Whisky Advocate: The Next Great Luxury Whisky Could Come From France
August 30, 2019France produces some of the finest luxury goods in the world: perfume, jewelry, wine, and fashion. Its fine wines and Cognacs command high prices and top auction bids, prized for their quality and collectability. Now, a new producer is looking to add whisky to that illustrious list. Alfred Giraud, a blended malt French whisky, is launching in the U.S. this month with two expressions: the unpeated Heritage, priced at $155, and its peated sibling Harmonie, which is $190. There are less than 1,000 bottles of Heritage for sale here, and just a few hundred bottles of Harmonie. Currently available in France and New York, the whiskies will eventually be sold—in similarly allocated amounts—in London, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.
Such high prices and accompanying small bottle counts aren’t uncommon, but they’re usually reserved for rare, age-stated Scotch or Japanese whiskies. Little more than three decades old, France’s whisky industry is still in its infancy, and most of its 60-plus producers are at micro scale, selling everything they make locally. The whiskies are high-quality, though hardly primed for Macallan-level pricing. But Philippe Giraud, who founded Alfred Giraud in 2012, sees opportunity. Whisky Advocate has the full story.—Susannah Skiver Barton
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