So whiskey kinda infamously has a cycle where demand goes up so brands (which are often bottled from third-party aging warehouses) have to source increasingly more marginal liquor so it obtains a bad reputation while people invest in distilling and aging (for years if not decades), so demand goes down, so bottlers can be picky and some of the agers go out of business so they have to liquidate (heh) their stock at auction, so whiskey gets better, and it develops a better reputation so demand goes up

Anyway this is about a 30 year cycle and I’m pretty sure we passed a quality peak around 2010 or so