The whiskey bonder

I was living in Singapore and I was working for a really big multinational and I realised the future of the family farm wasn’t necessarily hugely secure because my dad farms but I don’t farm and my brother doesn’t farm,” Louise McGuane confides. This seems to be the catalyst that brought Louise home to Cooraclare after working all over the world with large drinks companies for over 20 years.

On her father, PJ’s, beef and dairy farm, Louise established her business, The Chapel Gate Irish Whiskey Company, and on 1 December 2016, she became the first licenced whiskey bonder in Ireland.

“We brought back the lost art of Irish whiskey bonding and I built a purpose-built maturation facility and it’s just on a piece of land on the farm. We are located about a quarter mile from the Atlantic coast,” she explains.

In the 1800s, Ireland had hundreds of distilleries, every town had their local distillery and bonders were publicans or grocers who would go to the distillery, fill up their barrels and bring them back to their land or shop to mature.

This all stopped and by the 1920s there were only four distilleries left in the country.

“It [bonding] completely died out and with it went a lot of styles of regional whiskey. About 80% of whiskey’s flavour comes from the cask it is aged in and the place where the cask is aged. So my whiskey maturing on the farm in west Clare will be totally different to a whiskey maturing in a warehouse in Dublin, for example,” Louise explains.

In nearby Kilrush, the local bonder was a shop owner named JJ Corry. Louise has resurrected the brand and will be selling her whiskey with JJ’s label.

She places an emphasis on the fact that she is not trying to be him, but just wants to bring the brand back.

History

It is clear that history is important to this Clare lady and she believes it is really important for whiskey too.

“The value of provenance in whiskey is enormous and there is no better provenance than the McGuane family farm in Cooraclare. It is a stunning location. It matters to the maturation of the whiskey, you know, so I am very fortunate to have that. People buy provenance but I was born with it,” she tells us.

Louise plans on using her expert knowledge in the drinks industry and her own heritage, the family farm, to grow a global brand.

“I am going to grow a global whiskey brand and every bottle has the name Cooraclare on the label, so in 10 or 15 years’ time that’s going to be a name known globally and that is going to result in additional tourism, additional revenue for local people, so it is great to be back and I am glad to be contributing to the community,” she says.

“I am a really firm believer in enterprise being the key thing that will keep rural Ireland alive, you know? And I like having the opportunity to do my part in that,” she says.

Quality

It sounds like Louise has perhaps learned a thing or two from her father about quality when you hear her speak of his progressive nature and the emphasis he places on the quality of his beef and milk produce.

“He would have been experimenting very early with different grass varieties and that sort of stuff. He has a very interesting bloodline with his stock as well. He has been finessing his bloodline for 50 years, so he is a small-scale farmer but has super-high quality.”

Good-quality whiskey needs three years and one month to mature and her whiskey has spent one year maturing on the farm. Next year, she plans on laying down a new whiskey in her rackhouse. For now, she has sourced another mature whiskey that will be ready to hit the shelves in September and will be called JJ Corry’s The Gale, after a bicycle he invented. Look out for it.

For more information, see www.chapelgatewhiskey.com.