What happened in the years after The Wild Geese launched was not what Andre and Mairade had expected. They had expected competition. The drinks industry is competitive. What they had not expected was a direct attempt to shut them out of the category they had helped create.
Pernod Ricard, the second largest drinks conglomerate in the world and owner of Jameson Irish Whiskey — a brand named after a Scotsman — refused to supply The Wild Geese with whiskey unless Andre and Mairade agreed not to sell The Wild Geese in markets where Jameson was selling. Other brands were being supplied without such conditions. The message was clear. The ambition that The Wild Geese represented for Irish whiskey — and the story it was determined to tell — was a threat.
Andre and Mairade refused.
What followed was more than twenty-five legal actions filed against them across multiple markets, amounting to over fifty individual hearings. The claim in every case was the same: that The Wild Geese caused confusion with Pernod’s brand, Wild Turkey. In none of those actions was any evidence produced to support that claim. What the geography made plain was something else entirely. Wild Turkey had 85 per cent of its global sales concentrated in three countries. In one of those countries, Japan, The Wild Geese was never challenged. The actions were filed precisely where Jameson was selling.
They accused Andre and Mairade of acting in bad faith. The pattern of where they chose to fight told a different story.
Andre and Mairade did not back down. They fought back in the tradition of The Wild Geese — two people against the second largest drinks company in the world, measured in billions of revenue. More than fifty hearings. Not one defeat.
That is the origin of UNTAMED — a word that referred to the history of Ireland and to two people who had not merely studied those stories. They had lived them.
