vessel that gives you big flavours. I know we've come to adapt that, but it should be a mellowing vessel.” He concludes ambitiously, “The likes of us have a big education piece to do.”

 

 

He is adamant that the core audience for whisky - the "experienced drinkers" - has not gone anywhere. “I don't think they've gone away. And I'll tell you why – because every whisky show, whisky fair on the planet is busier than ever! They are full. My old Whisky Show in London – they sold out months in advance.… The interest is still there if it's an amazing product, if it's a delicious product.”

The issue is timing rather than decline: “The way people have been buying over the last 10 years, we have more whisky than we can drink. I believe a lot of people are just going to wait for the right things to come along. They have enough whisky at home and are sensible, because now the prices are high. They are drinking what they have collected for the last few years, and they will buy later.”

Value has also been an important factor in this shift. Sukhinder believes that while prices were “getting stupid”, bottlers and retailers should have taken a more active role in curating bottles with good value. In an ideal world, a responsible retailer would say, “we only deal with quality, we have to try before we buy” Sukhinder added, “Of course, [quality] is the bottler's responsibility but unfortunately for me that has not often been the case.”

On the upside, Sukhinder is seeing early signs of returning buyers. “What we are finding now is people are coming back, little by little – not fast. I'm getting enquiries on high-end stuff, people wanting to bottle good casks. I don't think whisky will ever die. I just think people will be more selective.”

 

Bringing The Fun Back

At this point, the logic behind Tormore and Portintruan felt inevitable. “We had the chance to buy Tormore and we had invested so heavily into stock for Elixir Distillers, Single Malts of Scotland, et cetera. There's no point in complaining, let's just do it right.” Sukhinder’s new distilleries, bottlings and rare samples of Karuizawa are a grand project to demonstrate how things ought to be done, one glass at a time.

 

 

Thierry Bénitah put it to him more simply – he was bringing the fun back into whisky. La Maison du Whisky’s Chief Executive looked at Sukhinder and saw something the industry had been missing: a reason to trust what’s in the bottle again. Sukhinder is bringing the fun back – not by chasing spectacle, but by bottling honestly, leading masterclasses and putting a strong team in place. That was what the whisky industry used to feel like, and what it should feel like again.

 

 

Bénitah was not offering a casual compliment. He and Sukhinder are longtime friends, both of whom came up in the trade around the same time, with enough shared history to spot the same cycles and the same moments where the category loses its way. Lately, that bond has even been sealed in liquid form: a 30-year-old Imperial single malt named “30 Years of Friendship - Sukhinder Singh and Thierry Bénitah”.

 

A Bridge to the Past

Whisky for Sukhinder also represents a community of long, cherished friendships. He owns a vast collection of over 10,000 rare bottles, but behind Sukhinder’s collection is a web of human stories from the industry at its best. I asked Sukhinder: who would he want beside him if he were to open something special from his collection?

“There are too many lovely people of the past,” he says at first, almost overwhelmed by the thought. “Old distillery managers, old master blenders.”

Then one name rises to the surface immediately, as if it had been waiting there.

“I tell you who I absolutely adore, Dr Jim Beveridge, who was the Master Blender of Johnnie Walker. The guy is the loveliest, most humble, most knowledgeable person possible.”

 

Dr Jim Beveridge OBE was responsible for developing many of Johnnie Walker's modern products.

 

Sukhinder cannot praise Beveridge without also praising the work. “Johnnie Walker, I would say, is the most consistent whisky on the planet. Johnnie Walker Black, for me, is so delicious and so good and so consistent.” He fondly remembers a birthday gift that sounds more meaningful than any trophy. “It was my 50th birthday and Diageo gave me a present of creating my own blend with Jim, which was lovely. They did me six bottles and everything.”

From there, the names keep coming, each one attached to a specific lesson or specific kind of presence. “I love Richard Paterson, because he was the one that really inspired me about blends and really explained to me the art of blending…”

 

Richard Paterson who oversaw brands like Whyte & Mackay, The Dalmore and Jura is widely known for his charismatic, larger-than-life personality and dramatic flair (like throwing whisky on the floor).

 

“Then you've got someone who has knowledge on everything to do with whisky and history, Alan Winchester, who was from Glenlivet. Such a lovely man and absolutely adores whisky.”

 

The respected Alan Winchester worked as Master Distiller for The Glenlivet Distillery.

 

“Iain Henderson, who used to be the Distillery Manager of Laphroaig, had been in the industry for years and years!”

 

The late Iain Henderson was Master Distiller at Laphroaig Distillery from 1989 to 2002, and remains respected for expanding the distillery's reach and production.

 

And finally, a name that ties the whole thing back to what Sukhinder is building now: “There was also the late Colin Ross from Ben Nevis… for me a special connection because he was Distillery Manager at Tormore.”

 

The late Colin Ross was the long-time beloved MD of Ben Nevis Distillery, respected for his deep knowledge, contributions to Ben Nevis, Tormore and even to Japan's Nikka Whisky. 

 

He speaks as if he is still living inside that older map of whisky, where the industry is not a grid of brand portfolios but a tapestry of characters. Master blenders with impressive palates and gentle manners. Distillery managers who spent a lifetime protecting the craft. Flamboyant storytellers who could make you understand and care about blends, not as a compromise, but as an art. People who, in Sukhinder’s telling, were not just great at their jobs, but great to be around.

 

A Whisky Community Revival

It is hard not to notice what sits underneath the warmth of that list. There is a sense that whisky is supposed to be shared among people who genuinely love it – and that enjoyment comes from trust. Trust in the bottler. Trust in the liquid. Trust that the bottle is meant to be opened, not always placed on a pedestal. This is the real whisky revival that Sukhinder will help rebuild.

That is where Sukhinder’s energy comes from. You feel it when he is talking about a special bottle, a choice of cask, a distillery manager he adores, or the new design concepts for his final stock of Imperial Single Malt soon to be released. You also feel it when he is talking about what has gone wrong.

When all is said and done, what would he like to be remembered for?

 

 

“Look, I hope we can make a success of Tormore and Portintruan and do them correctly and be an inspiration to others of how to bring back whisky – because I think the chance that the big distillers will do it is not going to happen. Everything is about efficiency, bringing the cost down.”

In his eyes, Big Whisky is too committed to efficiency, scale, and the economics of making huge volumes of less distinctive spirit. In a market where novelty can be manufactured faster than quality, it is easier to keep reaching for louder casks, rather than rebuild upstream processes that can make a spirit genuinely special in the first place. And when you are big enough, he notes, you can move product at prices that smaller craft producers simply cannot match.

 

The Chichibu Distillery II single malt (which we have reviewed here)

 

But Sukhinder also sees great potential in many small- to medium-sized producers. There are still many producers making honest, high-quality whisky without constant theatrics. He speaks warmly of Bunnahabhain and Deanston. He lights up talking about Chichibu’s Ichiro Akuto too, and about how exciting it is to see Chichibu Distillery II producing spirit that is already “so good”, a result he links, with obvious delight, to choices like “direct fire” distillation that Sukhinder is a strong evangelist for.

 

(Source: Christie's)

 

“I hope to help bring together a community of really good, like-minded distillers so that we can work together – because we will never be able to compete against the big guys. There is strength in unity. So somehow to champion people who are doing a good job and working with them, to inspire the next generation – I think that would be lovely. "

If anyone can pull that kind of coalition together, it is probably the man who has spent his entire life being vouched for, one relationship at a time, one bottle at a time. The difference now is that the bottle he is chasing is not Kirkliston in a cupboard. It is a world that remembers how thrilling it can be when the liquid really is, as he likes to insist, “bloody good”.

 

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Editor: This is a written profile based on our interview with Sukhinder Singh. If you wish to read the entire Q&A interview, click here.

This March, Christie's London Wine and Spirits will put on auction two complete casks of Karuizawa whisky from Sukhinder's collection. The live auction, numbered 24677, is scheduled to take place on 10 March at 2:00 pm GMT in London. Click here to go to Christie's official auction page.

 

One of two Karuizawa whisky casks up for auction (Source: Christie's)

 

@CharsiuCharlie