Grey Goose was created by 77 year old Sidney Frank in the 1990s.
Already a household name thanks to his work with Jacques Cardin and Jägermeister (in which he somehow managed to make a liqueur popular as an after-dinner digestif in Central Europe become the party favourite of youth culture), he could have quite comfortably retired then.
But he didn’t. Instead, he sought to exploit what he recognised as a gap in the spirits market - that there was no premium vodka that was being presented as a status item.
Grey Goose came about when he sent executives from the Sidney Frank Importing Company to France, firm in his belief that the French create the best in everything. François Thibault, a Maître de Chai (Cellar Master) from Cognac, was appointed to develop the Grey Goose recipe in 1997.
With his method, Grey Goose Vodka became the first vodka to be created in the Maître de Chai tradition, which allows aromas to be produced in the distillation process specific to the vodka.
Grey Goose was named the best-tasting vodka in the world by the Beverage Testing Institute in 1998. Frank's ability to market his spirit as a drink of the economic elite brought incredible success.
Grey Goose sold more than 1.5 million cases in 2014 to become the best-selling premium brand vodka in the United States. In August that year, it was subsequently sold to Bacardi for $2.2 billion.
Grey Goose's owners may have changed, but the original Grey Goose recipe is still the same today, and Thibault continues to oversee its creation.
Grey Goose is made using 100% French ingredients. The soft winter wheat (which has an additional four months of growth compared to summer wheat), for example, is grown in Picardy. The wheat is then fermented continuously over six cascading tanks, producing the wash, which is then distilled into spirit using a five-step process in this same region, north and east of Paris. Finally, the distillate is sent to Cognac to be blended with natural spring lined with limestone 150 meters below the blending facility, providing calcium-rich spring water, before it is bottled.
Grey Goose has many points of interest, from its handsome bottles to its interesting flavoured varieties. Grey Goose serves as a great example of how important understanding the market and being passionate about provenance truly is, and its rise to the status of trendy, premium vodka is a testament to this fact.