The Julian I’d seen in front of crowds seemed like an extrovert.
“Were you always a confident public speaker?” I asked him.
“I’m not confident at all,” he said. “It was hard.”
He trailed off.
I thought back to a conversation I had with Ed and Chenault on the Cathedral of Bourbon night, when all this began. Back then I didn’t have the bandwidth to understand what they were telling me. There, by the band, she talked about how quiet and reserved her father was before the whiskey stuff blew up, how he’d sit quietly while Sissy ran the house. I asked Sissy about the change. She laughed and remembered the many seasons of their life and how their children saw the change happen in real time. “Like, who is this man?” she said.
His daughter Chenault told me how, now that she’s grown, she understands better that he struggled to know how exactly to show the love he felt. That makes the change she’s seen even more remarkable. Not long ago, her house design landed on the front of a magazine. Bursting with pride, she called her parents. Julian answered the phone. She told him and he pulled the phone away for a moment and hollered across the room, “She got the freaking cover!”
He went on and on about how proud he was of her hard work and talent, and of the business and reputation she’d built while being an amazing mother and leader in the family and that if he was the kind of man prone to tears of joy, he’d be crying them. She couldn’t believe this emotional gushing. Never in her life had he ever said anything like that at all.
“Wow, Dad,” she said. “Is Mom hearing all of this? I’ve never heard you talk like this!”
5
ONE OF THE MOST VEXING and popular quests for bourbon drinkers is to identify who actually distilled the liquid that fills the bottles in their home bars and collections. Four different whiskeys have been bottled under the label of Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve, and that’s without getting into the 10- and 12-year-old bourbon Julian sells. The first Pappy was (1) Old Boone distilled in the 1970s, because Julian was sitting on aged barrels of it that he didn’t want to go to waste. That was good whiskey. Then came a long run of (2) Stitzel-Weller. That was great whiskey. When people think of the Pappy taste, that’s what they’re imagining. Julian always wondered about rating systems because, if an inferior whiskey got the famous 99, then why didn’t the otherworldly Stitzel-Weller get a perfect 100?
His success planted the seeds of his potential demise. That 99 came just four years after Diageo had shut down the Van Winkles’ old plant and sold off Pappy’s four brands for cash. The same panic that led to that now deeply regretted fire sale also led to Julian’s access to those barrels. Once his whiskey had started a revolution, the big companies and other bourbon brand owners realized what he’d done and how the public had responded, and slowly those barrels became harder and harder to find. Julian could see into the future. A day would come when nobody would sell him whiskey. He understood the problem but didn’t know how to solve it without getting his family back into the distilling business. Then, in 2001, as he searched for a possible solution, a solution found him: Buffalo Trace called with the idea of a joint venture. The company offered Julian a symbolic union that appealed to his love of tradition: a rejoining of the Van Winkles with the W. L. Weller brand that Buffalo Trace had bought from Diageo two years before, along with its precious stocks of aged, wheated, Stitzel-Weller bourbon. It was perfect. Almost.
The Buffalo Trace–distilled Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve would not be available for fifteen years. But Julian didn’t have fifteen years of Stitzel-Weller left. You see the problem.
The math didn’t work. Julian Van Winkle would run out of Stitzel-Weller before he could bottle the Buffalo Trace, which is made from the same mash bill his family used back on Limestone Lane. Julian needed bourbon, and not just any bourbon. He needed to protect his reputation as the best in the world, and not get caught up in negative publicity about changing the mythic Pappy “formula,” even though there really isn’t a formula at all, just a complex interaction of grains and water and wood and weather and time. It’s funny: when you start to learn about bourbon, you imagine it as an art, and the more you learn, the more you discover it’s a science. But there comes a point when even the experts dissemble and shrug and admit they don’t actually know how all those factors work together and interplay, and that’s when you start to see it as art again.
The best barrels he found at the time were made by (3) Bernheim.
Now that’s where it got tricky.
The Bernheim distillation wasn’t his favorite—some barrels were better than others—but it still had the Van Winkle wheated mash bill. The old Stitzel-Weller bones were in place. And sometimes that shone through and he loved the whiskey. Other times he tasted some harshness and in some barrels an underlying flavor that came from the construction of the still and from the yeast that Diageo used. Whiskey, as he told me over and over again, is fragile. When Diageo shut down the Stitzel-Weller plant and replaced it with a new one, the company accidentally lost its ability to make the same consistently wonderful bourbon that had been made since Derby Day 1935. The Bernheim whiskey was good but not what his palate identified as that powerful taste of home. Using it was a risk, yes, but one he’d have to take to stay in business.
He’d rebuilt his family’s reputation on Stitzel-Weller, which he loved and which many bourbon aficionados consider the finest whiskey ever made, and now he was putting all that into the hands of something that was not his favorite. Some experts didn’t like it, not picking it as exceptional in blind tests. But many people loved it. And more tellingly, many people didn’t even notice, as the price for Pappy kept spiraling upward on the secondary market. But I believe it made Julian feel like a little bit of a fraud. He never said this to me directly but I think he lived in fear that someone would make a big deal out of the Bernheim Pappy or he’d get asked in a public forum and have to say either that he didn’t like his own highly touted whiskey or, even worse, lie and say he did. Nobody ever asked, at least not directly enough that he had to answer. Now those fifteen years have passed, and there’s (4) Buffalo Trace distillation whiskey sitting on a table waiting for him.
6
THE TASTING THAT I’D DRIVEN UP FOR is the next year’s 15-year-old Pappy Van Winkle Family Reserve. That wait was finally over for him. I was anxious. Julian got to work. A stack of towels sat in the third drawer down. A plastic clipboard showed a list of all the barrels and their locations in the rickhouses. The most important people in the making of whiskey are the folks who control how and where and when the barrels are stored, from higher floors to cooler ones, using the changing temperatures and varied airflows and idiosyncratic climates of the storage facilities to impact the color, taste, and character of the liquid inside the barrels. Julian checked the information: D-6-19, I-1-18, digits as meaningful to him as they were inscrutable to me. In all there were one hundred ninety barrels. Julian took a sip and held the glass up to the light. A sign read, QUIET PLEASE, TASTERS AT WORK.
He gushed over No. 116 and No. 107 and made notes to himself.
Barrels 103 and 104 were hot, which means they hit your mouth with a fierce, alcoholic burn. When they found a barrel the tasters thought was bad, they wrote an X on the bottle in Sharpie. Julian and I were tasting when Kevin Nowaczyk, one of the Buffalo Trace experts, came in to join him at the tasting table.
“We’ve found five or six good ones,” Julian said, nodding. “A little sweet, some too dry.”
“There’s a character, too, especially the wheated bourbons, that as things get older they kind of pick up this syrupy sweetness,” Kevin said. “I don’t know if you’ve ever smelled ether but . . . ethereal?”
Julian and I laughed.
“Oh yeah, when I was four or five years old I got my tonsils out,” Julian said.
“I was in Las Vegas . . . ,” I cracked.
Kevin la
ughed, too.
“Never go up against a man in the depths of an ether binge,” he said.
We got on with the tasting. “There’s just like this solvent-y sweetness,” Kevin said, “not quite like acetone or gasoline but I think ether is the best description. At least that’s what I pick up all the time.”
“Spoken like a true chemist,” Julian said.
“I actually did career day at school for my daughter the other day,” Kevin said, “and I had to kind of dance around what I did and I said I’m someone who combines chemical compounds to make stuff, and my eight-year-old daughter yelled really loudly, ‘He makes beer.’”
We did this for a while—drinking whiskey, to state the obvious, happens a lot when you’re hanging with Julian, from really rare Stitzel-Weller white dog to old bottles of Maker’s Mark—and to be honest, it gets repetitive after a while. I know, I know. But if you’re reading this to get inside the making and selling of Pappy Van Winkle, I’m duty bound to report that drinking some of the best bourbon in the world can get tiresome. But that very monotony is what made this particular tasting so special. It looked like all the others. I mean, tastings are all the same—unremarkable, undramatic—until this summer. In some ways, this was the day he’d been anticipating since he packed up and left behind that falling down rattrap bottling plant full of raining vodka and raccoon shit. It was the beginning of the rest of his life, and of Preston’s life, and of the life of their family brand, which began long before Julian was born and would hopefully live on long after he dies. He was tasting a 15-year-old Pappy made of the wheated bourbon produced on-site by Buffalo Trace. Sometimes a brand is an invented thing to sell people on an idea. For Julian, seeing Pappy on each bottle is personal. It matters to him that the bourbon carries on the philosophical ideal of his family’s old distillery. He’s been involved in every stage of this process and now it’s time to find out how they did. It had been a long wait.
7
FOR ALL THE SCIENCE THAT TAKES PLACE in the lab, and for all my mocking of the idea of magic, there is something about the landscape that finds its way into these bottles that are filled in Kentucky and then sent out around the world. The bourbon inside is a note sent by shipwrecked people to let someone out over the horizon know that they are still alive, and to maybe transmit some of the culture, too. The sunlight that shines down on the fields that bear the grains that become the whiskey leaves the sun eight minutes and twenty seconds before it warms the earth and gives life to those plants. We are always living in the past and every bottle carries that time travel with it into the world, sealed tight against the oxidizing danger of the air. Maybe whiskey is so fragile because once the cap comes off, the past rushes out of the bottle and is gone forever.
Throughout the past three years, I’ve spent a lot of time in Kentucky, for this book and for a television show I produce called TrueSouth, which featured the state in one of the episodes. So much time on the ground has forced me to really consider this place, and the idea of bourbon as a document kept growing stronger and stronger. I make the show with the writer John T. Edge and the director Tim Horgan. In it, we travel around the South and try to strip away myth and reveal the place as it is, not as people might wish in their sepia-toned memories for it to have been. For one episode, I spent a lot of time driving around bourbon country in Kentucky, and that time changed the way I saw Julian and his whiskey. I grew up in a farming community, so the emotional value of land was hardwired into me at a young age. I saw that same kind of love in Kentucky and I realized that if half of making whiskey is industrial, then the other half is agrarian. Bourbon is a crop as surely as cotton or soybeans or rice. This sentiment hit home when our television show landed in a Kentucky farming community named Hodgenville, where the eighth and ninth generations of men and women worked their family land, and in the nearby self-proclaimed Bourbon Capital of the World, Bardstown. In between them, right on the county line, was a little place called New Haven. It’s a county-line town, which gives it an outlaw feel. All over the South, the Baptists and the bootleggers have long worked to keep some counties dry while others stayed wet. That meant county-line runs by teenagers in cars, looking for a six-pack or a quart—Oxford, Mississippi, to the Panola county line—or by semitruck, hauling thousands of cases in large and complex bootlegging operations, transporting beer and liquor from a wet county to a dry one.
A couple of times on our initial scouting trip of Kentucky, we stopped at a liquor store called Mouser’s in New Haven, usually at the end of a workday, to get a cold Budweiser and a pint of Barton’s. We drank the beers at the counter, talking to one of the owners, who wore diamond rings on all his fingers. Old men eyed us while playing cards and throwing spent peanut shells on the floor. Mounted deer heads hung on the walls and the card players joked about growing pot. If you’ve ever heard the song “Copperhead Road,” these are the folks it’s about: DEA’s got a chopper in the air. . . . They don’t like strangers in county-line towns. You can tell by the tension you feel in every room you enter, until someone gives you the blessing, and suddenly people relax.
We hung out at the counter and let this place wash over us—a deeply Catholic town, where most everyone grew up with a dozen siblings. Shrines made of Virgin Mary statues rest in the oval porcelain shade of abandoned bathtubs. Kentucky remains full of these little worlds somehow protected against the ravenous American homogeneity. The state does microcultures well. Down the road in Monroe County, there is a hyperlocal style of barbecue, rising from the daily rhythms of factory life, during which a pork shoulder is cut thin on a band saw and cooked quickly over hickory scraps from sawmills, suiting the short lunch breaks allowed the factory shifts. Hundreds of these bubbles exist.
Kentucky still feels like the frontier. It’s hard to explain but palpable on the ground and especially on the road: US Route 31, Kentucky Route 63, Glasgow to Eighty-Eight to Summer Shade, rocketing with the windows down, passing farms that have been in the same family for generations. You could feel all that leaning against the counter at Mouser’s, sipping on a Budweiser, listening to the stories, and clocking the diamond rings that looked like twinkling brass knuckles when the owner made a fist. During our first trip to Mouser’s, we all wondered how we might get this strange hidden world on camera. It seemed vital to explaining the place, because to most local farmers, there’s no difference between growing cotton and bootlegging whiskey, between fields of wheat and of bright-green funky marijuana crops growing in their shadow to hide them from those DEA flights. In Kentucky, the founding spirit of whiskey has been co-opted by businesses but that spirit didn’t just go away. If you want to see the lengths a man is willing to go to protect his homeplace, whether it’s turning a rotting rye crop into whiskey or planting rows of pot mixed in with his corn, then just get on the back roads and drive.
To get our television cameras inside Mouser’s, we needed someone with maximum credibility. We decided on a now reformed drug kingpin from around these parts. Joe Keith Bickett was a member of the famed Cornbread Mafia, the largest domestic drug cartel ever assembled, all in the counties around Mouser’s and the famous bourbon distilleries. Joe Keith did his twenty-plus years, was released, and now works for a law firm. He also wrote two hilarious books about his experiences. So Joe Keith walked into Mouser’s and found one of the owners at the counter. “Tell us about back in the bootlegging days,” he asked. “Come on, man, about how it was back in the sixties?”
“It used to be we were the only liquor store till you got to Murfreesboro, Tennessee,” the owner told him. “We had a bootleg business. We probably have had more beer go out the back of this store than we did go out the front. And my uncle worked here and my daddy . . . and all they did was haul booze. But then, as the years went through, Hardin County went wet, Warren County went wet, now you got Pulaski County wet. You got Clinton County wet. You got Cumberland County wet. You got Edmonson County wet. You’ve got Taylor County wet. You’ve go
t all these counties . . .”
The voters of LaRue County just passed their alcohol law by ten votes, pushed by politicians who wanted to figure out how to catch some money from the bourbon boom that’s bringing wealth into so many counties around them. To most farmers, there’s not much difference between moonshining and bootlegging, between growing pot and supplying corn to big distilleries; this is farming country and all a farmer wants is to make enough money from his land to be able to pass it on to the next generation. Bourbon, when made from local crops, is a physical manifestation of deeply American ideas about home and land and independence. As Joe Keith said when asked about his route to being a drug kingpin, “We didn’t see where that would be any harder to grow than soybeans.”
In the end, more than seventy people were arrested and charged for being part of the Cornbread Mafia. Some of them remain in jail. A few won’t ever get out. Zero of the convicted men testified against their friends or enemies. Nobody rolled. Not one person. There are actual mafia members who have snitched at the drop of a subpoena, but these Kentucky farmboys did their time and kept their mouths shut. That’s the best description of what it feels like to sit at Mouser’s and drink a beer as a card game goes on behind you, or to drive these winding Kentucky roads past meth trailers or horse farms, whether getting a half-pint in a bootlegger’s shack of a store or driving a manicured road that winds down to a distillery where Julian Van Winkle is sitting at a lazy Susan, tasting dozens of barrels of whiskey, trying to remember how Stitzel-Weller tasted when he was a much younger man.
Pappyland Page 13
