ALWAYS IN MOTION
Meet the Perpetual Collection, Glenfiddich’s latest global travel retail offering of four bespoke whiskies
We’ve all witnessed the cautious return to travel recently after the past two years of almost entirely remaining on land, and with that return comes an exciting new launch.
The Perpetual Collection, launched in August this year, is Glenfiddich’s latest creation to be unveiled in the global travel retail market and designed with globetrotters in mind. Each of the four bottles in the collection have distinctly varied flavour profiles, created using the solera vatting process. In order to find out more, we sat down with Glenfiddich’s global brand ambassador, Struan Grant Ralph.
Phoebe Calver (PC): How did the concept of this collection come to fruition?
Struan Grant Ralph (SGR): It’s nice actually because I was involved in this project right from the start, from conception, and we were working with this, I suppose, tradition that Glenfiddich have of solera vatting.
It’s something that we first started putting in place in the mid-90s. David Stewart and some of the guys sort of took inspiration from Spanish sherry bodegas, and at that time we were looking to introduce a new 15-year-old to Glenfiddich. We had a 12 that was recognisable all around the world and gave people a taste of the distillery, but quite light and probably not with the depth and complexity that we knew we had in stock. So that first solera was a way to combine sherry, bourbon and new oak in a way that stayed really true to the distillery's DNA but offered our consumer something richer, more complex, with a good story. Although in the
90s I don’t think they really thought about the marketability – I think they just thought hey, it tastes nice and [so] let’s go with it.