Quartz: "What makes a Scotch worth $25,000 may surprise you"

By Ethan Fixell

David Stewart, The Balvenie’s master of malt, and the longest-serving master blender in the Scotch industry, claims that roughly 70% of whisky flavor comes from wood. Over the last half of a century, he has discovered, through trial and error, just how different types of oak containers can drastically shape the profile of a whisky. Now, Stewart is taking all that he has learned—and distilled—over the years to create some of the highest quality, rarest Scotch ever produced. And while the drams can be described in myriad ways, “affordable” isn’t one of them.

One such example is Chapter Two of the Balvenie’s DCS Compendium, the five-chapter series commemorating master blender David Charles Stewart’s 50 years at the distillery. This chapter, a set of five single-cask whiskies from the 1970s through the early 2000s that retails for $27,500, specifically highlights “the influence of oak”—incidentally, the variable that most directly permits distillers to charge thousands of dollars for a single bottle....

Read on at Quartz!