Raj Bhakta has always claimed to be able to see what’s coming around the corner. It isn’t an entirely unjustified boast. Some sixteen years ago, he scripted the revival of rye whisky in America with WhistlePig, a craft whiskey distilled in Shoreham, Vermont.
Rye was bourbon’s shabby, anti-aspirational cousin until Bhakta constructed a bucolic charm around it and took it upmarket. “Back then, there was this gigantic opening at the high end of the American whiskey category. It was bourbon-dominant, but we had no real luxury whiskey.
All you had was a bunch of Scotsmen, with their accent: “Oh, can you taste the teardrop of an angel in our whisky?’” he says, shaking his head disparagingly. Bhakta Spirits and its journey In 2020, four years after being unceremoniously chucked out of the cult company he founded, Bhakta set up a namesake house of vintages that unearths and sells rare whiskies, brandies, and rum from across the world. Bhakta Spirits’ first release was a vintage blended armagnac (a grape brandy made in south west France) that carried a 50-year age statement and included liquid dating back to 1868; its latest is a ten-year-old Indian single malt whisky from Ocean King Distillers in Goa that has been aged for over four months in French Oak casks that once held armagnac from 1982.
The Bhakta 2012, which retails for $149 ( ₹ 12,500), is one of the oldest Indian whiskies ever put to market. Bhakta describes it as a “honey bomb”. “It’s spicy in the.