Announcing the wWw Toronto Chapter Launch, Fall 2015!

Kate Simmie, wWw Toronto Chapter President. Photo Credit: MELISSA RENWICK / TORONTO STAR 

We're thrilled to announce that Women Who Whiskey will be launching our first Canadian chapter in Toronto this fall! 

Kate Simmie, Toronto Chapter President, will be leading the effort to launch and establish the new chapter. 

Our upcoming launch was featured in the Toronto Star this morning,  where Diana Hall talked to Kate about her plans for wWw Toronto. We're including an excerpt below, but you can read the full article here! 

Toronto chapter president Kate Simmie hopes her club — which she said will advertise largely through social media and word-of-mouth — will inspire women who didn’t know they could like anything other than vodka sodas to try new cocktails, like a well-crafted Manhattan.

“I do think it's important to offer a safe, fun, supportive environment for women to go out and try something. Maybe they hate it, and maybe they don’t want to drink it again, but maybe it opens their eyes to something new,” she said.

Donna Wolff, owner of The Caledonian, a Scottish pub and whisky bar in Little Italy, said women have been traditionally ignored as consumers.

“It’s all advertised to men. It’s a male-dominated drink,” Wolff said. “You never see whisky being (advertised) to women, but women love whisky, drink whisky, buy whisky, and it’s not ever advertised for us.”

But within the last five years, Wolff has seen women drinking whisky in droves. The pub offers monthly tastings and crams 60 eager attendees into her Women and Whisky tastings each month, she said.

In fact, Wolff says the monthly ladies’ tastings — at which a group of women informally test a variety of whiskies with a female distiller — have become so popular, The Caledonian has had to start a wait list for the events.

Both female-oriented and female—-driven whisky groups offer an element of education to their itineraries, but to Women Who Whiskey’s founder, changing condescending attitudes about women who order a whisky on the rocks is a secondary goal.

“First and foremost, I think it’s a social club,” Toffoli said. “Whisky is the glue that sort of holds everything together.”

Anyone interested in joining the ladies’ experimental whisky club can join the Women Who Whiskey mailing list for updates at womenwhowhiskey.club/join, or by emailing the Toronto chapter at wwwtorontochapter@gmail.com.