Glenfiddich and the Rise of Single Malt Whisky

On Christmas Day 1887, in a small clearing in the Fiddich valley near Dufftown, William Grant supervised the first distillation at a new pot still built almost entirely by his own hands. He had spent nearly two decades as a clerk and later manager at the Mortlach Distillery, and had saved patiently to buy his own site, his own equipment and, when the opportunity arose, second-hand pot stills from the Cardhu Distillery for the modest sum of one hundred and twenty pounds.

Grant was assisted by his nine children. Between them, over the course of a year, they built the distillery walls, installed the stills and dug the channels that brought water from the Robbie Dhu springs. The Glenfiddich they produced that first Christmas would in time become the most widely sold single malt Scotch whisky in the world.

For most of its first seventy-five years, however, Glenfiddich was a distillery of Speyside rather than of the world. Its whisky went largely into the blends of other houses, as was true of virtually every single malt of the period. Single malt as a consumer category, distinct and named on the label, scarcely existed outside Scotland.

The decision that changed the history of Scotch whisky came in the 1960s. William Grant & Sons resolved to bottle Glenfiddich as a single malt in its own right, in a distinctive triangular bottle designed to stand out on the shelf, and to market it internationally. It was an audacious move. Blended Scotch dominated every export market, and the industry consensus was that foreign drinkers would find single malt too assertive, too regional, too obscure.

The industry told them the world would not want single malt. The world proved otherwise.

The consensus was wrong. Glenfiddich's international launch was a slow-building success, and by the 1980s single malt had become one of the fastest-growing categories in the spirits world. The distilleries of Speyside — Glenlivet, The Macallan, The Balvenie, Cardhu, Strathisla and many others — followed Glenfiddich abroad, and a global market emerged for whiskies that had previously been known only to their neighbours.

Glenfiddich itself remained under the ownership of the founding family, William Grant & Sons, and continues to do so today — a rarity among the major Scotch houses. The twelve-year-old, matured in a combination of American oak ex-bourbon casks and European oak ex-sherry casks, and then married in small oak tuns, remains the flagship of the range.

In 1969 Glenfiddich became the first distillery to open its doors to visitors, and in doing so effectively founded the modern whisky tourism industry. Today, thousands make the journey each year to Dufftown to see the place where a single family, on Christmas Day, opened the world to single malt.