A whisky label is one of the few pieces of commercial writing that is mostly legislation. Single malt, single grain, blended malt, bourbon, rye: each of those has a legal text behind it setting out what the liquid has to be before the word is allowed on the glass. Then there is the second set of words. Small batch, reserve, handcrafted, finest. Those mean whatever the person printing the label wants them to mean. Both sets are set on the same front label in the same typeface. Nothing on the glass says which is which.
The word doing the most damage is single. It sounds like rarity, or like one of something, and it is neither. In Scotch it means one distillery: malted barley, pot stills, a single address, and no promise at all about what is inside beyond that. The bottle almost certainly holds whisky drawn from dozens of casks of different ages and different woods, married by someone whose job is making this year taste like the last one. A single malt is a blend. It is blended within one set of walls instead of across several, which is a real distinction and not the one anybody hears when they read the word.
What separates malt from grain is the grain and the still together. The regulations are specific: single malt must be made from water and malted barley with no other cereals, distilled at one distillery, in pot stills. Grain whisky starts where that stops, with other cereals in the mash and, in practice, a column still. A pot still is a batch vessel, filled and run and emptied and filled again, and what comes off it depends on the copper, on the shape of the neck and on where the distiller decides to cut. A column still runs continuously, wash going in at one end and spirit coming off a plate part way up, and it takes the spirit to a far higher strength on the way. Higher strength means less of everything that was not alcohol. So the categories printed on the label describe a mash bill and a set of equipment. Almost nobody reads them that way.
Ireland keeps the logic and changes the ingredient. Single pot still is one distillery again, but from a mash of malted and unmalted barley together, a combination usually explained by an old tax on malt and kept long after the tax went. America built its categories on different ground. Bourbon, rye and corn whiskey are defined by grain percentages and by wood: fifty-one percent corn for bourbon, fifty-one percent rye for rye, eighty percent corn for corn whiskey. Bourbon and rye also require a new charred oak container. Not one of those definitions names a state. Kentucky is a habit, not a rule.
Back to the unregulated half, where single cask and small batch sit side by side looking like a matched pair. Single cask means exactly what it says, and the bottles that claim it usually print a cask number to prove it. Small batch has no definition anywhere. No rule says how small a batch is, so four casks and four hundred are both small batches. The age statement is the opposite case. Where a number appears it is the age of the youngest whisky in the bottle, never the average and never the oldest. A twelve year old may well hold thirty year old casks. It cannot hold an eleven.
The catalogue behind this site has no style column at all. It has a name, a bottler and a strength, so style here is read out of the words in the name, which makes it exactly as good as what the label chose to say. On 1,580 of 1,963 bottlings the name says nothing the code can read, and those entries state that the style is not recorded rather than guess at the likeliest answer. A catalogue that admits what it cannot tell you is worth more than one that quietly fills the gap in.