WHISKY aficionados will have noticed that it's startlingly difficult to buy a bottle of Japanese single malt these days. Duty-free shops at Changi Airport have run out of stock, but if you're lucky, you might find a handful of blends. And the few retail stores here that have them are charging an arm and a kidney for it.

This can all be traced to November 2014, when influential British whisky writer Jim Murray dubbed Suntory's Yamazaki Sherry Cask 2013 single malt "World Whisky of the Year" in the 2015 edition of his Whisky Bible. It was awarded 97.5 points out of 100 - a first for a Japanese whisky.

Yamazaki Sherry Cask 2013 stock everywhere evaporated - which was unsurprising since only 18,000 bottles were made. But every other Yamazaki whisky also got snapped up. And then any Japanese single malt became inexplicably associated with what Murray called the "near indescribable genius" of Sherry Cask 2013.