Why Dingle Gold should find a place behind the bar of a cruise ship

It’s surprising what gems turn up on Twitter from time to time. I found @DingleSpirit among the new users this weekend, and immediately assumed it was a new identity for David Dingle CBE (left), the chief executive of cruise conglomerate Carnival UK.
As boss of the company which runs Cunard and P&O in this country and P&O Australia, he has been on Twitter for a while, as @david_dingle, although he is not exactly an ardent user; he has so far managed to post only two messages – the first was back at the beginning of July when he provided a link to a set of pictures from P&O’s 175th Birthday event in Southampton.
Had he, I wondered, embraced a new identity which would put new life into the promotion of his brands during National Cruise Week.
Closer examination proved this was not the case. I discovered @DingleSpirit was created by a whiskey distillery which is being established in the wonderful Irish town of Dingle, County Kerry, in the far south-west of Ireland.
It’s an artisan affair set up by Oliver Hughes, who has created the Porterhouse Brewing Company, a small chain which has expanded from Ireland to add pubs in Covent Garden, London and Fraunces Tavern in the financial district of New York.
Leaving aside the secretive and illicit producers of poteen, The Dingle distillery will be a minnow compared with Ireland’s three other whiskey production centre, which are all operated by multi-national giants.
Production is about to start, supervised by Scotch whisky expert John McDougall, and it will be four or five years before its first bottles of Dingle Green (in Bourbon casks) and Dingle Gold (from Sherry casks) are ready for drinking.
“I’ve been planning this distillery for a good few years now,” Hughes told The Spirits Business. “There’s a lot of whisky distilleries in Scotland which attract whisky tourism, but what do we have? We have three whiskey distilleries, all of them part of the biggest drinks companies in the world and none of them Irish. I felt this has to provide an opportunity for us.
“We pioneered craft beer in this country and people thought we were mad trying to take on Guinness and Diageo. They all said we wouldn’t succeed, and we did. We’re now applying the same principle here.”
It would be a shame if some of the first bottles were not available on David Dingle’s Cunard and P&O ships. And if he can’t wait until they have matured, perhaps he could start with Dingle Original gin and Dingle Distillery vodka, which are also about to enter production.
So how about it, David? Will you be asking your food and beverage managers to organise a tasting?