The Story
In 1992, Tim Duckett, an environmental consultant and obsessive single malt collector, met two people who would radically alter his relationship with whisky: Bill and Lyn Lark. Duckett was appointed to a government committee that was investigating the management of Tasmania’s Ben Lomond ski field. Lyn Lark was on the same committee – she and her husband Bill had an interest in the pub at the top of the mountain. But as Duckett recalls, it was the Lark’s upcoming whisky venture that most interested him. ‘Lyn and Bill said they were going to start making whisky. I said I was going to drink it.’
By 1999, the Larks had been distilling for seven years, bottling small amounts of single malt whisky and gin, and quietly pioneering Australia’s small-scale distilling movement. Duckett had, as promised, studiously got to work drinking their whiskies, but being a long-time member of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society and a devoted collector of Scottish single cask bottlings, he felt there was more to be done.
‘When the Lark’s first barrel became commercially available in 1999, I bought it. I had no real idea of what I wanted to do, but I could see a future in the whisky industry because we have the right conditions here in Tasmania.’
After 1999, Duckett went on to purchase more Lark casks and he also started acquiring Tasmania Distillery (now Sullivans Cove) casks from the earl 2000s. By 2012, he’d built up an impressive inventory and decided to start his own independent bottling label, Tasmanian Heartwood Malt Whisky.
His first release, Mt Wellington, came out in 2012. The name references the mountain that rises like a cathedral organ above Hobart, and the whisky itself was about as prodigious. It was distilled at Sullivans Cove and spent 12 years maturing in an ex-Jim Beam barrel before being bottled at cask strength – a whopping 62.4%. Big, bold, and a bit rough at the edges, this first bottling set a template that Duckett would build on and refine with future releases.
Every Heartwood is bottled at cask strength, which means some of them have come in at a ridiculous 72% ABV. But Duckett also blends casks to create his own vattings or ‘blended malts’. Duckett’s commentary on each release and the names he comes up with for each bottling is particularly famed – the ‘The Vat out of Hell’ and the ‘Epiphany at the Lakes’ (the latter a reference to the birth of the Tassie whisky industry with Bill Lark’s light bulb moment) among the most memorable.
Equally amusing are some of the tactics Duckett employs to prepare Heartwood whiskies. From leaving casks in the sun, to bashing vats of whisky with an oar (the volatiles are released that way), Duckett is keen to experiment and develop distinctively Australian whiskies in the process. ‘Innovation through isolation’ is one of his mantras, and having received high praise from the world’s top whisky critics for his hugely flavourful whiskies, and taking out International Independent Bottler of the Year on more than one occasion, it seems the isolation is working.
Some dedicated collectors are even aiming to own a bottle of every Heartwood release, currently over 60. As a result, a lucrative secondary market for these bottlings has emerged – Release the Beast, the second Heartwood bottling, sold for $1600 at the Rare Whisky Auction during Tasmanian Whisky Week 2019. But despite the success, some of Duckett’s friends and fellow whisky drinkers started to baulk at the price, strength and unavailability of Heartwood whiskies. In response, Duckett created Tasmanian Independent Bottlers (TIB) in 2015, a separate label that would bottle more affordable, more ‘sessionable’ whiskies (Duckett’s term) to entice a wider spectrum of palates.
Currently, Duckett continues to source and release new bottlings, and his son Louis has joined him in preparing and selling the whiskies. Their bondstore in Hobart now contains over 10,000 litres of whisky from a dozen different distilleries.