Single Malts Direct

Exactly how did that Rosebank 21 find its way to my home in Rochester, New York? Think of all the trouble we’ve gone to over the past several years to find great whisky shops. We stop along the highway, driving north from Boston, on our way to see G-man in Portland, and pick up a few bargains at the New Hampshire state store. Or when we’re in Boston, we make a point of visiting Joe at Federal. That’s always a treat, because Joe ends up sharing some of his favorite malts, spreading the whisky gospel if you will. Couple years back we made a pilgrimage to some shop in NJ, where they sold Ballechin. It’s always fun to find someplace new, a shop with an interesting inventory, with some hard to find malts, with bargains on great whiskies. But then there’s always the difficulty of getting the whisky home. And in the end, there’s a limit on what we might find. After all, there just wasn’t any Rosebank to be found anywhere, in any of these shops on American soil.

So last weekend, while reading my current issue of Whisky magazine, I saw an add for singlemaltsdirect.com. And to my amazement, when I looked through their on-line catalogue, I found, not only the Classic Malts bottling of Rosebank, about which I have already posted, but two more Rosebanks. Are you kidding me? Three Rosebanks in one catalogue? I flipped out, and wanted to order. However, I was concerned. Single Malts Direct is located somewhere in Scotland (where else?), but was I going to be able to import whisky on my own? The website has a detailed chart for calculating shipping to almost anywhere on the globe, but then there is further information about customs, and duties, and importing, and some scary sounding disclaimers. So in my mind, I pictured myself ordering the Rosebank, but then the order would get stuck at the port of entry, and I’d have to drive four hundred miles to some bonded warehouse and pay a ton of duty, and then have to schlep the whisky home myself. Was it really worth it?

But before abandoning this idea, I sent an email off to singlemaltsdirect.com, and asked a bunch of questions about customs and duty and insurance and the like. And then, a day later, I got an email back from Sheila@singlemaltsdirect.com, who put to rest all my fears. The prices listed in the catalogue included duty; they took care of all the paperwork, including the customs declaration; my only responsibility was insurance against breakage, and although the website didn’t yet have a link for that, Sheila said they would take care of insuring my first order, free of charge. So I figured, what the hell? Let’s give it a try, and I ordered five bottles (yes, I know; that sounds excessive, but who knows whether they’ll have any of these Rosebanks a year from now, when I want to reorder. In fact, as it turned out, I got the very last bottle of one of the offerings.) On Tuesday, I received an email saying that my order had shipped, and then Friday afternoon, when I came home from work, there it was – a big box sitting on my kitchen counter with, you guessed it, five Rosebanks all wrapped up in bubble wrap, or Styrofoam boxes. So there’s two things to point out: 1) This was a turnkey order; I just placed the order, and the whisky came to my house; and 2) it took only three days for a box of whisky to get from the UK to my kitchen in holiday season, when all shipping seems to slow down. Three days --It takes the postal service longer than that to deliver a letter to Manhattan.

Just for the hell of it, take a look at their online catalogue. You’ll find an unbelievable inventory of hard to find malts, independent bottlings, and old age statements. Plus, the prices aren’t bad. I checked out the numbers on a couple whiskies that have gone up in price over the past few years – for example HP 18, or Bunnahabhain 18 – and found their prices to be very competitive. I’m a fan of local shopping; I like to know my purveyor; I like the experience of handling the product; I like the personal attention; and I like to support our local merchants. But for hard-to-find stuff, for malts that just cannot be located in the U.S., I recommend singlemaltsdirect.com. They were as attentive and responsive as any on-line merchant with whom I’ve ever dealt.