WINTER 2017
George School I N N O V A T O R S
Meredith Meyer Grelli ’03 BRINGING TOGETHER PEOPLE OF ALL STRIPES TO CREATE COMMUNITY
“It’s hard to innovate if consumers don’t come along for the ride.”
Sometimes being innovative means going back to the way things were done a long time ago and giving it a contemporary twist. In 2010, Meredith Meyer Grelli ’03 and her family were inspired to open a craft distillery in Pittsburgh after visiting vineyards around Niagara on the Lake. The culmination of family ideas and ideals— not to mention her and husband Alex’s experience in food, drink, and community development— became Wigle Whiskey, the city’s first new distillery since Prohibition. Originally, western Pennsylvania was home to 4,000 distilleries, each making its own brand of rye whiskey. But Prohibition brought about their demise.
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By the time Wigle (pronounced “wiggle”) opened in December 2011, the industry had consolidated so much that all rye whiskey sold in state liquor stores came from just two major producers. “We were living through the most uninteresting spirits environment,” she explains. Just as opening a distillery in Pittsburgh was novel, so were Wigle’s goals: to not only make whiskey and profits, but “to support the community, economic, and agricultural systems on which we depend” while engaging and educating consumers. Today 100,000 visitors a year come for tours and tastings as well as to frequent fundraisers and other community programs. Wigle is committed to using only certified organic grain (it’s the largest buyer of organic grain in Pennsylvania) and to transparency about its distilling practices. Then there is the innovation of the products themselves—mostly whiskey, but also other spirits—to which Wigle devotes considerable resources. It does this in three ways: through a yearlong course Meredith teaches at Chatham University, that takes students through a stagegate process to develop new products; through Whiskey Whim, a fast-cycle (monthly) experimental whiskey; and by “tinkering with the current portfolio for continuous improvement.”