There is a stillness to the vaulted cellars of Michel Couvreur, where the air carries the mingled scents of damp stone, ancient wood, and oxidised wine. Casks lie stacked in quiet procession, their origins marked not only by cooper and year, but by the wines they once held. These underground chambers, tucked beneath the Burgundian village of Bouze-lès-Beaune, offer a rare kind of sanctuary—a place where whisky is shaped slowly, not in stillhouses, but in silence, shadow, and wood.

Michel Couvreur, a Belgian wine merchant who settled in Burgundy in the 1970s, revolutionised whisky by championing the wood over the distillate. He once declared that ninety per cent of whisky character comes from oak and only ten per cent from distillation. With this guiding principle he selected sherry and wine casks of exceptional pedigree—Jura Vin Jaune, Pedro Ximénez, Fino, Moscatel—often hand‑picked from storied bodegas, ready to breathe new life into quality Scotch spirit. When he passed in 2013, his son‑in‑law Cyril Deschamps and cellar master Jean‑Arnaud Frantzen took the helm, preserving Couvreur’s dedication to gravity‑fed cask handling and painstaking record‑keeping.