EASY ON THE PALATE
Our Master of Malt reflects on the way Glenfiddich has developed its export business and still thinks outside the cask
It may seem strange that the first spirit flowed from Glenfiddich on 25 December 1887, but Christmas Day was not a public holiday in Scotland until 1958 following a kirk ban on ‘Yule vacations’ almost 300 years previously. The company originally bought its distilling equipment, including two stills, from Mrs Cumming’s distillery at Cardow and in January 1888, its output was 400 gallons (1,818 litres) a week and was fully contracted to an Aberdeen spirit merchant until 1890. Today, Glenfiddich has 43 stills, and the potential annual output is 28 million litres of alcohol, although it is currently running at considerably less than that. The parent company, William Grant & Co Ltd, introduced the now familiar triangular bottle for Grant’s Standfast Blended Whisky in 1957 and they adopted this packaging for Glenfiddich in 1961.
In 1963, the company focused its marketing on American opinion formers, to bounce-start its world-wide export campaign, which became a phenomenal success. Until then, the company only exported 500 cases of Glenfiddich. By 1966, the export total was 8,000 cases. In 1974 Glenfiddich exported 119,500 cases, hitting 500,000 in 1986 and one million cases in 2018.
The stag was first incorporated into the label in 1968 and for many years, it seemed that the brand’s presentation did not change. I was fortunate enough, in the early 90s, to be shown by their design team that a tweak was being made to the label every couple of years with seemingly very little change. The original looks very different from the modern iconic logo, but most people don’t realise.
The company has been imaginative and innovative on many fronts over the years. Most recently, in the summer of 2021, Glenfiddich began converting its 20 delivery trucks to run on biogas made from the distillery’s own waste products. The waste draff from the mash tun and pot ale from the first distillation, which used to be sold off for high protein cattle feed, is converted through anaerobic digestion – where bacteria break down organic matter – into an ultra-low carbon fuel. This cuts the vehicles’ CO2 emissions by over 95 per cent compared with the normal diesel and other fossil fuels. As Glasgow has just hosted COP26, it is good news that each of these trucks will displace 250 tonnes of CO2 annually.
Glenfiddich’s PR team is currently working with cocktail bar staffs around the world to create cocktails featuring the malt. Many will say that this is profane – that a single malt should only be drunk neat or with a wee bit of water. However, by taking this route, the brand can engage with many new consumers.
For the past 14 years, the brand has selected several annual Artists in Residence. These have come from all over the world. Artists in watercolour and oils, poets, sculptors, photographers, you name it, they have all been resident at Dufftown for a year to produce a considerable volume of artworks. Some of which even I like (I am fussy and fairly boring in my art choices).
People think of Glenfiddich as a ‘starter’ malt, a simple whisky, one from which drinkers move on to more complex malts. This is far from the truth and the brand has been very daring in their bottlings, as this issue’s whiskies will show – and they also offer very good value.
A Master of Malt, John Lamond is one of the world’s leading authorities on whisky and author of The Malt Whisky File, The Whisky Connoisseur’s Companion and Le Snob: Whisky.