The Time Re:Imagined collection from the Glenfiddich distillery in Scotland’s Speyside region is meant for serious single malt collectors. It is available in three expressions, starting old and getting older: a 30-year-old, a 40-year-old and a 50-year-old.
According to Jyri Pylkkanen, Glenfiddich Regional Malts Brand Ambassador for Southeast Asia, it is a chance to experience the ultimate expression of the distillery’s character. “Our new make spirit, because of the fermentation and high cut point in the distillation, has a cut grass aroma, together with apple and pear notes,” he explains. “For Glenfiddich, it’s really important to maintain this character. At the end of the day, [whether you have a 12-year-old whisky or a 30-year-old one] you still have the distillery DNA.” Those fresh apple notes, for example, tend to move towards a sort of spicy, stewed apple character as the spirit moves up in age.
Each expression is also a chance to explore an artistic representation of time, which is one of the most essential components of a good whisky. The 30-year-old, which is named Suspended Time, has an outer packaging of metal ribbons, with the bottle seeming to be suspended within them. Glenfiddich expressions are typically aged in a combination of American and European oak casks; Suspended Time has a higher proportion of the latter, of about 30 per cent, to bring with it a little more spice and oakiness.
The 40-year-old expression is called Cumulative Time, and has a container sculpted to look like stone to invoke an inspiration from the slow, complex process of geological metamorphosis. The whisky itself is created with a unique ‘remnant vatting’ process, wherein small portions of the previous batch are added to the next. “It’s like you have your base, and you just continue building layers on top of that,” Pylkkanen explains. “It’s a continuous process, building an accumulation of flavours for the whisky.”
The 50-year-old, naturally, is the rarest expression, with only 220 bottles produced in its first release stemming from just three casks from the 1960s. Known as Simultaneous Time, it also has the most ambitious packaging artistry—computational architect Manuel Jimenez Garcia was engaged to translate 50 years of climate data from the distillery’s locality into a three-dimensional form. In other words, encoded in the complex facets of the final sculpture are the circumstances that gave life to the whisky. “Nothing happens overnight in whisky,” Pylkkanen says. “You see changes of climate, of air pressure, temperature, humidity—everything affects the flavour of the whisky and what happens in the cask.”
The Glenfiddich Time Re:Imagined series was showcased in Kuala Lumpur at the new premises of Skillet KL, the Modern European restaurant helmed by Chef Raymond Tham—whose other restaurant, Beta KL, was recently awarded a Michelin Star. The menu was themed around various aspects of time—also an important factor in cuisine—with dishes such as steamed lobster celebrating seasonality, and 72-hour slow-cooked wagyu beef ribs, an ode to patience. Pylkkanen led a tasting of the 30-year-old Suspended Time, while the 21-year-old Glenfiddich Gran Reserva played a supporting role by freely flowing all night.
