It also means Cosculluela and Picard end up with more booze for their buck. A faster maturation to a minimum viable product, if you will, means the angels get to steal less of Maison Lineti’s produce. The “angel’s share” is the portion of whisky that naturally evaporates through the porous wood of the casks into the atmosphere during the spirit’s aging process. Simply put, less time in Lineti’s barrels means less whisky disappears.

“Every year you lose 2 percent of your whisky, so you need to produce approximately 20 percent more than the final volume you will need at 10 years,” Cosculluela says. “So if you work on the drinkability to get something really tasty and balanced in three years, you save a lot of raw material, a lot of space in your warehouse, and a lot of energy.”

However, for Picard, this use of these winemaking skills and methods is not enough to ensure success for Maison Linetti—comprehensive data analysis is also key. Excel files document some 10,000 lines of data per batch produced.

“On the brewing part, we collect temperature, the time, the transfer yield of the pump, the water added, everything,” Cosculluela says. “For the fermentation, we collect the time and temperature every 20 minutes. For the stills, we have the ABV, the temperature, and the speed.” As a result, Cosculluela and Picard can see the direct impacts of any changes they make. “We try to change only one parameter at a time,” Cosculluela says, so that any improvements can be tracked back to exactly what was altered.

“If we develop a project on the fermentation parts, we just need a different samples from the batch, and you can collect the data in two weeks,” says Picard. “But do a study on the maturation? That needs time. We conducted one three years ago, and we've only just begun to have the final results.”