Image – Sullivans Cove Distillery
Patrick Maguire is one of the Australian whisky industry’s pioneering figures. He got his start 22 years ago as a distiller for the fledgling Tasmania Distillery in Hobart, the city he was born and raised in.
A few years later, with several investors, he took ownership of Sullivans Cove and set about producing the best possible whisky he could.
His efforts received the ultimate reward when Sullivans Cove French Oak was awarded world’s best in 2014. For his work in developing Tasmanian whisky, he was then inducted into the Whisky Hall of Fame in 2018.
You’d never guess any of this when talking to Pat. Humble and quietly spoken, his manner belies the steely determination and grit he’s shown to create one of the world’s great whiskies.
In recent times, he’s taken a more ambassadorial role at Sullivans as the next generation, lead by head distiller Heather Tillott, moves the brand into the future, right back to the eponymous cove where it all started.
At Oz Whisky Review, we’ve been trying to give readers a more detailed portrait of Australia’s most sought-after whisky brand, and below is an edited extract of a phone chat I had with Pat looking back over the last two decades he’s spent helping to build the Tasmanian whisky industry.
Is there a bit of a changing of the guard happening in Tasmanian whisky at the moment, with yourself, Bill Lark and Casey Overeem playing more background roles, and Mark Littler [Hellyers Road] moving on? There’s now a new brigade coming through, which must excite you.
I was around the whole thing when it first started. And back in those days, in a way, we had no idea what we were doing. As far as the industry goes, there wasn’t one, and it was very difficult getting people to even show an interest.
Now it’s totally different. There’s so many distilleries around the country, and not only distilleries, there’s so many things that have developed around the industry. It’s actually become an industry in that time.
To see where everything has got to and the people coming through now, it’s amazing. I’m quite stunned by it all to be honest.
The original Tasmania Distillery location at the old Gasworks.
On the early 1990s history of Tasmanian whisky, the Hosken era of Sullivans Cove, Brian Poke and Franklin Distillery – I find that history fascinating, all the hard graft that was done to get Tasmanian whisky to where it is now. Do you think that history should be discussed more to put the present into perspective?
I think the history of these things is good to understand, but not to the point where it becomes a distraction. I think we’ve got to tip our hats to the people who started it off, all the people who were there right at the start. If it wasn’t for them doing these things, as crazy as they might have been at the time, then we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing today.
But I think we’ve got to look to the future and really hone our skills, and aim to be true competitors in the world of whisky and distilling, making credible products that have a good chance of getting on the world stage.
At the moment, most Australian distilleries don’t produce a lot of volume. There are a handful around the country now that produce some sort of volume, but we’re all still tiny compared to what they do in places like Scotland, America and so on. I’m not quite sure at the moment if we need to become giant producers of whisky, if that’s the future for the industry.
I kind of believe that the niche market with high quality products is the way to go for us here in Australia, because we’re a long way from the world’s markets. To me there’s no point competing in the bottom end of the market.
Sullivans Cove Distillery. Photo – Natalie Mendham
In saying that, do you think there’s space for more affordable Tasmania whisky, say a blend, at that $60-$90 range, just to get consumers into the category that mightn’t ever spend $150+ on a bottle of whisky?
Blended whiskies are a very important part of the whole whisky range. Most people drink blends, and have done so historically, and they also make up by far the majority of whiskies produced, particularly in Scotland.
I think it’s an important part of the market, because more people will take the chance on trying some Australian whisky if there’s a $60-$80 bottle.
And if they’re good quality spirits, and people like them, why shouldn’t we be producing them? People can’t afford to buy the higher price single malts all the time. As long as they’ve got Australian whisky in the cupboard, I’ve got no problem with that at all, I think it’s all a part of the mix.
Returning to the high quality side of the equation then, one thing I’ve always wondered is whether or not there was a point when you realised that the whisky you were maturing at Sullivans Cove was turning into something pretty special? Was there a moment?
Yeah, I guess there was. Because we’d spent a lot of time sort of getting nowhere [laughs]. The whisky that we’d filled into these barrels was pretty good (I guess we would think that).
But I can remember sitting in the warehouse one day looking at all these barrels and thinking, ‘What the hell have we done?’ We’ve made all this whisky and we can’t sell it. What are we going to do?
And we stopped producing for a while. I think we got to about a thousand barrels and we weren’t really selling anything and we thought, well, we better stop producing and put some money into marketing instead.
And then things changed. We won a couple of awards. Jim Murray gave us a few high scores and awards, and that created a little bit of interest.
We started to get some traction in the market in Australia, but we got more interest overseas initially. We were selling into Europe, Canada and the U.S. far more than we were selling here.
The Europeans and the North Americans have been drinking single malt for a long time and understood it, and they thought, hmm, this is good whisky, we’ll buy it, and they did, and that’s where it really started taking off around 2008-9. The Australian market didn’t really understand it that well at the time.
And then when we won world’s best whisky in 2014, that’s when the shit hit the fan really, and it just took off from there. It showed that we were capable of making good quality spirits in Australia, and everybody was a bit surprised by that.
I did think it was going to be a five minute wonder and then die down and go away. But it never did. And that surprised me. That was when I was really reassured that we’d done a good job and made a good product.
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The other thing I wanted to talk about was the creation of the Sullivans core range. Do you think the core range was one of the reasons for some of your success? Should other Tassie and Australian producers look to offer consumers something similar?
I think it was important for us at the time, even though what we were doing at our level was very small scale.
But we were trying to bring out and exploit the individual flavours of each cask. We didn’t want to go down the path of everything tasting the same. So we put together the single cask American Oak, French Oak and the Double Cask, and we just stuck to that for a long time.
You listen to your customers. And going to all the whisky shows, I kept on hearing that consumers had become comfortable with our consistency and our branding – even though there was variation between casks, they knew what they were going to get, and they could recognise us straight away. That’s what I was trying to achieve, and it gave some consistency to what was an emerging industry and category.
It might be a different story now. Because there is a strong market here in Australia now, and globally consumers are looking for different things. They’re experimenting a lot with what’s out there, so maybe it’s not so important these days. But at the time I think it was crucial.
With a lot of Scottish blends and single malts, they’re all blended to taste the same, so you know what you’re buying is the same, and that is a very sensible thing to do. Each single cask, each barrel, was different, and that’s what we were trying to say.
Early bottlings of the updated Sullivans Cove core range
The other important decision you made was to consistently fill into larger format casks. It might have seemed like a minor decision at the time, but it’s proved crucial since. Would you like to see Australian producers using larger format casks and being more patient before releasing their whisky?
Once again, I go back to the early days, and at that stage I thought our market would probably be Asia, because it’s closer to us and people there like their whisky. So I did a tour around Asia looking at what those markets wanted, with a few bottles of whisky in my suitcase.
Everywhere I went, people tasted the whisky and said, that’s really nice, and it was seven year old Sullivans Cove whisky at the time matured in large format barrels. And they said, look, we love the packaging, and the whisky you’ve got in these bottles is great, but come back when you’re 12 years old. And I thought, shit, twelve years old!
But it was the strong message I got wherever I went. And whisky festivals that I did in other places around the world, I got the same message – the whisky needs more age, it wasn’t quite developed yet.
Did you also think that it wasn’t developed yet? Did you agree with what you were hearing from customers at that time?
Well, I was looking at the Scottish model. And in those days, 10 year old, 12 year old whiskies were common, and I thought, well, there’s a reason they’re doing that, a part from it being purely commercial.
These days they’re bottling a lot earlier. But for their good stuff, you’re looking at 10 to 12 years old. They’re also using larger format barrels and going for age, so that to me was the obvious thing to be aiming for. The Scots have been doing that for a long time, so why wouldn’t you adopt that model?
What we were putting into bottle at that stage, we went to a lot of trouble, and still do, to select every barrel.
Even though you’ve got a dozen of the same barrels sitting in the same rack for years, they’ll all mature differently and hit their peak at different times and moments. So our job was to choose each individual barrel when it was ready to bottle, not just because it turns 10 or 12 something years old. We let the barrels tell us when they’re ready.
Some barrels will mature a lot earlier than others. Some barrels at eight and nine years old will have already developed their complexity and texture, but others take a lot longer. So you’ve got to take your time and cherry pick the right ones.
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I would like to see Australia head more in that direction. To go for larger format barrels, to go for time in maturation. Because as I said before, if we’re going to compete we can’t do it on volume and low price, we need to do it on quality. And to get that quality, you need the time.
You can get very good whisky out of small barrels in a short amount of time. They taste good, but I don’t think they have everything that a whisky needs: that texture, that creaminess, that consistency that you get out of large barrels and time.
Some of these decisions have resulted in some seriously high prices for a bottle of Australian single malt. Do you think it’s unfortunate that Sullivans doesn’t have a whisky available for under $200? And with some consumers frustrated by the increasing price of Sullivans Cove, is their frustration justified?
They’re very interesting questions [laughing]. We wrestle with that a lot.
But prices are driven by the market, not by us.
One of the reasons I developed the Double Cask, back in 2006 or so, was, with excise going up twice a year every year and the cost of everything we were doing increasing, it was a struggle to keep the price of our whiskies under $100.
So one of the reasons I put the Double Cask out at 40% ABV was to try and keep one of our lines under $100 as long as I possibly could. But eventually excise beat us, and once you go over the $100 mark, then if it’s $102 or $150, it sort of doesn’t really matter.
But I was desperately trying to keep it under $100, because that price was a real barrier for a lot of people.
But once we’d won a few major awards, the demand for the product just went through the roof and didn’t slow down.
After our first award, I rang around to some wineries who’d won similar trophies and asked people at those wineries what we should do. They all warned me, don’t put your prices up, you’ll kill it. So we didn’t, we held our prices, and didn’t put them up at all for about 18 months.
But everyone else around us pushed the prices up. At all the retailers, the price of our whisky went up, and we were getting concerned.
Photo – Sullivans Cove
We can’t control the price a retailer wants to sell our whisky for, obviously you can’t do that. So the market dictates the price, not us. And all the way along, we had resisted putting the prices up.
But when you see – and back in those days we might have been selling our whisky for $150 a bottle – other people selling it for $400, $500, and you’d think, how can they do that? But, the market was there, the demand was there.
So gradually, over time, we have brought our prices up because we thought, well, why shouldn’t we get a better price for our own product?
And since those days, Sullivans Cove now has whiskies that are 18 to 20 years old, and that’s extremely unusual in the Australian context. They’ve only got a handful of those barrels left. So if you want some of that older stuff, you’ve gotta pay for it, basically. Because all that time, all those years sitting in the barrel, you’ve got to cover the cost of that, and the loss of that whisky to the angels.
But we also don’t want to be too ridiculous. At the end of the day, it’s a bottle of whisky, and it’s made to be enjoyed, not to be locked in a safe to never see the light of day.
The whole thing around pricing is a fascinating discussion, and it’s a difficult course to navigate.
I always wanted our whiskies to be at that ultra premium end of the market, and I think we’ve achieved that, which is great. But it’s a really complicated thing to do.
You’ve got to see that it’s value for money. Our customers have got to be happy. And if they’re not, they won’t buy the whisky. They’ll walk.
Clearly, they’re very happy!
Well [laughing], the way I look at is, if you’re getting a high price for your product, whatever it is, it has to be a quality product, it has to be value for money. The price tag has to fit. And if you’re making a Rolls Royce, why would you sell it a Holden price?
Fair play. So what do you think the industry has to do now to continue to thrive and grow? Are there any key things that you think established and emerging distilleries need to do to keep driving the industry forward?
One of the most important things we can do now is to educate ourselves better about the products that we’re making.
I think we need to create opportunities for people to get an education in how to make various spirits, so they can get a qualification and gain the experience needed to produce high quality spirits. I think that would help the industry a lot.
If we’re going to be credible in what we’re doing into the future, we need to create a good education system to back it, so that we can get quality people working in these businesses at various levels.
… we need to be able to tell an Australian story with the whisky that we’re making. We don’t want to be seen as some sort of offshoot of Scotch. We need an Australian accent to what we do.
And we need to be able to tell an Australian story with the whisky that we’re making. We don’t want to be seen as some sort of offshoot of Scotch. We need an Australian accent to what we do. We’re already seeing that in our gins, where distillers are using various native botanicals, which I think is brilliant.
I’m fascinated by the idea of producing an Australian whisky from native grains. It might take 50 or 100 years to get there, but why not go on the journey? It’d be brilliant if we could do that sort of thing.
Definitely. Alright, a final one. You’re going to be marooned somewhere and you can only take one bottle of whisky, the Sullivans American Oak or the Sullivans French Oak, which one is it going to be?
That’s easy for me, it would be the American Oak. I’ve always had a fondness for that one.
It’s a more simple whisky in terms of flavour and structure in some ways, but as a distiller, it’s closer to what comes out of the still. I can still get that in the American Oak.
The spirit itself is structured just the same as the French Oak, but the American is uncomplicated, it’s straightforward.
The French Oak is a beautiful whisky, and has all that richness and depth that the fortified wine from the previous cask brings. But the American Oak is just simpler and cleaner, and as a distiller, I prefer that.