Why Australia Is Great for Whisky

Australian whisky, like Australian wine, is not a novelty. Australia doesn’t make good whisky in spite of where it is; it makes good whisky because of where it is. Australia has every raw ingredient of good whisky making and growing in quantity and quality. In fact, one of Australia’s whisky ingredients gives us an advantage that is close to unfair.

It’s worth noting, of course, that good or great Australian whisky isn't a new idea. Australia passed one of the world's first legal definitions of whisky in its Spirits Act of 1906. This Act required our whisky to be matured in wood for not less than two years – a rule that still stands today. Australia wrote its whisky law before most of the world had yet bothered.

Barley, and lots of it

Whisky – single malt, at least – is barley made liquid. Australia is one of the world's great barley-growing nations and a major exporter of malting barley. This places Australian whisky production at an incredible advantage. Australian distillers aren't importing their key ingredient at a premium; they're often sourcing it from paddocks a short drive from the still. Good, clean, high-quality malting barley is a baseline requirement for good malt whisky. We’re blessed with it.

Clean water, and a lot of latitude

Whisky is mostly water – in the mash, in the reduction to bottling strength, in the whole process – so the quality and reliability of the water supply is much more than a mere romantic detail. Australia is blessed with clean, pure water in general, but Tasmania – in both perception and in reality – has built much of its reputation on exactly this: cool, clean, abundant water. New Zealand has its famed 100% Pure campaign; the word Tasmania effectively says the same thing, and to some extent so too the rest of Australia. Australia’s water sources are excellent. In whisky, this matters.

A warm, active climate that speeds the whole thing up

Australia’s climate – in broad terms because it’s not, of course, a single entity – changes the character of Australian whisky. Scotland matures its whisky slow and cold. Much of Australia matures its whisky warm. Warmth makes the spirit and the wood work harder and faster at each other. A whisky can pull colour, texture and flavour out of a barrel in Australia in a handful of years that might take a Scottish cask a decade or more. If someone said that a seven-year-old Australian whisky had the same wood-spirit integration as a 12-year-old Scottish whisky, it wouldn’t be far wrong.

It’s worth noting too that Australian and Scotch, for instance, whisky are not therefore on the same clock, and behave slightly differently in the cellar too. Australian’ whisky typically loses some of its mass to evaporation as it matures in barrel; Scotch whisky typically gains volume as it matures courtesy of the denser, wetter air the barrels sit in.

The unfair advantage: casks

Access to high quality barley, and clean green water, are big Australian advantages. But, increasingly, in pure flavour terms, there’s another biggie. And it’s this: the barrels themselves.

Australia is nothing if not awash in partly-used, new/virgin, and old wine casks and barrels. Australia has over 150 years of wine barrel use, and these barrels have pretty much been employed to make every style of wine imaginable. Whisky production relies on access to oak barrels. Australia, when it comes to ex-wine barrels, is a field of a whisky-maker’s dreams.

Barrels do an enormous share of the work in any whisky. The majority of the colour and a very large slice of the flavour come from the wood, not the spirit. Which cask you use is therefore one of the most consequential decisions a distiller makes.

All this history of Australian wine-making has left behind a standing library of ex-red-wine barrels and – crucially – ex-fortified casks: old tawny (port-style), apera (sherry-style), muscat and topaque. These are precisely the sorts of casks that Scottish and Irish distillers pay dearly to import from Europe. Australian distillers can source them domestically, often with relationships that run straight back to a winery down the road. That access shapes the whisky in the glass: a lot of Australia's most distinctive single malt owes its richness and its dried-fruit, spiced character to those ex-fortified barrels.

(This one of many reasons why Warren Randall, owner of the grand Seppeltsfield winery in the Barossa valley – otherwise known as heaven for fortified wine – also has a significant stake in the Lark distillery.)

This, in a way, is the ultimate irony of Australia’s alcohol-production history. There was a long period of time where Australian wine was seen as the (health) saviour for a nation addicted to the drinking of spirits and fortified wines (only, or largely). The wine industry didn't set out to hand the whisky industry a richly beautiful gift, in flavour, style and quality terms. Australian wine didn’t set out to give Australian whisky a world-beating (or world-competitive) advantage. But it did, and it is.

A drinking and dining culture ready to receive it

The final reason that Australia is a great place to make high grade whisky isn't agricultural, but it is crucial. It's cultural. Australia already has a sophisticated, curious drinking public; it has decades of serious wine culture, a strong and diverse restaurant scene, and drinkers used to talking about provenance, region, cask/oak and best of all: quality. That's fertile ground for premium whisky. Ultimately an audience for high-grade Australian whisky didn't need to be built from scratch; it was already there, glass in hand, primed – once the quality of production, and richness of story, was in place – to be taken seriously.

Related reading on the site: [What Is Single Malt Whisky] · [The Whisky Styles Australia Does Best] · [Why Australian Whisky Is So Expensive]