Austin Nichols Wild Turkey Distillery

In 1940, a distillery executive by the name of Thomas McCarthy inadvertently established the brand name Wild Turkey. An avid sportsman, he gathered with friends each year to hunt wild turkey on a South Carolina estate. Naturally, he was asked to bring the whiskey and each year his friends would ask for more of that ‘Wild Turkey Bourbon’. He realized he had a winning brand and so in 1942 Austin Nichols began to market Wild Turkey Bourbon.

The story of Wild Turkey begins in 1851 when James and John Ripy arrived in Kentucky from Tyrone, Ireland, and opened a store selling general goods. They settled beneath the limestone cliffs of the Kentucky river and built their first distillery there in 1869. Business boomed until Prohibition in 1919 when the distillery’s output was reduced to very small quantities of Bourbon to be sold for medical use by the wholesale grocer Austin Nichols. After the repeal of Prohibition the distillery was modernised, output increased and Austin Nichols shed its grocery business to concentrate on wines and spirits, especially Bourbon.