Glenfiddich distillery is releasing fifty very special bottles of 50-year old single malt. That's right, I said fifty year old single malt. The whisky in question has been stored in two oak casks in Glenfiddich's distillery warehouse in Banffshire, Scotland since its original production. Glenfiddich will release just fifty bottles of the scotch each year for the next ten years. The scotch is contained in a numbered hand-made blown glass bottle, decorated with Scottish silver. The bottle arrives in a hand-stiched leather case and is accompanied by a leather-bound book about the history of the scotch, with room for the lucky owner's own comments.

Peter Gordon, the grandson of the Glenfiddich founder, described the scotch as "flawless." The scotch will be sold initially in carefully chosen international airports, and then the rest of the bottles will be distributed to a few select retailers for sale to upscale collector markets.

The price? A mere £10,000 British pounds per bottle, or roughly, $16,553 U. S. dollars.

If you're not one of this year's 50 lucky (and wealthy) purchasers, don't despair. There's good single malt news for those of us who don't have booze budgets in the thousands. The Scottish single malt industry is not sitting on its barrels of aged single malt and betting on future profits; distilleries are actively refurbishing older closed distilleries and putting them into active production. Macallan, one of the better known and best-selling single malts has re-opened distilleries closed twenty years ago, and built two new, very large, state of the art warehouses. Single malt scotch which has for a very long time required a fairly erudite and cultivated palate and expansive wallet, has been discovered by new markets, eager for export. The sales of blended whisky have fallen, but the increasing obsession with single malt, especially in Asia, where China can't seem to import enough, have more than offset the decline in blended scotch sales. It's also paved the way for some of the smaller distilleries to import their scotch to the U.S.

Increasingly, distilleries are bottling young single malt scotch that's less than ten years old, and selling them at rock-bottom prices. There are also more distilleries blending single malts for export. McClellands' Highland sells young single malts blended from the product of three or four distilleries from an area, like their Islay blend. Most of the scotch in their blends comes from their owner, Morrison Bowmore's distilleries. Diageo, the world's largest producer of whisky under a variey of brands has spent millions building new distilleries in Scotland.