Independent bottlers are the tastemakers of the whisky world. It’s a business model that operates on the strength of a company’s ability to find amazing liquids and know when is the right moment to release them to the public. Companies like Gordon & MacPhail, Adelphi and Claxton’s have built legacy on bottling some of Scotland’s most hard-to-find and prestigious drams for an audience of the whisky elite.
The Heart Cut – founded by the husband-and-wife duo of former Bacardi exec Georgie Bell and ex-Sweet & Chilli Fabrizio Leoni – isn’t like that. They set out to create a whisky bottler that could introduce off-the-beaten-track distilleries to a new audience.
“Before we started, we looked at 20 independent bottlers operating in the UK,” says Bell. “We realised that, for the most part, these independent bottlers focused on Scotch and were catering exclusively to the 1% of the whisky drinker – so the whisky enthusiast rather than the whisky curious. There was a huge absence of any sort of brand advocacy or storytelling, anything like that – so that’s what we made sure we were doing with The Heart Cut.
“If you’re creating an independent bottling brand today, I think you need to be reflective of the landscape. Whisky does come from everywhere. If you’re just focusing on one nation, or one or two nations, you’re doing the growth of the whisky industry a disservice, and you’re not fully educating.”
As a result, The Heart Cut’s library of bottlings casts a wide net across the whisky atlas. Since launching at the end of 2023, the brand has released bottlings from Denmark, Norway, Oregon and California, to name just a few. There’s nothing from Scotland yet, although Bell assures that it’s not out of the question.
“The reason I love independent bottling as a model is it does give you flexibility to be able to showcase anything,” she explains.
“But the model means that we have to bottle bangers. Because we’re small batch and we’re introducing these producers to a new audience, it’s our responsibility to make sure that everything we bottle is amazing. And it has to be accessible – in its price but also accessible by design, accessible by language.”
For its 11th and most recent release, the brand has collaborated with Irish whiskey broker JJ Corry on a small-batch blend of JJ Corry’s stocks matured and finished across oloroso, Pedro Ximenez and pajarete casks. The release delves deeper into the relationship between curation, bottling and the tastemakers of the whisky world.
JJ Corry was launched in 2016 by former Diageo exec Louise McGuane to revive the Irish whiskey tradition of bonding. Like bottlers, McGuane doesn’t distil any whiskey herself but instead ages, blends, and bottles crowdsourced casks.
“[McGuane’s approach] to being a bonder is similar to what we’re doing,” says Bell. “It gives you the flexibility and fluidity to reflect and cater what the whisky drinker wants. Like us, they’re not stuck in one style and way of doing things, we can both evolve as time goes on and I think that’s important in a modern whisky brand.”
