Tormore: the built environment
The Tormore producer website explicitly describes its Speyside site as built in 1959. That year belongs to the constructed distillery and its place in the surrounding Cromdale Hills. It should not be repurposed as a separately verified company-registration date or first-maturation date. The distillery's present-day interpretation of its history is useful evidence, but its own wording still determines what is proved.
Midleton: two physical histories
Old Midleton's chronology reaches 1825, and Irish Distillers associates its operation with the period through 1975. In the same historical account, the company explains the 1975 expansion of the Midleton site for the movement of other Irish whiskey operations. A reader exploring historic structures should understand which part belonged to the old works, and should not assume a new production plant is identical to the surviving heritage site.
Yamazaki: founding a category, not one release
Suntory identifies 1923 as the beginning of Yamazaki's construction, while its Shirofuda whisky arrived in 1929. An industrial site, an evolving production practice and a commercial bottle are three different subjects of research. Yamazaki's producer history allows us to discuss its foundational role without claiming that the date of the first consumer release is also the date of the first distillation.
The photographic record has a date, too
A distillery photograph documents the appearance of a particular location at the time of exposure. A 2009 interior photograph at Yamazaki cannot establish what the stillhouse looked like in 1923. Likewise, an image of Old Midleton must be labelled as heritage photography, not as a contemporary image of New Midleton production. Photographic rights, subject identity and image date are part of a historical caption.
How WHISKAVIA will link these records
The reference model connects each dated claim to its source and to the relevant physical or historical entity. Where a secondary register disagrees with a producer, the correct response is to preserve the kind of event described and its date precision, not automatically choose the most repeated year. Readers should be able to move from a timeline to a place, an archive and a photograph without losing these distinctions.
Further reading
Original WHISKAVIA introduction; not a producer dossier or live travel listing.