By Richard Thomas
(Credit score: Richard Thomas)
The Thanksgiving weekend was marred for bourbon followers by the announcement on Thursday that Kentucky Owl’s dad or mum firm was in chapter court docket. Stoli Group, finest often known as the house owners of Stoli Vodka but additionally house owners of Kentucky Owl and different manufacturers, filed for Chapter 11 chapter in a Texas court docket on Wednesday. They listed over $100 million in belongings, however between $50 and $100 million in liabilities.
Chapter 11 is the kind of chapter the place an organization or particular person seeks safety from collectors from the courts, granting them respiration room to reorganize, dump belongings or search new traces of financing/funding. Entities coming into Chapter 11 ultimately intend to emerge from chapter capable of meet some or all of their obligations.
That is the third chapter from a whiskey firm within the latter half of this 12 months. In August, the longest working whisky distillery in Sweden, Mackmyra, went into receivership. They have been later rescued from chapter in October. Earlier this week, phrase got here from Eire that Waterford Distillery was apparently in default, having been put into receivership on the behest of its bankers.
The Stoli announcement is completely different, nevertheless, in that Stoli’s portfolio is far bigger than Mackmyra and Waterford, each of which have been impartial whisky-makers. Kentucky Owl is a sourced model owned by a bigger liquor firm, and Stoli itself blames its monetary predicament not on Kentucky Owl, however on a hunch of their wine gross sales.
The model was based in 1879 by Charles Dedman, who constructed a distillery and launched The Wiseman Bourbon. The Kentucky Owl and its related manufacturers went defunct throughout Prohibition, to be revived in 2014 by Charles Dedman’s descendant, Dixon Dedman. The sourced bourbon model was bought by Stoli in 2017; Dedman stayed on as a model ambassador, however his associate left the corporate after the acquisition. Dedman adopted a number of years later, collaborating within the basis of the two XO bourbon model. Stoli employed on Maureen Robertson, just lately retired from Diageo, as Grasp Blender in 2023, and introduced plans to develop a Nelson County, Kentucky quarry website into a brand new distillery complicated in 2022. Regardless of repeated bulletins that the $150 million mission is on monitor, it’s effectively behind it’s schedule as said first in 2020 after which once more in 2022.
