(Wine-Searcher) - Irish whiskey has made a remarkable comeback in the past two decades, but can its meteoric rise continue?

If you have a trace of Irish ancestry in you – and even if you don't – there's a fair chance you'll be raising a glass to someone or something today.

And, if you are, there's a good chance that glass will contain whiskey. After all, why wouldn't it? Didn't the Irish invent whiskey? And Irish whiskey is enjoying a spectacular renaissance at the moment, becoming flavor of the month not just in Ireland, but in the US, Europe and the massive Asian markets where Scotch was once king.

The past 15 years have been a golden time for Irish whiskey, which had struggled along for 80 years previously, depending on grizzled locals and the children of emigrants to survive in what was a cold and inhospitable marketplace.

But suddenly, as though a switch had been thrown, Irish whiskey began what has become one of the most impressive comebacks by a spirit brand ever. A huge growth in volume has seen sales more than double in the space of just eight years and this in turn has led to a spurt in new distilleries coming on line. From having three distilleries not that long ago, Ireland now has 12, with another dozen or so in the planning or construction stage.

This upsurge in interest becomes even more obvious when compared to its near neighbor, Scotland. Scotch has been the leading whiskey country for a century and has led the way through a canny combination of innovation and tradition. The development of the single malt market was a masterstroke at a time when blends were all the rage, for example. Offering different wood finishes also offered different variants of whiskeys, thereby growing the pie.

However, Scotch is now in another of its periodic crises, with a shortage of spirit meaning distilleries are unable to offer age-statement expressions. How can you offer 15-year-old malt, when it was only distilled 12 years ago? Consequently, producers will start releasing younger, non-age-statement labels and they'll keep the older stuff for hard-to-get limited releases, at exorbitant prices.

Irish whiskey, by contrast, takes three years to make and is frequently blended, meaning producers have to manage a much smaller time lag between production and bottling. Then there is the flavor profile of Irish whiskey – the blend of pot still and column still spirits tends toward the sweet and soft, when compared to Scotch. This is what blend and Bourbon drinkers go for, so it's not surprising that, while Scotch is a $7 billion industry, the annual value of Irish whiskey sales has surged from $2.5bn in 2008 to almost $6bn last year.

Irish and Scotch have always had a competitive history, going back to the very genesis of whiskey itself. Both countries claim it, but the Irish have the edge when it comes to getting it down on paper first. While whiskey first appears in Scotland's written records in 1494 (when the exchequer rolls mentioned giving malt to Friar Jon Cor "wherewith to make aqua vitae"), the Irish Annals of Clonmacnoise had noted in 1405 that a local chieftain died "from a surfeit of aqua vitae" over the Christmas holidays.