Louise McGuane and Jennifer Nickerson: Women making history
As two of the only female Irish whiskey business owners, the J.J. Corry and Tipperary distillery founders have joined forces to make history with a new limited edition release that has the capacity to change the category forever.
No book about the modern Irish whiskey industry would be complete without a chapter on Louise McGuane.
Having spent her entire career in drinks, including as global head of Diageo World Class and head of marketing for Veuve Cliquot and Nyetimber, she swapped wine for whiskey and in 2015 launched J.J. Corry, bringing whiskey bonding back to Ireland for the first time in 50 years.
She’s a visionary with a keen eye for excellent casks and exciting business deals. Her collaborations have embraced everything from the Fairfield Irish botanical spirits range with Mr. Lyan to a 32-year-old single malt in partnership with Last Drop Distillers, and even a Bourbon with Kentucky Owl.
Now her latest limited edition collaboration with long-time friend Jennifer Nickerson, co-founder of Tipperary Boutique Distillery in Clonmel, County Tipperary, is her biggest yet, rewriting the history books in more ways than one.
Making history: Nickerson and McGuane’s collaboration is a first for the Irish whiskey industry
J.J. Corry x Tipperary The Founders is not only the first collaboration between two female-founded Irish whiskey businesses, but as a vatted malt it’s thought to also be the first Irish whiskey to carry the classification on the label.
McGuane explains: “The terms ‘vatted malt’ and ‘blended malt’ don’t exist in the Irish whiskey technical file, so we approached the department of agriculture to tell them what we’re doing. To my knowledge, this is the first official Irish vatted malt and we’re the first to get approval in Ireland. We didn't know if we’d get permission or not, but we did. It’s been a while in the making.”
It’s a monumental step toward greater transparency in Irish whiskey, a notoriously loose category when it comes to definitions and identifying sourced liquid. It may be a limited edition run of just 264 bottles (132 in J.J. Corry livery and 132 in Tipperary), but the precedent it sets will help shape the Irish whiskey category in the 21st century and beyond.
The whiskey itself, launched to mark International Women’s Day 2024, is a 50:50 blend of PX Sherry-finished malt from J.J. Corry and malt whiskey matured by Tipperary in first-fill ex-Rioja casks. Blended malts are fairly common in Irish whiskey, but rarely is the fact stated on the label, and never before have two female-founded businesses joined forces in such a way.
Avoiding tokenism
“We always do something for IWD and every year everybody tots out a woman from somewhere, always at just this one time of the year,” explains McGuane. “Jen and I are two of the very few women physically making whiskey in Ireland, and we started at roughly the same time. J.J. Corry does a lot of collaborations anyway so I felt this made total sense to get together and physically make something.”
Nickerson, who co-founded Tipperary distillery with her father and husband in 2016, adds: “We could have just taken some photos of us together but we wanted to do something more significant that’s a physical embodiment of women in whisky.”
Two visionaries: McGuane and Nickerson share many common entrepreneurial traits
The pair began their respective whiskey businesses within a year of each other and quickly formed a bond. “There just aren’t many of us women in the Irish whiskey industry so you sort of just gravitate toward each other,” explains McGuane. “Jen will come over to my place and we’ll have a good moan about things. It’s hard to run a whiskey company so it’s nice to share problems, because a problem shared is a problem halved.”
Nickerson left her career as a chartered accountant and tax advisor with KPMG to follow her dream of running a whisky distillery, a passion shared with her father, Stuart Nickerson, one of the Scotch and Irish whiskey industries’ leading consultants.
“I grew up in the Scotch industry in the ‘80s and ‘90s,” explains Nickerson. “Back then the women would work in the bottling hall and as secretaries, but it was the men who had the offices, the big tables. They worked in the still houses and in blending. You wouldn’t get any cross over at all. Things have really changed since then though, you’d never have seen a female brand ambassador.”
Inspiring through leadership
Female representation in the Irish whiskey industry is gradually now increasing, thanks to the visibility of entrepreneurs like McGuane and Nickerson, whisky makers like Helen Mulholland (Lough Gill), Alex Thomas (Bushmills) and Lora Hemy (Roe & Co), as well as ambassadors like Janice Snowden (Bushmills) and J.J. Corry’s own Niamh McMahon.
Louise agrees: “|t’s gotten a lot better, and Helen Mulholland is a good example of this. She was at Bushmills for 30 years but you never heard of her until very recently. Now all the bigger businesses understand it’s a no brainer, Helen can come and be the spokesperson. People have wised up in that regard.”
Nickerson adds that representation is about more than just giving women credit for their work. “You have to see it to be it,” she says. “You have to see people in positions of leadership to have ambition to be that, and there needs to be more of it, not just in whiskey but all sorts of industries. We need to be pushing people forwards so they’re visible.”
One-of-a-kind: Bottles #1 of J.J Corry x Tipperary The Founders will be sold at auction
Neither McGuane nor Nickerson had a female mentor or role model in the whiskey industry when they started out, although they cite prominent women within the wine and finance industries they look up to. Having visible role models and mentors is something they agree is extremely important for anyone who aspires for a career in whiskey.
“Mentorship is extremely important, even if it’s indirect.” says McGuane. “I never had a direct mentor per se, but if you’re lucky enough to pick up an accidental one along the way at some point in your career, even if it’s in the background, it can have a lifelong impact. What the OurWhisky Foundation is doing with the mentorship programme is really important work.”
The Demeter Collection
Supporting mentorship is one of the reasons McGuane and Nickerson were so keen to get involved with the OurWhisky Foundation’s upcoming fundraising auction, the Demeter Collection, held in partnership with Whisky Auctioneer.
Bottles #1 of both the Tipperary and J.J. Corry Founders edition will form part of the Collection as one singular lot, although these two bottles have an additional significance in that the composition of the blends is slightly different (60:40 instead of 50:50, with each bottle’s recipe weighted in favour of each brand), making each one completely unique.
McGuane says: “The good that can be done through this auction is really interesting, and the opportunity to showcase something very special is cool. The work the Foundation is doing is so important I’d row in behind it, no matter what they did. If this was a sponsored swim, I’d be doing it.”
The Demeter Collection auction will run 29 March - 8 April 2024 at whiskyauctioneer.com.
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