Revolutionising organic spirit production

Mark Reynier C'80 is on a mission. After 20 years in the wine trade, and another 20 in whisky including relaunching the Bruichladdich Distillery on the Scottish island of Islay, he is on a crusade to create the most flavoursome, profound and natural spirits in the world.

It's all about provenance, whether barley or sugar cane, and the expression of the soils of the individual farms it comes from: terroir - that is the secret to his award-winning single malt. Waterford Distillery, which Mark created in Ireland in 2015, is now a 'cathedral of malt’ (blessed by Fr Kevin Taggart) with barley distilled and traceable to 100 conventional, organic and biodynamic different Irish farms - available as a Single Farm Origin, a single malt in its own right, or assembled together for maximum complexity as The Cuvée.

In its first 18 months in the market Waterford has been awarded Distillery of The Year 2021 & again for 2022, as well as Brand Innovator of the Year.

With the success of his single malt whisky production, Mark turned his attention to rum, building Renegade Rum on the Caribbean island of Grenada with an all-female distilling team. Here the focus is also on the terroir with Renegade growing 200 acres of sugar cane on 12 farms including a volcano, the freshly milled cane juice being key to the flavour.

As Mark explains, "Terroir, that fantastic 3 dimensional interaction of soil, microclimate and topography on a crop, is the combination of biological, geographical and chemical processes that have influenced my business from wine to whisky to rum”. Those physical geography lessons and "tedious" double biology at Worth clearly helped!

You can read more about Mark and his career in the 2020 issue of The Blue Paper.

Waterford Whisky can be found at Berry Brothers, The Whisky Exchange, Royal Mile Whiskies, Joroboams & other whisky specialists, and pre-cask Renegade Rum is also now available at Royal Mile Whiskies.