The wind that takes the barley

The age of sail is coming back. Dublin has just received a shipment of French wine in the hold of a 108-year old sailing ship. The Kathleen & May, a three-masted wooden schooner, has tied up along the docks with its cargo of more than 12,000 bottles.

I think the original concept was to save on carbon dioxide and sell the resulting wine at a slight "green" premium. But with the rise and rise in oil prices it turns out that this is actually a competitive method of transport.

The whiskey aspect of this story comes with the ship's return journey to France in September. Then it will carry Irish and Scotch whiskey.

These are proving voyages with rented ships. The company behind the venture is also having new vessels built to achieve greater efficiencies.

Cling film wrap

Diageo (owner of Bushmills and a bunch of Scottish distilleries) has been trying an interesting experiment.

A maturing barrel of whiskey loses about 2% of its volume to the surrounding air every year. It's usually considered a necessary evil as some liquid must be absorbed into the wood and released again in order for whiskey to acquire its colour and flavour. The fact that the wood "breathes" along with the temperature cycles in the warehouse is generally considered to encourage this process.

Diageo has "solved" the evaporation loss by wrapping the casks in cling film. Conventional wisdom says this would interfere with the maturation process but Diageo says its test casks have aged well over the last five years.

I'll be surprised if this results in whiskey with the same flavour profile as if the casks had not been wrapped but I can definitely see the contents of such barrels ending up in cheaper blends.

Chilled whiskey

John Hansell reports on a different experiment: cheap whiskey designed to be drunk extremely chilled. It makes marketing sense.

Jameson results

Pernod Ricard continues to post good results for its Jameson brand. Sales for the year ending June are up 15% in volume, 21% in value. The company aims to increase the current sales of 2.6m cases a year to 3m cases by 2010.

Participation in the whiskey appreciation community inevitably draws one into the illicit, cross-border trade in whiskey samples. Afficionados spread across the globe traffic small quantities of the spirit among themselves. In doing so they overcome issues with local availability (it's hard to buy Japanese whiskey in Ireland, for example) and also reduce the considerable expense of sampling a wide variety of expressions.

There are a few considerations when sending precious liquids through the post:

• The bottles should not leak, even with changes in air pressure within the cargo hold of an airplane.

• The package should be light to minimise the airmail tariff.

• The package should not look like it contains whiskey since some countries have severe restrictions on alcohol imports and will destroy anything that breaches the rules. The US and Canada seem to fall into this category, according to online chatter.

There is more than one way to skin a cat but I present below one system that has been successfully tested between Ireland and Japan. Four 30ml samples were sent by standard airmail for a cost of under €4.

Here's the setup:

In this picture you can see:

• A standard cardboard postal tube. This one is about 34cm long. A longer version is available. It's quite strong and won't deform under a heap of mail.

• 30ml bottles from Muji. These are designed to hold liquids when travelling. They are made from rigid PET, the same kind of plastic used in drinks bottles. The cap screws down tightly and is supplemented by an inner stopper to further reduce the possibility of leaks.

  Four of these bottles fit comfortably in the postal tube pictured.

  A 50ml size is also available though 30ml is sufficient for a proper tasting. 50ml is the capacity of a glass whiskey miniature bottle, often reused for sample trading.

  The 30ml bottles cost €1.95 each in Ireland. The Japanese label tells me they sell for the equivalent of €0.56 in Japan so stock up when you are passing through Tokyo.

  Muji also sells a little plastic funnel to help when filling the bottles.

• Bubble wrap to roll around the stack of bottles, wedging them within the tube.

• Wadding to pack in the ends of the tube. It's probably best if this is absorbent, like scrunched up newspaper, in case of leakage.

• A customs label. The post office supplies this but it saves time to have a few at home for filling out in advance.

  There is a box to tick for 'gift' but you also have to specify what's inside. As mentioned, if you write 'alcohol' or 'whiskey' there is a chance it won't get past customs. You could write 'malt', or 'barley juice' perhaps. The packaging described here is very light so it's not at all obvious externally that it contains any sort of liquid. Wink, wink.

• Address labels.

I've been stitching together a new feature for the site all week: an A to Z of Irish Whiskey.

It's useful as a standalone reference but it will also let me write snappier posts here. Instead of pausing to define whiskey terms like grain whiskey or single cask as they crop up in a news item I can just add a link to the A to Z and steam ahead.

Besides strictly technical definitions, I've made sure to include plenty of examples from the world of Irish whiskey to reinforce the explanations.

I'll be adding more entries to the A to Z as the need arises. That will include short company profiles, sites associated with distilling in Ireland and so on.

I hope you find it useful.