Review of the Year 2020

What a year! After only two months in 2020, life changed for most people due to the Corona virus. For Whisky.de, the pandemic also brought some changes: most of our employees worked in a home office for most of the year. As with many other companies, families and institutions, flexibility is a must. Fortunately for us and you, as an online mail order company, we were allowed to sell whisky to men and women without restriction throughout the year.

Nevertheless, the exceptional situation had one downer: the planned Whisky.de distillery tours in Scotland had to be cancelled. Instead, there was a small tour through Switzerland when the pandemic allowed it. We visited Langatun, Locher (Säntis Malt) and Seven Seals and filmed tour videos with informative interviews for you. But postponed is not abandoned: We will make up for the originally planned tours as soon as the situation allows.

We strive to organise one of our exciting regular live tastings for you every month. At the end of the year, we dedicated five tastings to each of the Scotch whisky regions(Highlands, Lowlands, Islands,Islay and Speyside). In the course of #WeStayAtHome, we expanded our offer even further in spring: with weekly mini live tastings during the lockdown (for example with Macallan, Glenrothes, Ardmore, Laphroaig), we wanted to make your time at home as entertaining as possible.
Our next live tasting will take place on 29.01.21 with St. Kilian. In the course of this we will also taste the whisky from our own Whisky Vision TV cask.

This brings us to the next milestone in our annual review: Our whisky c ask has turned 3 years old! Our own cask was filled with their raw spirit on 25.09.2017 at St. Kilian. Last year we had a crack in the cask and had to have it repaired, which cost us 81 days of maturation. So on 15.12.20 the time had finally come: the spirit in the barrel may call itself 'whisky'! Of course, we don't want to deprive you of this whisky! We have taken eight litres from the cask, which we will fill into miniatures and send out for the Live Tasting on 29.01.21.

These miniatures are not the only ones we have bottled this year. The 'Whisky.de exklusiv' bottlings have become a permanent feature of our range. These special bottlings are handpicked by us. A highlight this year were the two special bottlings we were allowed to design for Big Peat. The Big Peat Football Edition shows the Islay fisherman in the fan curve and the Big Peat Halloween Edition takes you to a haunted house.

In addition, we were also allowed to develop two very own bottlings this year! We are very proud of our first own whiskies, which we actively designed in a creative process. First, we launched Highland Cattle, an 11-year-old blended malt Scotch whisky. The sweet and oily malt matured predominantly in oak casks that had previously held sherry. With the second bottling, Horst Lüning has fulfilled a dream after 25 years: His own Scotch malt whisky 'Whisky.de Malt by Horst Lüning'. It had to be complex, affordable and authentic. For this purpose, malt whiskies from selected distilleries from bourbon and sherry casks were blended together. The result is a fresh, fruity blended malt, which has been given a complex, spicy note with a little oak in the finish by adding sherry cask whisky. Both bottlings have 46% and are without colour and chill filtering. We have also further developed our Whisky.de crystal glass: The Whisky.de Winter Landscape glass is adorned with a decorative winter distillery design created by us.

Despite the somewhat different year, of course we didn't miss out on special events and holidays! For St. Patrick's Day, Father's Day or Easter, we had special offers and specials for you. In April, we organised a big competition in which five lucky winners could look forward to a trip to the Cherry Blossom Festival 2021 in Hamburg. On our Instagram channel, we organised a large-scale photo competition: all of our followers were allowed to upload photos of their home bars and the three participants with the most likes were able to enjoy great prizes (a Bushmills cask bar, Bushmills 10 years and glasses from Bruichladdich and Bushmills). At this point, a big thank you to all participants and all our more than 12,000 Instagram subscribers!

This year we took a big step and expanded our range. We decided to also offer gin . In the meantime, we already have a small but fine selection of gins on offer and are pleased that these are also well received by our customers. In addition, you will also find ready-packed cocktail sets for some delicious whisky and gin cocktails in our shop.

There have also been innovations in our newsletter system. You can now choose whether you want to receive the monthly newsletters or be informed on a daily basis. In the Daily Mail we send out special tidbits selected by us, in the News you can find out what's going on in the whisky industry and with New Bottlings you get all the new products from our range every day. All Videos sends you, not a selection as in our monthly newsletter, but really all videos to your email inbox and All Offers informs you directly about every special offer and every price reduction that we post in our shop.

It's nice that you have reviewed the past year with us. Now we look forward to a healthy, good year 2021 with you! Whatever resolution you have made, we hope we can continue to accompany you. The Lüning family and the Whisky.de team wish you a Happy New Year!