Author: Anne Burchett
Sukhinder Singh and his brother Rajbir founded The Whisky Exchange, an online retailer of premium spirits, and Speciality Drinks, an on-trade distribution business for spirits and Champagne, in 1999. In 2021, they sold both companies to Pernod Ricard. Today, they are focused on Elixir Distillers, the independent bottler launched in 2015, the Tormore distillery in Speyside acquired from Pernod Richard in 2022 and Portintruan, the distillery they’re building on Islay. For Voice of the Industry, Singh reflects on how he became one of the best-known figures in spirits and why he believes the industry has, in some respects, lost its way.
The origin story
Sukhinder Singh started in the spirits business when he was very young. “Spirits were always part of the Indian culture,” he says. “My parents were the first Indian family to open an off-licence in the UK back in 1972 and I grew up in the industry “.
Most regular customers would stick to the same brand of whisky or switch between one or two.
The premium bottles, eight or ten single malts, a handful of Cognacs and a few liqueurs, sat on the top shelves and young Sukhinder would have to climb a ladder to fetch them for the most discerning customers. One of them first piqued his curiosity when he explained that the reason he never bought the same single malt was because he enjoyed exploring different distilleries.
Aged 15, Singh started collecting spirit miniatures as a hobby. The vice president of the Miniature Bottle Club of the UK happened to live up the road from the shop and gave him a membership. Singh noticed that most of the content of the monthly club’s magazine was about single malt. At the first opportunity he went up to Scotland and fell in love with the place and the people.
He then found himself, almost by accident, the owner of the world’s largest miniature collection at the time, 8,000 bottles. It had been sold at auction, but the buyer defaulted. The insurance company paid the vendor, and six or seven years later, put the collection back up for sale. Singh bid £1,000, the most he could afford, on the very last day, and got the lot. He sold everything but 400 malt miniatures over the next two years and reinvested what he made in more malt miniatures. He also started to travel regularly to Scotland to learn more about whisky.
He eventually started to collect bottles, one bottle from each distillery initially.
One day, he opened a very old bottle of Springbank, the first bottle of single malt he’d ever opened. He remembers it to this day. “Every day I would have a dram,” he says, “and every day it tasted different. Always good but different. It blew my mind.”
Singh sold most of his miniature collection and focused on whisky bottles and memorabilia, mostly of historical brands because they tell a story.
“The journey was lovely, and I learned slowly, a little at a time,” he says. “I started collecting whisky as a hobby initially, but I was in the right place, at the right time and I fell in love with it.”
Whisky’s summer of love
There were only a dozen single malt whisky brands then, a few from independent bottlers, but hardly anything from the big guys. In the early 90s though, a few companies started bottling limited editions. Bowmore was one of the first with Black Bowmore in 1993. The packaging was like nothing seen before and the whisky was black in colour.
The industry really started developing in the early 2000s according to Singh. Duncan Taylor and Douglas Lang, two important independent bottlers, had access to stock from some of the best distilleries and started bottling single malts, different ages from different distilleries. They were bottling 1960s and 1970s vintages, whisky’s golden era. “Anything that was distilled then is just magical,” Singh says. “There are still a few people who have stuff in casks from the 60s, but it’s a bit too woody now. It was perfect at 25, 30, 35 years old because the quality of the wood was so good back then.”
The family shop was sold in 1998, and Singh started the Whisky Exchange with his brother in 1999, not without some trepidation. They bought a little warehouse and a friend who’d studied computer science charged them £10,000 to build their first website.
They would buy bottles of single malts from people who approached them asking for valuations, and would sell them to friends and customers, mostly in the UK initially as the international market was yet to develop.
The late 90s, early 2000s is when the best whiskies were launched. And there was a lot of it.
“It felt like it would never end,” says Singh. “These companies needed us because we were the only whisky specialist in the UK. We were buying, in some cases, 50% of everything they bottled. You could say they made us and we made them. It was just wild. These whiskies were amazing.”
Because they were online, they were able to sell to countries where single malt was already established, such as Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and especially Japan. Japan was a premium market, and many companies would make products exclusively them. Japanese bars would order directly from the Singh brothers, up to 12 mixed boxes of single malts, sometimes once every two weeks just because they wanted the variety.
“I set the prices,” Singh says. “When demand was able to take it, I would push the prices up very slowly, but only when I believed in the quality of the whisky. Sometimes, the stock would sell out in minutes, and I knew the price was too low. Of course, there were some whiskies that I didn’t like and didn’t touch, but it was the best era. We were selling Bowmore 1966 for £70 to £80 a bottle. I’m buying back those same whiskies today for £2,500 to £3,000. Why didn’t I keep any? Why didn’t I keep all of them? I kept one of each for my own collection, and an odd bottle to drink, but I should have kept a case of each because it was the most amazing liquid ever produced.” The lament of a true collector!
While whisky was going crazy, Singh’s brother, whom he describes as “not as crazy and mad and geeky” as him, took charge of their other company, Speciality Drinks. The range of spirits available in the UK at the time was limited but some markets, such as the US for bourbon and tequila, were way ahead. Rajbir Singh found contacts in those markets and would import a selection of spirits.
“We didn’t know them,” Singh says, “but they just seemed interesting. And when they arrived, we would open a bottle to try, and we would recommend them to different specialists. For example, there was a bourbon bar about to open, and they wanted 100 different bourbons. Rajbir hunted down a hundred different bourbons across the US for them. The same guy, Henry Besant, went on to open the first tequila bar in London, called Green and Red. Rajbir went to Mexico and the US and tracked down 80 different tequilas for him.”
Speciality Brands was the first to import Ron Zacapa rum, Don Julio tequila and Diplomatico rum, unknown brands at the time but global giants nowadays. “Diplomatico, we build from the bottom up,” Singh says. “We gave it a premium positioning by putting it into five-star hotels and on cocktail lists. They had a small distributor in the US, and we were the second one. We found it in the US, brought it across, and it was quite a unique liquid at that time, rich and sweet. Zacapa was the same, but we found Diplomatico better, and we did a phenomenal job with it. We helped them find their French distribution, their German distributor, their Spanish distributor, because we had good connections everywhere.”
Gathering clouds
Having survived Covid thanks to their online operations, the Singh brothers started building a distillery on Islay to create liquid made to their exacting specifications for their own brands. Then Pernod Ricard came along and made them “an offer that they couldn’t refuse”. It was a “happy accident”, but it came at the right time as the growth of DTC in premium goods was beginning to bite. Speciality Drinks was the biggest seller of LOUIS XIII Cognac in the UK when Remy Cointreau decided to go direct. “They took all our business,” Singh says. “Then Louis Vuitton set up a DTC division looking after VIPs and corporate clients. Diageo, Bacardi and Pernod were looking at it too.”
Margins were also increasingly under pressure. “Online was great in the beginning because it gave us a very big target audience,” says Singh. “But other retailers built an online presence and competition grew. Then Amazon got into alcohol. When Amazon wants to own something, they kill it first to destroy the competition. After Amazon came into spirits, the prices of many products were lower than they were five years earlier even though there had been price increases along the way.”
He is also worried about price dumping. “The big guys are used to doing big volumes and they have huge forecasts,” he says. “They want to maintain their market share and they’re happy to make less profit to sell more. There are ridiculous prices out there from brands that would never ever have discounted before.”
He’s not a fan of supermarket whiskies either. “Whisky is patience, whisky is a very complicated process, and it’s being bastardised, with these not very good no-age expressions made for supermarkets. Their retail price is more expensive than a 10-year-old or a 12-year-old whisky and they are discounted by £15 a bottle for the customer to think he’s got a great deal. I’ve seen discounts as much as £22 on a cheap whisky, but that’s because the retail price is wrong to start with.”
Conversely, he thinks premium whisky prices were pushed too high and scarcity isn’t a thing anymore. “Ten years ago, a 50-year-old whisky was a big thing,” he says. “Today, every single big company has got a 40, 50, 60-year-old whisky, coming out at some point in the next year to two years, and prices are all over the place. One brand is charging £9,000 for a 50-year-old whisky and then you’ve got Macallan at £50,000. There’s no consistency and no clarity. During Covid people had time and money, interest were low and speculators got into premium whiskies. They were still collectors and drinkers around but over 50% of buyers were speculators. Most of these guys have disappeared now and there’s too much aged stock sitting in the market. Some of it is coming to auction and selling for half-price if not less. I’ve just bought a 50-year-old whisky for £5,500 that normally retails for £18,000. The big guys need to stop and not launch anything for a year so that the market can absorb all the old stock.”
Fraud is another concern. “We haven’t even touched the tip of the iceberg,” he says. “A lot of people have bought casks in the last few years. In 5 to 10 years, they’ll want to realise their investment, and they’ll realise they’ve been ripped off when they’re offered less than half of what they paid. In many cases people were sold stuff that doesn’t even exist.”
What about the liquid?
The gilded era of plentiful high quality came to an end as the market grew. “Back into the 80s, we had 12 single malts, in the 90s, we had 15 and then everyone jumped on the bandwagon,” Singh says. “Brands all had a lot of liquid and could pick and choose their casks. In the last 10 years demand started exceeding supply and brands started recasking and bottling what they had because they didn’t have enough of the right liquid. They shouldn’t have. Anyone can bottle a forty-year-old whisky, but how good is it? Only a handful of good whiskies survives over 30 years.’
Global warming and corporate greed are not helping either according to Singh. “The barley is not the same. The wood is not the same. The yeast is not the same. All these things make a difference. The big guys are only interested in their share price, and it all becomes about efficiency. What’s the most efficient yeast? What’s the cheapest casks? Speeding up stuff doesn’t work with whisky.”
The outwardly calm and measured Singh claims to be “a bit angry” because “all the brands I used to love, I do not love anymore. Nobody talks about liquid anymore. They talk about packaging, limited edition, stupid concepts, but they don’t talk about liquid The liquid they’re making is still good, but something goes wrong during the ageing and the blending.”
“A lot of the people in the production teams I grew up loving and learning from have retired. They were in their roles for 30 to 40 years. There was no pressure, they had time. A master blender is like an artist. They need headspace to be truly creative. It’s impossible to create 20 new brands every six months on top of your normal day to day job.”
The other thing that upsets him is how the Sherry casks available today are so different to what was available 20 years ago. “Nobody drinks Sherry nowadays,” he says. “What we’ve got today are seasoned casks made for the whisky industry, with a concoction which is supposed to give you the same flavour as Sherry. They are wood spice heavy, with a lot of colour and they taste of furniture polish. The old Sherry flavour was soft, musty, mushroomy and nutty and lovely.”
Singh sees a risk that some consumers could turn away from premium whisky. “Older consumers are going to stop enjoying it because it tastes so different nowadays,” he says. “Then you have new consumers for whom the new normal is what’s in the market today. That’s very sad.”
The best liquid, according to him, is now coming from the small to medium sized companies. “Not all the small companies, some of them are just doing it for the wrong reason or are very inexperienced, but there’s a handful of people who are going back to the old school and just doing the right thing.”
“That’s why everyone is so excited that we’re building a distillery and opening two distilleries though,” he says. “It’s amazing how many people have been so kind and complimentary. They know how we started and what we’re good at and all and they know the big companies aren’t doing a brilliant job.”
Can the industry reclaim the patience and integrity that once made great whisky possible? If it can’t, watch out for releases from Tormore or Portintruan.
Sukhinder Singh’s tasting selection
Port Askaig 8 year old – Islay Single Malt
A fruity, minerally medium-peated single malt, this eight-year-old whisky has the perfect balance of fruit and peat at a slightly higher strength of 45.8%.
Port Askaig 8 Year Old Scotch Whisky: The Whisky Exchange
£50.25
Blair Athol 10 year old – Macbeth Series / Bloody Sergeant
An amazing concept in which the single malt whisky was selected to depict the character of the play: vanilla, toffee, fruit and nut. Blair Athol is a richer malt, so it can work well with more active casks, in this case, first-fill bourbon and red wine.
£95.75
Any Imperial Single Malt Scotch Whisky
Imperial distillery was closed in the year 2000 and is therefore known as a lost distillery. Only a handful of bottlings have been released, mainly by independent bottlers. The malts are very elegant and fruity with flavours of tropical fruit.
For example, Imperial 1995 – 26 Year Old – Single Malts of Scotland Marriage Scotch Whisky: The Whisky Exchange
£50.25
Any Glen Grant Single Malt Scotch from bottler Gordon & Macphail, ideally distilled pre-1970
Old Glen Grant malts are much richer and have a lovely texture compared to recent bottlings, where the whisky is still very nice but much lighter in style. A lot of these bottlings are very old whiskies, aged more than 30 years – with some aged more than 70 years. Only the best single malts in the best casks can mature to such a great age and taste wonderful.
Search results for Glen Grant: The Whisky Exchange
Red Spot 31 year old matured in a Marsala cask, exclusively for The Whisky Exchange
I am a huge fan of Single Pot Still Irish Whiskey. I chose this cask before leaving The Whisky Exchange, and it is absolutely wonderful, with lots of tropical fruit notes – including passion fruit, mango, cherry and other dark fruits – and spice, which suits the whiskey.
https://www.whiskybase.com/whiskies/whisky/256887/red-spot-1991
Red Spot 1991 – 31 Year Old – Marsala Cask – Exclusive to The Whisky Exchange : The Whisky Exchange
£945
Black Tot – Historic Solera Rum
This is an incredible combination: a rich rum matured in oloroso and PX sherry casks, and then further aged and mellowed in casks that form part of a solera system similar to one used in the sherry industry. I call it “the sherry cask of rum”!
Black Tot Historic Solera Rum : The Whisky Exchange
£63.75
Tapatio Tequila
I am quite frustrated with the array of new tequilas; most have additives and are filtered to remove as much of the taste as possible. For me, they can be more like lightly flavoured vodka. I like to taste the agave plant in my tequila, which can only be present when the plant has had good, long ageing. One of the tequilas that I enjoy greatly is Tapatio; it has a rich, earthy herbaceous flavour that gently lingers.
