By law, all spirits imported into the United States for retail sale must conform to a few specific bottle sizes (among them, 250ml, 750ml, 1 liter, 1.5 liters, etc). Nearly the entire rest of the world allows other bottle sizes, including the popular British de-facto standard of 700ml. This seems unimportant, until you realize that every producer of scotch must create an entirely separate bottling run, including special bottles and labels, in 750ml bottles in order to export to the United States market. While many of them do this because the US market is lucrative, a great many more DO NOT. This means many wonderful whiskies are enjoyed by the rest of the world and never seen by US consumers. This is especially true of single-cask bottlings and other limited editions. The effort to bottle for the US is usually not worth it for small-batch products.
This law is arcane, and its overturning would allow the importing of many amazing whiskies into the US as well as a decrease in the costs associated with bottling special runs earmarked for the USA. This sounds like a win-win to me. If you love scotch, I urge you to both sign this petition AND tell anyone you know who likes scotch to sign it too.
Short URL: http://wh.gov/PyJa
Heh. I know the person that started the petition. It’s cool that you’re blogging about it.
A petition to make sure I pay the same price for 50 less millimeters???? Where do I sign!!!
Jim,
There are hundreds of bottles not available in the US because they are in 700ml bottles. Are you saying you’d rather NOT have the option to buy them because they’re smaller? Would you like the government to legislatively prevent you from buying other kinds of products because they might not be the same size as other products on the market?