Suntory

Suntory's whisky begins with a wine merchant. Shinjiro Torii opened a shop in Osaka in his twenties and made his name with Akadama Port Wine in 1907, but whisky was the ambition, and in 1923 he began building Yamazaki outside Kyoto — Japan's first malt whisky distillery. He chose the site on the principle that environment and water matter more than anything else.

The house now draws on three distilleries and that is the point of it: malt from Yamazaki, malt from Hakushu high in the Japanese Alps, and grain from Chita on the coast. Blending them is the craft the company is built around, and it matures across bourbon, sherry and mizunara — the Japanese oak that gives sandalwood and incense, and which Suntory has done much to bring into whisky.

Its first bottling, Shirofuda, came in 1929; Kakubin followed in 1937. The twelve-year-old Yamazaki arrived in 1984, and Hibiki, from 1989, is the house's flagship blend. In 2023 Suntory marked a century of whisky-making.