Pappyland

by Wright Thompson

  “Every once in a while you’ll hear them sounds,” Lou said, “but I’m cool with it.”

  “So you’re living where the bottling room was?” Julian asked.

  “No,” Lou said. “Actually, you see that little porch up there, under the door right there. . . . I’m in that little storage room.”

  “Yeah, that’s where the bottled whiskey, we would store it,” Julian said.

  A backwoods Narnia awaited. If you ran a militia, it would be your dream home. Lou led us through a small door into the apartment he’d built himself out of nothing. The creative engineering on display was incredible. He’d insulated it and built walls where none existed and had a couch and a television and a bed and everything they needed to live.

  “Julian, that’s what I wanted you to see,” Defino said. “I threw plywood on that and studded the walls and insulated them and made me a little trap door to where I could go out and around.”

  It looked like something built by a hillbilly Robinson Crusoe or a mountain holler Swiss Family Robinson, such a strange combination of slapdash amateur make-do-ism combined with a real frontier proficiency.

  “That is amazing,” Julian said. “This guy is handier than a pocket in a shirt.”

  “This does not compute,” Preston said.

  Something else occurred to me, looking from Julian and Preston to Lou and back again. No matter how polished Julian seemed now, he once lived Lou’s life, out in this holler on a backwoods road. Lou’s day-to-day grind was once Julian’s. Julian remembered a few times when he actually said a prayer to his dead father, asking for help. There were a lot of low moments he left buried out here, or at least he thought he did. During his time in Lawrenceburg, he’d grown further away from Pappy and a lot closer than he cared to admit to Lou.

  Defino snapped us back to the conversation.

  “Julian, are you still at Buffalo?” he asked.

  “Yeah, it’s going well,” Julian said.

  “You bottlin’ your whiskey?” Defino asked.

  “Yeah, they are making it, bottling it, everything,” Julian said. “It’s a good deal. I came out well on that, as far as not having to do all this shit anymore.”

  Defino smiled. He understood. “Johnny Cash said, ‘If you put the screws to me I’m gonna screw right out the bottom of it,’” he said with a laugh.

  18

  THIS IS WHERE JULIAN WAS WORKING when he got the call that would change his life. This is where he stopped being a guy like Lou and started to become some sort of cultural icon. He remembers the phone call perfectly. It was from a woman named Patty. She worked at what is now Diageo and called to tell Julian that they had excess whiskey for sale. The company was unloading its bourbon: from shutting down the Stitzel-Weller plant to shedding its famous brands to trying to find buyers for the barrels in its warehouses. The big corporation didn’t know what it had; it got rid of the old machines and Pappy’s living yeast. Bourbon was part of its past, and so these barrels needed to go. They were priced as low as $200 each. For an entire barrel. Julian flipped page after page and wondered why an enormous corporation with lawyers and accountants and vice presidents and meetings and conference calls didn’t see the same value he saw on those pages. Until then, Julian had been buying barrels from the Old Boone distillery and bottling that as Old Rip Van Winkle. Every now and then he’d get some barrels of Stitzel-Weller and put them out under a special label, including the best whiskey I’ve ever personally tasted, sitting at his kitchen island, a 1968 distillation that was bottled as Family Reserve in 1984. Bourbon heads will recognize the label as being nearly similar to the one he uses now for the Van Winkle rye.

  Patty needed to move product. In hindsight, United Distillers took a huge bank vault of money and lit it on fire. The truth is, nobody understood what they had given up and what, in those thousands of barrels they were using as part of the Crown Royal blend, they still had. But Julian did. That was the taste of his youth, and the last pieces he could hold of his father and grandfather. Fine, aged wheated bourbon was his family’s legacy—that’s what he was really trying to protect. “Of course I believed in it because it was really good,” he said. “That’s when I got excited, because I tasted that whiskey. I was bottling Old Boone and all this other shit. I tasted the Stitzel-Weller stuff that Master Distiller Ed Foote was making since we sold the distillery and it was awesome.”

  Looking at this list of barrels, he knew what he needed to do. Each barrel, depending on evaporation, was good for ten to eighteen cases of whiskey. He called a local banker looking for a loan, offering the stock he’d inherited from his father as collateral. The first banker refused, saying these barrels weren’t worth the money they’d have to loan Julian to buy them. Finally, after making his case, he got someone to extend him a line of credit and he began buying up as many barrels as he could afford. In the bottling of it he felt he should pay respect to his family and to the distillery that made this beautiful whiskey, so he named his brand Van Winkle Family Reserve and put Pappy’s picture on the label. “The first year we bottled the 20-year-old it was awesome,” Julian said, “and I was like making eggnog with 20-year-old Pappy. I felt really guilty but boy it was really good eggnog. I had cases of this stuff sitting around and it was so good. I couldn’t believe how good it was, because this was 20-year-old Stitzel-Weller bourbon not stored on a top floor, but the cooler floors. We don’t have anything like that anymore because it’s gone.”

  That’s how it happened. He survived. Being in Lawrenceburg with Julian is so powerful and hard to explain, because his relief at his survival pours off him. His father ran out of time, same as mine, but this place is where Julian made his own time. He’d held on long enough for someone to come looking for a man who always makes fine bourbon, at a profit if he can, at a loss if he must . . . but always fine bourbon.

  Pappy came out and got a perfect 99-score review from the Beverage Testing Institute in 1996, which named it the greatest bourbon in the world. Here’s one last bit of myth busting: although Julian created Pappy as a vehicle for that Stitzel-Weller, a bourbon bottler never ever wastes juice, so the liquor in that famous bottle rated a 99 wasn’t the Stitzel-Weller but some of the Old Boone that was left over. He needed to finish up the last of that before getting to the truly transcendent stuff. So Julian is one of the few people who knows that Pappy got that first 99 and then the really great whiskey started to come out in the bottles bearing the picture of his granddad. Julian stayed out in the wilderness until he made a bourbon that caught the public’s imagination, and six years and dozens of barrels of Stitzel-Weller later, Buffalo Trace called and offered to buy into his brand and Julian left Lawrenceburg forever. His success made me think about my dad, and his dad, who both ran out of time, and about Julian, who’d endured—who made his own time—and found through his work and struggle the life-giving forces that eluded his father. He made the trip. He made it for both of them.

  19

  PEOPLE DON’T TREAT JULIAN LIKE A CELEBRITY. I’ve been around celebrities. There’s a different kind of respect for him. Supplicants want an audience more than proof of life. He doesn’t inspire selfies as much as handshakes. We sat courtside at a University of Kentucky basketball game, directly behind Coach Cal, who screamed at his players during one tense time-out, “This isn’t high school!” As Julian and I peered around the assistants to follow the action, a man walked over and gathered his nerve and said, tentatively, “Mr. Van Winkle?”

  Julian smiled and took the man’s hand.

  “I’m a big fan of your bourbon,” the man said and then excused himself, having delivered the message that pulled him from his seat and sent him down past the scorer’s table to the Kentucky bench. A few minutes later, Julian saw a woman he knew in the stands with her new baby and after he waved big, he leaned over to me, grinned, and said, “Future customer.”

  This is the life that started for him after Pa
ppy. “The cult bourbon shit,” Julian called it. I’ve seen the madness up close, again and again. Not long after our day in Lawrenceburg, Julian, Preston, and I went out to San Francisco for WhiskyFest. We stood behind their table and waited for the hordes to descend. Every age of Pappy was on the table in front of us, and then the doors opened and the line wound around the whole hotel ballroom. Someone wanted the 24-year-old, which doesn’t exist. Julian chuckled and said, “We’ve got 23, 20, and 15.”

  “You’re saving the 24-year-old for yourself,” the guy said.

  People lined up and got a small pour of whiskey and a photo and a few words. The first bottle of 23-year-old was gone in six minutes. I was counting. Someone asked for the empty bottle. Preston politely told him no and, when nobody was looking, scratched the label so people couldn’t sell it online full of cheap whiskey. Eight minutes later, the second and final bottle of 23-year-old was gone. People would be lined up for hours. A few liquor store owners got aggressive with Julian and Preston about how much they were sent every year. “How is it I spend so much money, and I don’t have enough allocation?” a man asked. “How do I get more allocation?”

  That is the question that follows the Van Winkles around the bourbon world, and nobody wants to hear the real answer: they have no say over who gets their whiskey or over how much retailers charge for it. Julian is forever raging about how the state liquor boards control the allocations. In New York, for instance, he can’t even make sure that Eleven Madison Park, a Michelin-starred restaurant that has supported his whiskey since before it was cool, gets as much as it wants. The whole thing feels corrupt. Ed is always checking price tags and complaining to store owners about their outrageous markups. Once he ordered Pappy at a bar near a ski resort and what they poured out of the bottle was not Pappy. They told him he was wrong. He asked to see the manager. The manager asked how he could tell. Ed explained his connection. The manager said he’d check and never returned. The next day, the bottles were gone.

  Sometimes shit happens at the plant. A few years ago, a bunch of whiskey went missing from the distillery itself. The local papers called it Pappygate. A loading dock employee stole around $100,000 of whiskey that he worked to sell through a syndicate made up of members of his rec-league softball team. The bottle scam feels like the kind of small detail that could serve as the opening metaphor in a book about the fall of the American republic. This ham-fisted minor league Cornbread Mafia also trafficked in guns and steroids.

  A law enforcement whiskey enthusiast stopped by the table in San Francisco. Everywhere Julian went, people wanted to talk about the stolen whiskey.

  “Do you mind me asking,” the cop said, “I recently read that with the recent convictions with everyone that’s pled with the bourbon heist, how did that affect your company and how things are going?”

  Julian smiled thinly. “We were selling everything we had before the robbery, and we’re selling everything we have after the robbery,” he said. “So all it did was make the supplies that much tighter and now people hear about us because of the robbery and they want to get some of the whiskey, and it makes it even harder to find, so it makes things worse for you all.”

  As I took in the event, I realized I’m seeing the same scene playing out over and over again. Some people were real asshats. The whole thing caused a visceral reaction that caught me off guard. It didn’t make sense or even reflect the overall spirit of the event. Most people were lovely and sharing a bucket list experience with friends, and yet I hated to admit that the longer I stood here the more I focused on the asshats. It was strange and exhausting. An idea floated around my subconscious, stubbornly refusing to cohere enough to acquire the power of language, but there was some chain of unintended consequences going on here to create both this event and my reaction to it. Bourbon became popular again, and then it became expensive and rare, which made it more popular and yet so hard to get that its original purpose as a way to facilitate and lubricate fellowship was being replaced by the hunting for and finding of it. The economy of bourbon was pushing out what I loved most about it. Maybe that’s why I was reacting so strongly. When the event finally ended, Julian and Preston looked wiped out. They both needed a drink.

  “Where you wanna go?” I asked.

  “Someplace nearby,” Julian said. “Somewhere with good vodka. I’m getting tired of all this whiskey.”

  We both laughed. It was time to fade into the night and for me to consider what all I’d seen.

  I’d always thought that bourbon was a tool. At WhiskyFest it felt like something people wanted to possess. That was weird to me. You drink expensive bourbon and then you piss it out. No getting around that. It’s just passing through. While it’s in your system, if you don’t drink too much of it and try to start a fight or some shit, that’s where the brief, flickering magic happens. Whiskey warms your insides and not just literally. There didn’t seem like a lot of warming going on in San Francisco, just a pelt-hunting mad dash.

  One night at the Van Winkles’ house, I got on my high horse about how ridiculous I found the fetishizing of whiskey, the way it is turned into the event itself as opposed to either a lubricant for the event or a way to shine a light on the unspoken meaning of an event. I was trashing the festivalgoers and both Julian and Sissy politely scolded me. People should be able to express their passion for something they love in whatever way they want, and the communities brought together by people who drink and discuss whiskey were no less valid that those where people drink whiskey and discuss baseball or politics or military history. I was being a snob and imposing my own values and biases onto other people. If they’d learned anything touring the world serving Pappy—Sissy worked those first events with Julian, before anyone had ever heard of them or wanted to buy a bottle—it was the knowledge that there were always a few jackasses but that they were usually outshone by the people who came to meet them, and to try a taste, with an earnest intention, with real pureness of heart.

  They’ve seen a tribe spring up around their whiskey, seen many tribes, really: those who buy it as a status symbol, those who can’t find it and long for it, those who can’t find it and blame everyone and especially them for that inability. It was an odd and beautiful thing to behold, more like seeing the northern lights than a strong brand culture. To explain, Sissy told me a story about a whiskey festival in New York years ago.

  There was this guy, a doctor, a small, gentle man who had brought his father and friends to WhiskyFest. They really hit it off, laughing, as he got to the front of the line. His name was Elliot Goldofsky. Then, later, she ran into him again, with all his friends, and as he introduced her, they told her he was the best otolaryngologist in America. She asked what on earth that meant. Everyone laughed. Sissy and Elliot got to talking, first about surface things like bourbon, and then later, about really important things like life. At one point he blurted, “I feel so strongly we were meant to meet this evening.”

  She went home. A week later, she and Julian found out their young son, Preston, was partially deaf. Now, four decades later, sitting at their dinner table in Kentucky, she began to cry. She cried then, too, she said, and went back into the story. They’d exchanged information and she found his number and called up to New York. Her voice broke when he answered.

  “Elliott,” she said. “I need you.”

  She smiled at me. Tears were still in her eyes. Elliott helped them choose the doctor who operated on Preston to try to restore his hearing. Now Preston will be the one to carry on those traditions and share them with people like a random doctor who came out to get a drink with some friends.

  20

  JULIAN LEFT THE CORN ON THE GRILL and came to greet me at the door. I’d finally taken the Van Winkles up on their offer to visit their “camp” in Michigan, which for me conjured visions of some rustic deer hunting place. When I followed the map to Harbor Springs, Michigan, and found huge white mansions on the shore and a quain
t downtown like something from the Hamptons, I started to laugh. Victorian summer homes with wide porches and American flags looked out onto rolling lawns and flower beds. Narrow footpaths ran between the homes, the whole place idyllic and languid. Old industrialist money lives up here on this lake—and new money, too: Betsy DeVos’s Amway-funded ship is at anchor in the marina. Pappy started to vacation here in the 1930s, even before he opened Stitzel-Weller. I came into a great room with a cathedral ceiling flooded with light.

  “First of all,” Julian said, “what would you like?”

  “I’d like a glass of water and then a whiskey drink.”

  They built this house in the past decade for their ever-expanding family of grandkids (there is a huge bunk room upstairs laid out like in the children’s book Madeline), able to afford such a place because of the success of Pappy. For years, they piled into small condos or rented houses and scrimped and saved and kept this vestige of Pappy’s genteel old world alive and part of their tradition. Now they’d built this big home, with enough room for everyone, and during the summer they pack up from the swelter of Kentucky and the family circles through. Pappy’s real value to his family can’t be seen at whiskey shows or on bourbon blogs. The success bought him the space and freedom to have this life and the luxury of having all his people close and along for the ride. They live slow here. I liked it. He poured drinks. Music played. We sat around and talked, and although I thought he was blissed out, there was something churning just out of sight.

  “Lawrenceburg, Kentucky,” he said, apropos of nothing. “Did that hit you heavy like it hit me? That was a freaky day.”

  I was surprised he wanted to go back there. I told him that was the first time I really understood what Pappy meant to him. I’d always seen his bourbon as an inheritance story, not a survival-in-the-wilderness story. “That’s probably the most important part about this whole thing,” he said, “that fucking awful but blessed thing that kicked this whole thing off from 1983 until 2002.”