George Dickel, Say What?

Lest no one think my gripes about bullshit in the marketing of spirits products are limited to micro-distilleries, here's a shot at Diageo, the world's biggest booze company.

I was working on some follow up to my December post about the George Dickel No. 8 shortage for my newsletter, The Bourbon Country Reader, which got me looking at several sources, including the history section of the Dickel web site.

Diageo seems to be engaging in some revisionist history on Dickel's behalf. They now have George and his wife, Augusta, visiting Tullahoma in 1867, where he dreams about "creating the finest, smoothest sippin’ whisky," and then "In 1870, Dickel’s dream came true, and a company which bore his name was opened at Cascade Hollow, Tennessee."

Both, based on everything else I can find out about Dickel's history, appear to be complete fabrications.

One purpose seems to be to obliterate both the independent history of the Cascade Distillery (which was, by all accounts, established in 1877 and never actually owned by Dickel) and diminish the role of the Shwab family (which the Dickel web site misspells as Schwab, like the stock broker), much like Four Roses has built up John Paul Jones at the expense of Rufus Rose.