Rare and collectible
International competitions are a great way for new brands to build a reputation. The Nantou Distillery created in internal team of ten people specifically aimed at winning awards. The team researches each competition’s awards history to identify which products won awards and what the individual judges’ preferences are. It then selects 600 of the 3,000 casks of whisky the distillery produces annually and begins assessing them, eventually winnowing them down to the three that the company will submit to competitions.
Omar has entered its single malt whiskies in many international tasting competitions since 2014, including the International Spirits Challenge, San Francisco World Spirits Competition, Malt Maniacs Awards, International Wine & Spirit Competition, World Whisky Awards and Concours Mondial de Bruxelles. The distillery has distinguished itself by accumulating more than 200 medals to date.
If you happen to visit the Nantou Distillery, be sure to check out the “oak cask wall” while you are there. Believe it or not, the “wall,” which is where the distillery stores the whiskies aged in its Solera system PX sherry casks, is worth more than NT$200 million!
Global competition for sherry casks is intense, but in 2015 TTL managed to outmaneuver Scottish distillers to acquire an entire set of sherry casks from Ximénez-Spínola, a winery in Spain’s famous Jerez wine region with a nearly 300-year history. Rumor has it that TTL was able to arrange the deal because the winery’s owner has a Taiwanese daughter-in-law. “Having connections makes things easier.”
This set of rare sherry casks is filled with whisky made in 2008, the year the Nantou Distillery initiated whisky production. The distillery began selling this special whisky in 2018, bottling it in crystal bottles at a rate of just four casks per year. Initially, each cask produced 250 bottles of whisky that sold for NT$10,000 each, but the angel’s share means that the amount of whisky in the remaining casks declines every year. By 2023, the angel’s share had reduced the volume to just 200 bottles per cask. In that year, the distillery chose to enhance the whisky’s collectability and investability by decorating each of the bottles with one of four of painter Ma Pai-sui works: The Beauty of Taroko, Kenting, Southern Coastline or Meinong Village Home. Sold out before they were even released, a set of four bottles is expected to be priced at more than NT$80,000.
Convinced of the positive outlook for the global whisky market, TTL is investing NT$1.3 billion in building two whisky chateaus with spires at the Nantou Distillery that it expects to finish in 2025. Once complete, these chateaus will house a whisky production facility and small museum, store 30,000 oak casks, and show visiting fans of Taiwanese whisky just how those whiskies are made.
This wall of Solera-system PX sherry casks is worth NT$200 million, yet is held together by nothing more than wooden supports. Nobody has dared to make any changes since the cask supplier personally ensured that the supports were placed just as they had been in Spain.
The Nantou Distillery’s four onion-shaped pot stills fill the stillhouse with the scent of sugar cane and of the esters produced by distilling the “wash” (fermented barley wort).