IN GOOD SPIRIT

Brooke Supernaw, senior vice president of spirits, wines and tobacco at DFS, is behind the slew of new drinks tempting you the next time you fly through Changi Airport.

In spirit retail today, you have to touch all five senses. Fashion retail is different – you can’t drink a Gucci bag. We created experiences such as the DFS Masters of Wine and Spirits to bring the winemakers and brand ambassadors to our sophisticated customers.

At Terminal 4, we introduced two concepts, the Cocktail Bar – where people can feel comfortable making cocktails, and the Craft Collection offering a curation of craft and smallbatch beers and spirits.

I’m from California, so I’m partial to Napa Valley Chardonnay or a cold beer with a barbecue. Before this role I was in the food industry as a buyer for U.S. companies. To learn more about spirits and wines, I travelled to Bordeaux, Champagne and Cognac, and our relationship with these houses allow us to create limited edition collections.

Beside our core categories, we also keep our pulse on the domestic market to see what the trends are. For instance, before craft Kyoto gin Ki Noh Bi even bottled their first product, we visited their distillery to work closely with them. In a first this year, we have an exclusive limited edition Ki Noh Bi that’s been aged in exkaruizawa sherry casks and bottled with labels using mask images from Kamiasobi Noh Troupe.

The 2018 Masters of Wines and Spirits Collection is at Changi Airport till mid year.