Whiskey's Battle between Aspiration and Reality

© Jim Hart | What we drink every day and what we'd like to drink are two very different things.

Ask anyone what their favorite whiskey is and the answer is unlikely to be Jim Beam.

That's no disrespect to Jim Beam, which is a perfectly fine Bourbon; you don't sell 10.5 million cases a year if you don't taste good. Nor is it meant as a slight at Johnnie Walker, Jack Daniels or Crown Royal – but the plain truth is that you are more likely to hear names like Pappy Van Winkle, Ardbeg and Yamazaki than the honest workhorses of the whiskey world.

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That's not a phenomenon unique to whiskey, of course. However, the vastness of the disparity between what people search for on our database and what people actually spend money on is nothing if not spectacular.

There are a few reasons for this, and the aspirational nature of many Wine-Searcher users is first among them. People tend not to use us to search for big brands, since these are widely available anyway. Despite what Hannibal Lecter might say about coveting things we see every day, in reality we covet things we cannot easily access. If Blanton's Bourbon was on every store shelf, people wouldn't need to use this site to find it.

There's also the exclusivity factor. People tend to seek out a rare or unique beverage to drink, if only to quietly lord it over their friends and acquaintances; it's simple human nature. Look at the craft beer boom – people started out just wanting an honest, non-industrial beer and soon they wanted ambergris-infused sour IPAs packed exclusively with Nelson Sauvin hops and "crafted" or "curated" at a little-known brewery in the wilds of Greenland. The urge to exclusivity is a basic human trait and the fuel behind the world's luxury goods markets.

Before we look at the whiskeys, though, we need to talk about India. India is the world's largest whiskey market and few countries are quite so dedicated to one type of drink as the Subcontinent is. Its domestic market is huge and some of the biggest-selling and most-searched for whiskeys are produced and almost entirely consumed in India; it's a little bit like the US wine market in that sense. Since it is so self-contained, we've decided to remove it from consideration for the purposes of this story and we'll do a separate story on it shortly.

Meanwhile, here are the world's biggest-selling whiskeys. Please note that the sales figures measured by the IWSR are taken across the entire brand, rather than for individual whiskeys. We've linked to the most popular variant in each brand in the following table.

The World's Biggest Selling Whiskeys:

There are no real surprises there, but let's see what happens when we take the aspirational approach and measure searches.

The Most Searched-for Whiskeys:

That's a very different kettle of fish. Yes, Johnnie Walker and Chivas are on the list, but the similarities end abruptly there. Probably the weirdest thing is the presence of the classic Black & White blend on the list. It's an old favorite, but also a little old-fashioned, so it's a bit of a shock to find it here.

The other big difference is the price. The big sellers have an average per bottle global average price of $30.70, while the "aspirational" list works out to $226.80, bolstered by the likes of Macallan and Stagg.

That's quite the gap between what we would like and what we will settle for.

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