Distilleries Editing and Proofreading Services

The bottle says twelve years, finished in sherry casks, distilled at the distillery pictured on the label. One of those statements is governed by a rule about the youngest liquid in the vat, one is governed by a rule about what "finished" may mean, and one may be governed by nothing at all except whether it is true. A drinks writer will ask about all three, and the answer has to be the same one the file says.

We edit what distilleries produce — label and packaging copy within the constraints that apply to it, age statement and cask documentation, brand and origin narratives, tasting room and visitor material, trade and distributor sell sheets, export documentation and market-specific label variants, cask ownership and investment material, and production and blending records. Our editors work on the claims a bottle makes and the paper behind them.

The age and cask statement is where a distillery's reputation is exposed, and its failure is a description written by marketing and reconciled with the records afterwards. Every word on the front of a bottle is a claim somebody can check. We work through these so an age statement is written against the youngest component in the vat with the vatting record identified, since one younger cask makes the number wrong regardless of what the rest of the parcel is; so "finished", "matured" and "aged" are used consistently with what actually happened and for how long, because a nine-week finish and a three-year secondary maturation are described with the same word by people who mean quite different things; so cask descriptions state what the cask previously held, its size and whether it was first fill, given that "sherry cask" covers a range from a genuine transport butt to a seasoned barrel and readers now know the difference; so origin claims distinguish distilled, matured, blended and bottled, as these can occur in four places and a picture of one of them implies all four; so any claim that would need different wording in an export market is flagged for the variant rather than translated late; so vintage, batch and bottle numbers tie to a record; and so the story about the founder is checked against what can be documented. Copy written this way survives the interview.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including production records, unreleased products and commercial material. We are editors rather than distillers, regulatory advisers or lawyers, and we offer no view on labelling compliance, production or product claims. What we can do is make the bottle say what the file supports.