135 year-old Scottish distillery Glenfiddich has brought to Singapore’s shores a new collection of whiskies that represent the peak of its achievements.
The Time Re:Imagined series is a trio of single malts – a 30, 40, and 50 Year Old – each showcasing a different facet of time and its symbolic relationship to the whisky it signifies.
Glenfiddich has tapped famed designer and computational architect Manuel Jiménez García to create unique casings for each of the three bottlings, resulting in outer packagings that all tell the story of the aged liquids housed inside.
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The 30 Year Old for instance embodies the concept of Suspended Time, marking the moment when Brian Kinsman, Glenfiddich’s Malt Master, suspends the whisky’s maturation to bottle it, capturing the whisky at the precise moment in time to preserve it for all eternity.
Its outer packaging design evokes this moment through moving ribbons, each one frozen in time to form cut-out windows, revealing the decanter inside. The dynamic lines and interwoven structure creates an illusion that the bottle is as if suspended effortlessly in mid-air.
The 40 Year Old meanwhile represents Cumulative Time. It is a bold representation of remnant vatting, a pioneering process where the remains of the previous batch are carried over and married with the casks selected for each subsequent release. Glenfiddich is the only distillery that uses this remnant vatting process, and this accumulation of flavours over time adds complexity to the liquid’s taste.
The exterior packaging brings this idea to life through a take on geological metamorphosis. The decanter is housed within a sculptural container and stopper made from jesmonite, an eco-friendly material with individual characteristics that render every piece unique. Different yet intertwined, it embodies how things evolve to become something new altogether.
Then there’s the 50 Year Old, a portrayal of Simultaneous Time, exploring the parallel and complex conditions and effects that have influenced this liquid. It is made using whiskies taken from three different American oak refill casks, all matured in the same warehouse, before being married together and finished in an American oak refill cask again for two years. Only 220 decanters of this whisky is available in this release across the globe.
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The outer casing is an artistic representation of the climatic data that created this 50 Year Old whisky. García decrypted the meteorological data – such as air pressure, temperature, and humidity – into an algorithm, and generated a design language to build the structure’s bespoke form, thus physically manifesting the seconds, days, and months of all those fifty years.
“In whisky production, we often talk about the role of Malt Masters and it is our responsibility to find the delicate balance between the taste of the whisky and the intensity of the oak cask. But we don’t always acknowledge how each cask, each bottle, is absolutely unique because of the time it has spent maturing,” remarks Kinsman.
“Both nature and time play huge roles in making whisky taste like it does and Glenfiddich’s Time Re:Imagined collection pays homage to this process and the exquisite liquid it helps to create.”
For more details and to purchase bottles within the Time Re:Imagined collection, visit www.since1887.sg.
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