No More Packaging - A Plea to Producers

Please!  For the love of God, please stop putting whisk(e)y in cardboard boxes, tin canisters, felt bags, whatever!  We live in an age where more people are buying booze online than in actual brick and mortar stores.  Glass bottles must be protected by shipping in styrofoam sleeves that hug the bottle snuggly, leaving no room for wooden crates or fancy plastic gift boxes.  Because whisky has become so collectable, a bottle will lose its potential resale value if every little item that came with it orginally isn't kept in tact.  That means that when we ship someone a bottle of Bruichladdich and don't include the canister, the resale value of that Bruichladdich may be affected and that angers collectors.  When we buy casks from Scotland we purposely bottle them without any additional packaging for this reason.  No more tins, no more problems. 

If a bottle never came with any packaging to begin with then it's easier to maintain a collectable's full resale value - all you need is the bottle itself.  Most people don't know that when booze gets delivered by distribution there are all kinds of open boxes, damaged containers, and missing pieces.  When we get our six bottles of Pappy 15 only three of them actually have the red bag.  That means three possible collectors are going to go home pissed through no fault of my own. 

There's an easy solution to this - no more packaging.  Sure, purists could argue that whisk(e)y is for drinking, not for collecting, but that's an entirely different argument.  In today's global world, where people rely on shipping for delivery, the less packaging the better.  It's easier for the parent company, it's easier for the bottler, it's easier for the retailer, and it's easier for the customer.  Let's do it now.

-David Driscoll