John Hall

The Path

Work across wine and whisky marks John Hall’s career more than any single role. At Chateau Gai in Ontario, he worked as a winemaker until 1992, learning the slow mechanics of fermentation, blending, and timing. That grounding carried into Kittling Ridge Wines & Spirits, which he founded in 1992 and ran through 2012, then into Forty Creek Distillery, which he founded in 2012. The through-line is not reinvention for its own sake, but a steady transfer of skills from one liquid format to another.

The Work Today

At Forty Creek Distillery in Grimsby, John Hall has worked as whisky maker since 2014, a role built on selection, adjustment, and restraint. The named releases tied to his work — Forty Creek Three Grain, Port Wood Reserve, Copper Pot Reserve, and Forty Creek Canadian Cream Whisky — show the range available inside a distilling program that still has to hold together as a whole. The 2012 releases matter because they show the point at which whisky became a wider field of experimentation for him. Port Wood Reserve, Copper Pot Reserve, and Forty Creek Canadian Cream Whisky all belong to that year, when Hall described the work as “a new creative canvas to paint on,” with flavour profiles, different grains, and ageing techniques as the variables at hand. That is a practical distiller’s view: the craft sits in how those elements are controlled, not in treating them as separate effects.

Signature

John's signature wines include Forty Creek Barrel Select, Forty Creek Three Grain, Port Wood Reserve, Copper Pot Reserve, and Forty Creek Canadian Cream Whisky.

In Their Words “I was looking forward to having a new creative canvas to paint on – exploring flavour profiles, different grains, ageing techniques.” “I had always been interested, all along. In fact, when I first graduated, I wanted to work for a whisky distiller. But unfortunately, they didn’t hire me. So I became a winemaker instead.”