This is the complete package, and a prime contender as one of the years tastiest new Japanese whiskies.Prunes, forest honey, vanilla seeds, dark chocolate cookies, and Brazil nut, with hints of chocolate orange and ground pepper: Im hooked. Cocoa, Whoppers, baked orange, jellied peel, jumpy peppery spices, tamarind bark.

he history of the excellent Mars Distillery is long and complicated. The special stills that now sit at the high-altitude distillery near Nagano were hand-built to the specifications of the preeminent grandfather of Japanese Whisky, Masataka Taketsuru. In the 1950s, Taketsuru-san’s mentor Iwai Kiichiro, who had commissioned his famed voyage to Scotland, designed and built two pot stills for Hombo Shuzo in Yamanashi using Takesturu’s original specifications.