Karuizawa 1999-2000 The Last Masterpieces 7th Batch

The Distillery: Karuizawa
 
Karuizawa is the ghost story of Japanese whisky. Built in 1955 at the foot of Mount Asama, an active volcano in the Japanese Alps, the distillery was tiny even by Japanese standards — four small stills, wooden washbacks, and a devotion to Scottish methods that bordered on obsessive: Golden Promise barley shipped in from Scotland, and maturation almost exclusively in ex-sherry casks sourced from Spain. It never chased scale. What it chased was intensity.
Production was mothballed at the end of 2000 as Japan’s whisky market slumped, and the distillery itself was dismantled in 2016 — the buildings gone, the stills sold off, the site erased. What remained was a small, finite pool of casks, and it’s that finiteness that turned Karuizawa from a little-known Japanese distillery into arguably the most mythologised name in the category. Every bottle released now is, quite literally, closer to the last one that will ever exist.
 
The Release: The Last Masterpieces, 7th Batch
 
Much of what’s left of Karuizawa passed into the hands of Eric Huang, a Taiwanese collector and whisky importer who acquired a significant portion of the distillery’s remaining stock in 2011 and has spent the years since releasing it in small, meticulously chosen batches — first through his company Spirits Shop Selection, and, for releases like this one, through his own label Hua Yang International Exhibition.
The Last Masterpieces is an eight-part farewell: a series of single casks, all distilled in Karuizawa’s final years of 1999 and 2000, each bottled at natural cask strength and dressed in a different traditional Japanese colour, with calligraphy by Souun Takeda, one of Japan’s most celebrated kanji artists. This is the seventh of the eight — matured in a single ex-sherry butt and bottled at 52.1%, undiluted and unfiltered. With only one batch left to follow, this is about as close to the end of the Karuizawa story as a bottle can get.