Waterford’s Reynier: “I’ve Got Myself to Blame”

“I’m not going to point the finger at anybody or moan or blame anybody, it’s my business plan, it was my project and my idea, and I was the one driving it…I’ve got myself to blame.”

Waterford Distillery founder Mark Reynier, speaking a week after his maverick Irish distillery went into receivership, still has a passion for the Waterford concept of making whiskies that focus on terroir. He hopes to raise enough money from investors to buy the distillery and its stocks of maturing whisky when bids are due in January.

Reynier says rising interest rates put the distillery on weak financial ground. Waterford secured a €45 million line of credit from HSBC Bank in January of 2023 to re-finance its existing debt and provide capital for distilling. However, interest rates jumped to 5.25%, making it impossible to repay the bank given lagging whisky sales worldwide. The bank appointed receivers last Wednesday and closed the distillery, with plans to either sell it as an ongoing business or sell off the assets, including the whisky stocks and a state of the art distillery.

“Not my greatest hour…I’ve felt better, I can tell you,” Reynier said. “Part of it is that feeling that you’ve let everybody down, and yeah, you can point to going to market the day before lockdown, you can point at our investment in America, you can point at the constipation of the market, the de-stocking that’s been going on post-COVID, the cost of living crisis, interest rates, all of that…but it all happened at the same time…when you’ve got no meat on the bone because you haven’t been able to make a run at it, that’s the problem,” he said.

Without giving a number, Reynier said he’s working with investors to make a bid for the distillery. “I know what we’ve created, I know how good it is, I know what we’ve got maturing away, I know how close we are…”

The full interview with Mark Reynier can be heard on the next episode of WhiskyCast.