Roughly a dozen years ago, I hosted a “blind” single malt tasting at my shop, the Kensington Wine Market. The idea behind blind tastings is to remove biases such as age, brand, distillery, and price. It allows for the best products to be so acclaimed purely upon their merits. I specifically didn’t market this event as a Scotch tasting as I was intending to include something rather unusual, at least at that time; a single malt whisky made in the Scottish style from the Kavalan Distillery in Taiwan.

Kavalan was founded in the northeast corner of Taiwan in 2005 by the King Car Group. It is about an hour’s drive south of the capital Taipei, on the other side of the Snow Mountains, in Yilan County. The distillery was named Kavalan in honour of the county’s original name, and as a nod to its indigenous people. Spirits flowed from the facility’s stills for the first time in March in 2006, and it wouldn’t be long before the distillery was turning heads.

Lee Tien-Tsai started what is now the King Car Group in 1979, selling root beer. Looking for a more profitable enterprise, the firm switched to vending canned coffee a few years later. By the end of the 1990s, King Car was a dominant player in the coffee business in Taiwain, with a rapidly expanding business abroad. They soon started lobbying the government – which had a monopoly on domestic alcohol production – to allow private enterprise. In 2002, they finally prevailed.

One of the consultants hired by Kavalan to help them set up their distillery is the late, great Dr. Jim Swan. That name might be familiar, as he had already consulted with dozens of distilleries around the world, including producers in India, Canada, the United States, Ireland, Scotland, and Israel. Dr. Swan had a secret recipe for producing young whiskies with more mature tasting profiles, and it worked especially well in hot climates like Taiwan.

Kavalan is not a small producer, and the King Car Group’s vision was always for it to be the dominant player in Asia.

However, despite being one of the 10 largest malt whisky distilleries in the world, they have never compromised quality for quantity. The company prides itself on having one of the smallest, most precise middle cuts (heart) in the industry, and they certainly don’t skimp on oak.

The region’s climate is hot and humid, with daytime temperatures frequently exceeding 40°C (104°F). This helps to speed up maturation, but also means the distillery’s “Angels Share” (evaporation loss) is between 5-7 per cent each year, compared to 1-2 per cent in Scotland. The first whisky was released in December of 2008, and by early 2010 it had gone viral. At a Burns’ Night blind tasting organized by The Times in Edinburgh (technically Leith), the Kavalan edged out 3 Scotch whiskies and an English whisky, making headlines around the world.

This was one of the reasons I put on the blind tasting; Kensington Wine Market had been given the privilege of launching Kavalan whisky in Canada, and we had been rather impressed by them. I put a bottle of the Kavalan Solist Vinho (STR cask) in a lineup of other cask strength single malt whiskies, the rest of which were all Scottish, and the results were unprecedented.

Of the 20 guests in attendance, 19 of them picked the Kavalan as their favourite whisky.

This was not only stunning as the whisky was Taiwanese, but because everything else in the lineup was at least 18 years of ag, and the Kavalan was less than five. There was one table of four, with three Scots and an Englishman. When I revealed to everyone that the evening’s most popular whisky was from Taiwan, they weren’t shocked, they were angry. “How could this be? Surely this is a joke!” It was not.

Fifteen years on from its founding, Kavalan has gone from strength to strength, and today its whiskies can be found in all the best whisky shops worldwide. The distillery welcomes an astounding 1 million visitors a year, more than 10x the number the most visited Scottish distillery could claim. And, in addition to whisky, the visitor center – in a nod to Kavalan’s origins – also serves up a mean cup of coffee! ~ Story by Andrew Ferguson

kavalanwhisky.com
kensigntonwinemarket.com