Diageo India launches invite-only cask programme
Drinks giant Diageo is looking to redefine the concept of ultra-luxury Indian spirits with its new cask programme, moving away from age statements to focus instead on “hyperpersonalisation”. Eloise Feilden finds out more.
“Today, when I buy a Lamborghini or a Ferrari, I’m able to customise it and it stands for me. There’s no reason why I can’t do that in the world of spirits,” Vikram Damodaran, chief innovation officer at Diageo India, tells Eloise Feilden about the company’s attitude towards ultra-luxury offerings.
The global drinks giant has just announced its invite-only India Rare Spirits Cask Programme which offers private clients the ability to blend their own dark spirit from a collection of more than 20,000 barrels of previously-unseen liquid.
Damodaran says the new programme is an “opportunity to really up the game” in ultra-premium spirits, giving clients “infinite capability to personalise” their own bespoke bottles.
How it Works
Diageo India has a collection of 20,000 barrels of rare, unseen liquids maturing in barrels from its seven Indian distilleries. Its new programme opens up this collection, which also contains 13 types of wood and 70+ finishing casks collected from Diageo’s portfolio of Indian and Spanish distilleries, to private clients.
Clients are given “infinite choice” to develop their own custom bottlings, Damodaran says. The first step is to either select a liquid that is already there or to “build their own” through blending from a library of 35-40 flavour blocks, each aged for a minimum of 5-10 years.
Once selected, each cask yields approximately 200 bottles. Clients can then choose which kind of bottles to use, and have “infinite choices in terms of inscriptions on the bottle, what the label can say [and] what the corks should say” so that “every single element of what is being offered is of ultimate personalisation”.
The goal, Damodaran says, is to “redefine what luxury ownership of spirits could mean”, creating something which “literally becomes a signature of the client in their bottles”.
“Hyperpersonalisation”, as he sees it, will be the next big trend in ultra-luxury spirits, and Diageo is ahead of the curve.
Age is just a number
Particularly for whisky, age statements have long been shorthand for the best of the best, but Damodaran wants to change this. “What this programme gives us is a freedom to move away from a unilateral view of age being the marker of premium offerings to ultimate personalisation becoming the marker of really high end offerings,” he says.
“We can always go down the paradigm of talking about age in the cask, but what we instead do is age it for the right time in order to be able to give the clients the right balance of flavour and performance intensity.”
India’s hot climate has a major impact on maturation time, speeding up evaporation and increasing interaction with the cask. “What you get out of maturation in India is flavour intensity,” Damodaran says.
He wants return to the idea of blending being synonymous with ultimate luxury. “The reason why it’s rare is not driven by the age; the reason why it’s rare is driven by your infinite capability to personalise the spirit.”
“We’re not saying age is bad, all we’re saying is there is an alternative route for you to explore something just as bespoke and special,” he says. “It just gives us a parallel narrative.”
The programme is not just limited to whisky, either. Diageo India has a range of dark spirits, including brandies and rums, in these casks, all of which are available only to private clients. “None of these bottles are available for purchase off a retail shelf,” he says.
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Diageo has launched the new programme 10 years after its purchase of United Spirits in India. “One of the things that sets Diageo apart in India – and this was one of the advantages of having invested in United Spirits – is the long lineage that United Spirits as a company has had in India over the last 70 years.”
This has been a key motivation for the company, which has the “largest footprint of distilleries” and therefore “massive maturation capacity”. Each of its seven Indian sites, Damodaran says, plays to its own specific microclimate.
Damodaran wants to make one thing clear: “This is not a cask investment programme”. Instead, Diageo is offering a cask purchase programme. “What they see is what they get, and what they buy is what they take away with them. We don’t hold inventory, we don’t stock inventory, so it’s fundamentally a ready-for-sale and a made-to-order programme.”
Who is it for?
The India Rare Spirits Cask Programme is part of a wider company push towards premiumisation.
In 2022 Diageo India sold off 32 low-margin, locally produced brands to Inbrew Beverages. In the last few years, Damodaran says, “we’ve been launching an entire array of products that have been sitting on the top end of the price point”.
Godawan, Diageo’s single malt Indian whisky, is the first product to come out of this effort. After three and a half years, the brand is now sold in eight countries and available across India – no easy feat considering the country’s complex array of state liquor laws.
India’s expanding luxury market is growing, with disposable incomes and wealth creation also increasing. “People at the tip of the Indian economic iceberg are people with global exposure and whose needs transcend geography,” the company’s chief innovation officer says. The company is tapping into this growing group of wealthy individuals whose interest in luxury spirits is also on the rise.
One of the programme’s first clients was an “ultra high-net worth family” in Delhi looking for two custom casks. “The family was looking for something bespoke for their children’s weddings,” with both son and daughter getting married in December.
The family selected two casks and had their family crest engraved on the bottle, with an added experiential element thrown in. “We set up a bespoke bar and had one of our own brand ambassadors deliver the liquid to the guests at the wedding,” Damodaran explains. “It wasn’t just about buying a cask and getting it filled in a bottle. The entire experience of having something hyper-personalised and then being delivered in the form of an experience that their guests could engage with is what made it very special.”
High net worth Indian consumers aren’t the only target market. The India Rare Spirits Cask Programme is also targeted at global collectors looking for Indian spirits.
“We’re casting the net wide, working with a private concierge service based in London to source clients from outside of India. We’ve got initial interest from the UK, the US, Dubai and India,” Damodaran says.
Prices start at 30 lakhs, equivalent to approximately £26,000. Damodaran’s plan is to build a roster of at least 50 private clients in the first year and scale up the programme subsequently.
“It’s not a big number, but it’s a number that helps us validate the business case and platform itself, because it’s a fledgling idea in India.
Individual clients are just half of the story – Diageo India is also eyeing up custom bottling brands for its new ultra-luxury bottlings, and Damodaran cites both Berry Bros. & Rudd and Fortnum & Mason as businesses “we would love to work with”.
Ultimately, Damodaran wants the cask programme to be about “quiet luxury”. He says: “This is an offering that doesn’t scream ‘I’m a luxury product’. It screams ‘I’m an extremely personalised product’.”
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