I was fascinated to learn that Uhlendorf and Hall had just collaborated with another Brooklyn business, D.S. & Durga, on a cologne. Hall told me how they had been scenting their price tags with a combination of scents they created themselves. Ulrich Lang, one of the cofounders of Elements Showcase and a perfumer himself, smelled them and was intrigued. Lang introduced them to D.S. & Durga’s David Moltz and Kavita Ahuja, and they worked together to create a new fragrance based on Hall and Uhlendorf’s desire for something masculine and outdoorsy. Spent Musket Oil, the result, is certainly that.

Spent Musket Oil is similar to D.S. & Durga’s Burning Barbershop in its smokiness. It comes on like a smoky eucalyptus, with notes of leather and tobacco and hints of vanilla and clove. A hour or two in, it’s more spicy and the smoke is slightly more subtle. That spiciness is probably the bay rhum.

According to the press materials, “Spent Musket Oil takes its cue from the other-worldly aroma of a Barbary wars-era rifle found in the hold of a packet ship in the Brooklyn Navy Yards with accords of vintage birchwood, spent rifle oil, and dried leather hilt warmed by Cavendish tabac, Merchant Marine’s bay rhum, and musk.”

Initially, I wondered if maybe Spent Musket Oil was too close to Burning Barbershop. In my memory, they were almost the same fragrance; I was quite wrong. By comparison, Burning Barbershop (which I reviewed almost exactly a year ago) is brighter, with lavender, mint and vanilla—like someone added a dose of smoke to Caron’s Pour un Homme. I think I smell a little bit of vetiver in Burning Barbershop, too. The light freshness of the lavender and vanilla (the mint is fairly subtle) plays off the weight of the smoke notes, which probably come from birch tar oil.

Spent Musket Oil as a whole is much heavier and spicier. I would put it in the family of Histoires de Parfums’ 1740, a spicy tobacco leather. With 1740 though, the tobacco note is brighter and sweeter, more ambery. And it’s less smoky.

What perhaps excited me most in talking to BKLYN Dry Goods’ Hall was that he’d connected this fragrance to a favorite cocktail at a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It’s quite gratifying to hear other people making the connection between cocktails and cologne. It’s called Salt & Ash and it was created by the Counting Room’s Maks Pazuniak. According to cocktail writer Robert Simonson, it’s Chichicapa Mezcal, Grapefruit-infused El Jimador Blanco Tequila, Lapsang sweet vermouth, Maraschino liqueur, agave, Angostura bitters and orange bitters. Seeing the ingredients listed, I can easily see how this could be a great influence for a cologne. There’s citrus in the form of grapefruit and orange, smoke both in the mezcal and the Lapsang souchong tea-infused vermouth and an almost minty cherry-almond flavor from the Maraschino. And finally, the tequila gives it an earthy, vegetal quality.

Another cocktail that this reminds me of, a much simpler one, is the McQueen, a scotch and mezcal concoction by bartender John McCarthy at Mary Queen of Scots in the Lower East Side. It’s easy to replicate at home with any blended scotch and mezcal, but McCarthy uses Glenrothes Select Reserve single malt scotch and Fidencio mezcal:

1oz The Glenrothes Select Reserve
1oz Fidencio Mezcal
.5oz dark agave syrup
dash orange bitters
dash chocolate bitters
grapefruit twist garnish

If I were to create a cocktail out of Spent Musket Oil, I would start with a good amber-hued rum and add a touch of Fernet Branca. I’d try sweetening it with some smoked agave syrup and give it some depth with Angostura bitters. I don’t know if that would work, of course, but those are the ingredients that come to mind when I smell Spent Musket Oil.

I didn’t know I needed a chocolate whiskey until I sampled some during a tour last August of the little warehouse space Kings County calls home. We’d been sipping some of their unaged “moonshine” whiskey and sampling various barrels of their aged bourbon when Nicole Austin, one of the distillers, poured us an experimental concoction. It was incredibly delicious.

“When is this going to be sold in stores?” we all asked eagerly. They weren’t sure then, and when I checked back with Austin in November, she said they were still working out the practicality of making it in large quantities.

The chocolate whiskey is murky brown in color. It smells like dark cocoa powder with a slight alcoholic twinge and it tastes like thick, slightly bitter raw chocolate. What makes this so good is that it isn’t a liqueur; it’s 40% alcohol, unsweetened. You’ve got to shake the bottle before you pour; there’s a lot of cacao sediment in there.

They make it by taking their moonshine and infusing it with ground cacao husks—the kind sometimes used for mulch—from Mast Brothers Chocolate Factory, a nearby business with a similar upstart, artisan background. (As an aside, I’ve been eating Mast Brothers chocolate bars for a few years now. Their Brooklyn Blend, a dark chocolate containing 73% cacao, is my favorite.) Now that this product exists, I’m wondering why no one thought of it before. It’s so obvious.

Like Kings County’s other products (moonshine and bourbon), the chocolate whiskey comes in a small, 200ml flask. Like the moonshine, it’s usually sold for $19.99 a bottle. Now, 200ml is just shy of seven ounces. The way I usually pour drinks, that’s about four glasses to sip—or three if I’m pouring generously. This is very expensive stuff.

As I’ve written before, small craft distilleries like Kings County charge so much (a normal-sized bottle, 750ml, would be $75) because they’re small and they have high costs. But there are two huge downsides to this business model. First, you’ve got to convince consumers that a few amateurs in Brooklyn can make a whiskey worth $75 a bottle when some damn fine stuff comes from distillers with generations of experience for a third of the price (think Jim Beam for $20 a liter). And second, some other new local distillers, like Breuckelen Distilling in Sunset Park, Brooklyn and New York Distilling Company in Williamsburg, sell their spirits for around half the price. I’m guessing it’s a case of Kings County having zero dollars in start-up money and the others having much, much more. I love what Kings County is doing, but obviously, the pricing still rankles me.

That said, I’ve paid for four bottles of their three types of whiskey so far, and I recommend the chocolate without reservations. It’s exquisite.

It’s best sipped neat: the rich, bitter chocolate flavors are very rewarding on their own. I was going to make a simple Old Fashioned with it (two ounces of whiskey, two dashes of bitters and a sugar cube, stirred with ice), but I decided to try something else. I poured an ounce and a half of the chocolate into a mixing glass with ice and added a half ounce of a 20% abv coffee liqueur, along with two healthy dashes of Fee Brothers’ Aztec Chocolate Bitters. The coffee liqueur, I figured, would be sweet enough that a sugar cube wouldn’t be necessary. Wrong. It needed a little extra sweetening. So I broke out a teaspoon of my homemade Alderwood smoked maple syrup and stirred it again. Yowza! It was pretty damn good. The smoke, the chocolate, and the coffee, united by the spice of the bitters, was a potent combination. But I still think it’s an awful lot of work for something that tastes so good neat.

Kings County Chocolate Whiskey is available in some New York City liquor stores and online through retailers like Astor Wines & Spirits and Park Avenue Liquor Shop.

I’m reminded of something the art critic Jerry Saltz wrote about five years ago. What he says about his goals in art criticism could just as well be a guide for a critic of any medium:

My only position is to let the reader in on my feelings; try to write in straightforward, jargon-free language; not oversimplify or dumb down my responses; aim to have an idea, a judgment or a description in every sentence; not take too much for granted; explain how artists might be original or derivative and how they use techniques and materials; observe whether they’re developing or standing still; provide context; and make judgments that hopefully amount to something more than just my opinion. To do this requires more than a position or a theory. It requires something else. This something else is what art, and criticism, are all about.

Saltz went on to describe an unpleasant interaction he had with the owner of an art gallery who got after him for negative reviews.

“You mean all reviews should be positive?” I asked. “Yes,” she replied unreservedly. “If you don’t like the work, don’t write about it.” I know there’s a lot at stake when a dealer shows an artist, but basically the art world was a micro-society to this gallerist — a country club or a pleasure cruise where everyone was to observe certain rules and just be nice. A review is now little more than spin control or a marketing device to tweak sales. As criticism is directly tied to shopping, anything that erodes brand identity is frowned upon. While the gallerist continued, I realized that she saw herself as something of an evangelist: someone who sells art, nurtures artists, and spreads the word. I wanted to be what Peter Plagens calls a “goalie,” someone who in essence says, “It’s going to have to be pretty good to get by me.” Finally, I blurted, “Praising everything an artist does reduces everything to drivel.” At which point she removed her arm from around my shoulder and I fled.

So shouldn’t we call out bad art? Shouldn’t we criticize marketing that’s off base or dubious? Shout down derivative products that claim to be original?

Any form of criticism is both parasitic and subjective. And when enthusiasts, and not impartial professionals are involved, it gets even stickier. I know, and I’ll readily admit that I am not an expert on fragrance, spirits, or cocktails. I love them all and I know more about each than the average person. I have a larger home bar and more colognes on my dresser than most of my friends. I’ve made or sampled more cocktails than your typical casual drinker. But I’m still, basically, a dilettante. So what qualifies me to hold forth on any of these topics?

To me, writing about fragrances and spirits is part of my education. It’s an outlet for me that connects me to more spirits and fragrances, their makers, and to fellow enthusiasts.

We amateur critics should follow some basic rules. Never make a personal attack on someone’s abilities or experience. If we must write something bad, we should be constructive and find the good as well. If we merely dislike something, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a failure as a product or as a piece of art. We need to ask ourselves why we’re writing, and to whom we’re writing for: are they fellow enthusiasts or the general public? Are we making so-called buying guides, or are we writing critical reviews? And do we have the depth of experience and knowledge to make the judgments we’re publishing?

If we’re completely up front about our motives and our background, we’re on much safer ground as critics.

I hunted down the public relations crew for The Macallan and asked about the Aroma Box, explaining that it was the perfect subject for my blog, Cocktails & Cologne: what more explicit connection between spirits and fine fragrances could there be?

It would be more than two months before I sat down with The Macallan’s brand ambassador, Charlie Whitfield, and saw the Aroma Box, but the wait was worth it. We met at the Flatiron District offices of Edrington, the privately held Scottish spirits company that owns The Macallan, Highland Park, Famous Grouse, and Cutty Sark, along with the Dominican run brand Brugal.

Whitfield is a youthful looking and impeccably groomed Scot whose smooth accent (like Glenrothes brand ambassador Ronnie Cox), sounds more English than Scottish. He’s an articulate salesman who carries props in his pockets for demonstrations and large-scale, lavishly produced public tastings, which he does all over the country. He’s a confident but down-to-earth showman; he likes to tell the story of his engagement to his wife (it involves The Macallan, of course), but it doesn’t seem exploitative.

The Aroma Box is a large unvarnished oak case with three sets of flacons of pure aroma oil, undiluted by alcohol. The oils are not single notes, but blends mixed to invoke aspects of whisky. Whitfield couldn’t tell us what those blends contained—they’re a secret only Roja Dove knows.

Dove is well known to fragrance aficionados, but he may not be familiar name to spirits connoisseurs, particularly outside Dove’s native U.K. He started his perfume career at the legendary French perfume house Guerlain (which may be best known for Shalimar) and eventually left to start his own company. The Roja Dove Haute Parfumerie opened in 2004, and he now sells his fragrances in Harrods in London and in boutiques in other major European cities. There are rumors that he may open a New York store, or at least begin selling his fragrances at Bergdorf Goodman. He makes scents for both men and women, and they are very expensive. A 100ml bottle of his Scandal Pour Homme, a masculine fougere, retails for about $270. Dove is also the author of a coffee table book called The Essence of Perfume.

The only clue as to the ingredients of the Aroma Box’s oils was a mention of Rose de Mai from Grasse, France and Vanilla Bourbon from Madagascar—but it seemed as though they were only invoked to establish the excellence of the ingredients and the connection to traditional perfumery. That said, I definitely detected both vanilla and rose in the oil blends once the presentation began.

Roja Dove and Charlie Whitfield

Like a fine wine, the nose of a good scotch whisky is complex and difficult to deconstruct for many of us. The Aroma Box goes beyond what a typical guided tasting or class can do: Roja Dove, himself a whisky novice at the beginning of his relationship with The Macallan, has deconstructed the elements that comprise the nose of scotch in general (the first six oils in the Box) and two Macallan single malts in specific.

We smelled each oil on a paper perfume test strip. The first was intensely woody, like an unvarnished oak chest or a cigar humidor. The next scent, much lighter, was sharp and at first full of black pepper and spice. Depending on how you look at it, these two could represent the contrast between aged and unaged whiskies or the effect of the oak vs. the personality of the spirit. In each of the next two pairs, one represented age, depth, and wood and the other youthfulness, vibrancy, fruit and spice.

The third strip, another heavy one, smelled dry, earthy, even musty. It reminded me a little of a Pu-Erh tea, which is a dark Chinese tea that’s dry aged. There was a slightly smoky note, and an underlying oak note. The fifth strip smelled like a strong vanilla to me, and then almond. It was the almond note that lingered, again, with oak undertones. Whitfield nodded his head, smiling when I said this. “Smooth, polished,” he said. “Like the smooth, rounded style of aged, mellow whisky.”

The next two sets each demonstrated three aspects of a fine Macallan scotch: the Sherry Oak series and the Fine Oak series. I’ll focus on the Sherry Oak — it’s my favorite of the two.

The Sherry Oak 18 (a bottle of which was generously given to me after the demonstration), is aged in casks made from Spanish oak first seasoned for a few months with immature mosto wine and then filled with dry Oloroso sherry for 18 months before being sent to Macallan.

The first of the three strips doused with the oil for the Sherry Oak series smelled spicy, like cinnamon, brown sugar and oak. When I smelled the next one, I immediately thought of Coca Cola, with dried fruit notes—maybe fig and orange. Upon a second sniff, I detected some floral notes as well. The last in this series smelled like a sweet, fresh orange. Whitfield called it a chocolate orange. We were instructed to put the three strips of paper in a wine glass to let the aromas concentrate and mingle.

Then Whitfield had me smell a glass of Macallan Sherry Oak 18. After the three strips, sniffing an actual glass of scotch was a revelation: each element came out, so that in all the complexity in the glass, we could effortlessly pick out the oak, the fruit, and the spices. As Whitfield promised, this was whisky deconstructed.

And then we went back to the glass with the strips in it. Removing the strips, we smelled the concentrated oil aromas. It smelled impressively close to the actual glass of scotch.

As an editorial demonstration, the Aroma Box is an excellent tool. It not only forces us to slow down and focus on the nose of the whisky, it also takes apart a bouquet that’s notoriously complex. Some of us may scoff at critics who describe wines and spirits in florid language and ridiculously specific comparisons, but when it comes down to it, some whiskies really do smell (and taste) like very specific things—brown sugar, baking spices, tobacco, leather, oranges, lemons. Once we begin to identify these notes, we have a greater appreciation for what we’re drinking and a better vocabulary to describe it.

Whitfield assured me that there would be more to come with The Macallan and Roja Dove, but I’d like to see that relationship made explicit: why not make a scotch-inspired cologne? None of the oils we smelled were meant to be worn, but any of them could provide the basis for a fragrance. I’d also like to see a smaller, relatively affordable version of the box with the first six oils and a booklet to guide drinkers through them would be great for tastings at home and in liquor stores.

An example of the former is Bleu de Chanel, an inoffensive but boring “sporty blue cologne” that used high quality ingredients but broke no new ground and disappointed lots of cologne junkies waiting for the next Chanel Pour Monsieur.

A good representative of the latter is Marc Jacobs Bang, a black pepper and vetiver cologne that was more interesting, more new than it needed to be. It was one of my favorite fragrances of 2010. (And incidentally, my review of it consistently gets the most hits of nearly anything I’ve written on this website.)

So where does Ben Sherman, the eponymous new cologne from the British mod brand fit in? Fortunately, it’s neither a patchouli/oakmoss clone nor a sporty blue variation. It isn’t Ben Sherman’s first cologne—the nearly 50-year-old brand has had at least three colognes launched in the last decade—but the company says it’s their “first-ever premium fragrance for men.” It retails for $55 (50ml) and $78 (100ml), which is typical for department store colognes, and it was launched in late November, early December.

The press materials that came with the 50ml bottle the company’s representatives sent me describe Ben Sherman like this:

A classic, woody-citrus scent with a modern twist that opens with tangerine, lemon, lime and mint, developing into a masculine, oaky scent to leave a hint of cedar, vanilla musk, coffee and amber notes.

It’s unique enough, with coffee notes that earns it comparisons to Thierry Mugler’s A*Men Pure Coffee from 2008 and Armani Attitude Extreme from 2009. All three have coffee and cedar notes, and both Armani and Ben Sherman share an additional amber note. And Bond No. 9′s New Haarlem, too, shares the coffee/cedar/amber notes, but it’s much heavier on the coffee.

After three days wearing Ben Sherman, I like it. It’s easy to wear, and the middle and basenotes are rewarding—despite lackluster powdery fruit top notes. For the first five minutes, it smells muted and bland, and not particularly masculine. The fruit notes are indistinct but more on the apple and stone fruit end of the spectrum than the typical orange and lemon citrus end. That surprised me, given the listing of bergamot (which I couldn’t detect at all).

Mercifully, the coffee/amber/cedar notes rescue it almost immediately. A few hours in, I’m occasionally smelling a pleasant leather note as well, something that isn’t listed in the materials provided by Ben Sherman.

You can be generous applying Ben Sherman; it’s not cloying or penetrating. As far as lasting power, I’d put in the middle of the spectrum, closer to Marc Jacobs Bang: it’s not fleeting but it may not be strong all day, either. To me, that’s a good thing. I don’t want to smell like I just showered myself with cologne 12 hours after I put it on.

The bottle, a glossy black exploded Union Jack design, is plastic, and it looks like you could take it apart like a three-dimensional puzzle. It isn’t the most ergonomic bottle, but it’s one of the more interesting ones on my dresser. Despite the materials, it does have some heft to it, so it certainly doesn’t feel cheap.

I’ve been clicking on lots of top ten lists. My favorite so far has to be Emily Nussbaum’s I Hate Top Ten Lists piece in the New Yorker. “I hate writing Top Ten lists, Top Five lists, Top Three lists, and anything titled The Best of the Rest,” she says. “As anyone who has descended into the Top Ten sausage factory knows very well, book critics haven’t read all of the books and music critics haven’t heard all of the music.” I agree. I still get irate when I think about a “best albums of the year” list I saw in the Minneapolis alt-weekly the City Pages a few years ago. The “critic” listed 100 of those so-called “best” albums. Now I know that more than 100 albums are released each year, but come on—a list that long isn’t the best anymore, and it’s not helpful.

My friend Kara Newman recently posted her annual list of cocktail and spirits trends predictions. First among them was that “Rum will be the new ‘it’ spirit.” That struck me perfectly plausible when, that very day, I had bought a fresh bottle of Gosling’s Black Seal rum to experiment with some rum recipes that I’d been seeing lately. And yesterday, when I went out for cocktails with the Drom perfumer and cocktail enthusiast Kevin Verspoor, he suggested we go somewhere that had a good rum selection…which was funny because I was just about to suggest Lani Kai, a rum haven. I wonder about Kara’s bitters prediction though. There are so many damn artisanal bitters on the market that (especially here in Brooklyn, the DIY crafty capital of the East Coast) we may have reached saturation. But she also predicted a trend toward more bitter flavors, which I’ll admit seems to be gaining traction.

Time Magazine had a huge series of top 10 lists that included some depressing things (in the consumer trends list, rent, airline tickets, and used cars are all up), and a couple of cocktail-related food trends. Time is a good barometer for those of us immersed in the cocktail scene; it shows that some of these trends are having a real impact on the greater booze market. Coming in at number four, Pre-Prohibition Drinks. I was a little put off by the initial Mad Men reference—as if the show actually created a boom in 60s-era cocktails (no, the show merely made its audience aware of an existing cocktail culture)—but it’s good to hear the mainstream marking old-school cocktails as a genuine phenomenon.

Number seven on the Time list was Artisanal Vinegars and Bitters. Josh Ozersky writes, “The nation’s avant-garde mixologists, mustachioed and otherwise, have taken up the creation of house-made bitters as part of their advanced drink programs, and their kitchen counterparts are following suit, with vinegars so complex and intriguing that they are sometimes served straight up between courses.”

I have yet to see an end-of-the-year fragrance list yet, and I’m wondering why. When a friend asked me for the best new colognes of the year, I realized that I hadn’t followed the new releases as avidly as I had in 2010. Maybe it’s because there weren’t as many big ones for men—I don’t know. (I certainly had some favorites: Odin’s 06 Amanu was one; Eau d’Italie’s Jardin du Poete was another. So was Danish designer Henrik Vibskov’s Type B. )

I’ll post my lists of favorite cocktails and colognes in the coming weeks.

The advantage of the handheld smoker, the manufacturer says, is that it doesn’t cook the food like a traditional or stove-top smoker—it just exposes it to smoke. They claim it works well with liquids, and the product website includes a video demonstrating a smoked Bloody Mary. But I found a higher quality video demonstration from Williams Sonoma.

Three minutes in, chef Michael Voltaggio makes smoked Margaritas. He fills a cocktail shaker with the ingredients, and then uses the Smoking Gun to fill the rest of the shaker with smoke. We don’t see whether or not he shakes the cocktail, or if he’s added ice while the smoke is in the shaker. I’m curious about the strength of the smoke flavor with this. Can a minute of smoke make a Margarita taste smoky?

When I’ve used my stove-top smoker to infuse agave and maple syrup with smoke, I’ve done it for 12 minutes. I haven’t experimented with less time.

The reviews online at Williams Sonoma are mixed. Complaints are that smoke pours out of every opening, that the smoke chamber gets clogged, and that the smoke lasts a short time. Of 11 reviews, four were negative and the rest were rated four or five stars out of five.

Location: Anywhere and everywhere
Order: A Bud Light
Verdict: There’s nothing wrong with the occasional Bud Light, particularly if your choice has to be light beer or no beer at all, but if that’s all you ever drink you’d likely wear jeans and sneakers to your daughter’s wedding, and “neat” sweatpants if you could get away with them.

Location: Anywhere at all
Order: Grey Goose and soda
Verdict: The dissonance here between puritanical simplicity and conspicuous consumption—once you mix vodka with ice and soda water, any difference between brands is instantly erased, so you might as well be drinking Georgi—places you as a member of the striving classes. There is an added possibility that you will be unpleasant to the help.

Location: Dive bar
Order: A Pickleback (that’s a shot of Jameson with a shot of pickle brine as a chaser)
Verdict: You spend too much time on social media.

Wondrich softens the sting of his judgment in the first example — there’s nothing wrong with the occasional order of anything. His ire is reserved for those who order the same thing every time, and the wrong thing in a given circumstance (like a glass of pinot grigio in a dive bar, or the jerk who tries to stump a regular bartender with an exotic cocktail he knows the bar won’t be able to furnish).

Me? I’ll always order something on the menu if I’m at a creative cocktail bar. At a dive, it’s most rewarding to go with a tap beer or straight whiskey. At a regular bar with no particular reputation for great cocktails, I’ll almost always order a Rusty Nail: two or three parts scotch, one part Drambuie. It’s really hard to mess it up. What does that say about me? That I’ve thought about this an awful lot.

Read the rest of Wondrich’s essay here.

So why don’t vermouth companies think this way? Where are the deluxe four-packs of Dolin, Noilly Prat, and Martini & Rossi? And why does Carpano Antica Formula only come in a one-liter bottle?

Think about it: Americans don’t drink vermouth on the rocks or as aperitifs. That may change, but for now, we buy big bottles of vermouth when we’re in the mood for Martinis or Manahattans, we make a couple, and then we screw the cap back on and forget about it for a while. We come back in a few weeks and wonder why our cocktails don’t taste as good.

To mitigate this, I buy the smallest bottle I can find, suck the air out of it with a vacuum wine saver, and store it in the fridge. It helps, but for a guy like me who makes a wide variety of cocktails, a bottle of vermouth can sit there for weeks. Besides, how much vermouth do single cocktails typically call for? An ounce?

Carpano Antica is another story. While it comes in a giant one-liter bottle, it’s way more conceivable to drink it straight. Just the same, the last time I bought a bottle, I split it with a friend. My half bottle still lasted me six weeks (and yes, the flavor did degrade noticeably).

They could even charge a premium for four- or six-packs of smaller bottles — consumers would either not notice it or gladly pay for the novelty. I would, if it meant fresher cocktails.

I reached out to the big vermouth companies and got nowhere. (Seriously, it’s near impossible to find a human at these companies.) So Noilly Prat, Martini & Rossi, if you’re listening, please consider marketing four- or six-packs of small vermouth bottles.

It’s now the number five scotch export market, according to the Scotch Whisky Association:

USA £267.6m (+14%)
France £219.5m (+13%)
Singapore £148.5m (+64%)
Spain £97.2m (-16%)
Taiwan £70.3m (+45%)
South Korea £65.8m (-13%)
South Africa £65.5m (+24%)
Germany £62.1m (+22%)
Brazil £44.8m (+56%)
UAE £41.9m (+29%)

Back in mid-2010, when the New York Times profiled the Taiwan-based Kavalan Distillery, the country (population: 23 million) was ranked tenth among export markets for Scotch whisky (by value), with export volume increasing 80% over the last ten years.

Earlier in 2010, Kavalan famously beat Scotch in a blind taste test that pitted Kavalan against three Scotches and an English whisky.