Growing up, I was obsessed with collecting football cards and football stickers. Not only would I be collecting the English Premier League players each year, but I’d also be filling in the sticker albums for all of the major International tournaments, be it the Euros or the World Cup. I have no allegiance to any English football teams, but I would find myself spending all of my pocket money on packets of cards. The chase? That was hoping to find the rarest card possible. Everybody at school was doing the same, so if you could be the one with that super-rare Steven Gerrard limited edition or shiny five-star Cristiano Ronaldo card, you were the talk of the town on the playground that day. My collecting days are behind me, but I do look back at those times fondly, and feel nostalgic when I think back to the thrill of unwrapping an extremely rare card.

I’m sure all of you reading this have your own rare artefacts or products at home that you display proudly on a shelf somewhere.

The whisky industry is the perfect world for anybody that has a fascination with rarity. I’m extremely lucky that in this role, I get the opportunity to try samples of some of the rarest, most exclusive whiskies in the world today. While exclusivity doesn’t necessarily equate to quality, there is something that takes you aback when trying a liquid that barely exists, let alone is easy to get hold of. And as time moves on, things that might have been easy to acquire one day may cease to exist.

What is unique about whisky in comparison to other industries where rare collectables are sought after, is that people drink whisky, so the product might not necessarily last forever (depending on how easily you can resist the temptation to break open a bottle of that something rare you have locked away) in comparison to, say, a football trading card, that somebody can lock up in a glass box and keep away for decades and decades.

The whisky industry will purposefully create products with the intention of them being rare commodities, but sometimes products end up becoming rare through external circumstances, such as the closure of a distillery. And there are, of course, plenty of whiskies that are naturally rare because of their high age statement or extremely limited supply.

The issue explores a whole variety of subject matters in the whisky industry that can correlate to rarity and scarcity. Chris Middleton looks at what exactly we mean by the phrase “luxury”, and how that can be attributed to the scarcity of a product, taking into consideration quality, as well as the super-rare collectable items that can be considered a luxury purchase.

One group of people that this issue spotlights are the under-appreciated group of archivists that exist in the industry. Archivists work as record keepers and keep in check an entire range of documents that distilleries and brands have at their disposal, so as to not lose them in the future. By keeping an eye on the past, and keeping those stories and artefacts safe, the future for lovers of these whiskies and their brands is bright. Archivists are key to understanding how a product becomes rare or sacred over time.

Rarity in whisky is also not just associated with the physical product of the liquid, but can refer to the production process as a whole that a distillery undertakes. For Moffat Distillery, as an example, we take a look at the extremely rare process of wood-fired stills, a practice that has barely been done across the world, let alone up in the Highlands of little old Scotland.

However you define rarity in your everyday life, it’s fascinating to reflect on just how much rarity there is in the whisky industry, but not surprising when you seriously think about its history and global scale. There are products and production methods that are common as the stones in our streets, but we never really know what might one day end up being a scarcity 50 years into the future. Who knows, one of those things might be this issue of Whisky Magazine: so make sure you store this in a safe, easy-to-find place just in case — after you’ve read it, of course!