I missed the turn into the monastery, and as I wheeled around, we saw a simple homemade sign.
TO THE STATUES, it read.
Neither of us knew what that meant, so we got out of the car and walked into the woods. Every so often, there’d be another sign.
TO THE STATUES.
We crossed a simple footbridge and looked down into deep gulches and hollers. We crossed a dam across a peaceful lake in which a man dressed in white silently fished. We climbed a simple ladder into the foothills and kept winding, passing little shrines and religious statues along the way. John T. and I both felt what I can only call a mystical twinge. I felt like I’d driven out here to bucket list–check a gravestone—a celebration of a great man’s death—and instead stumbled into a celebration of how he lived. We joked that maybe there were no statues, that we were the statues, or perhaps our worldly cares and anxieties and vanities, and that we were looking for some sort of cosmic mirror out here in the woods. A single cardinal sat on a limb and looked at us. We heard rain hitting the canopy high above but no water touched our faces. The high-pitched whine of tires on the highway down below grew more and more faint. The farther we walked, the more I started to really notice the plants and the little benches offering beautiful hillside views. I didn’t want the walk to end, and I always want a walk to end.
I’ve been ordering my life foolishly. A voice of warning has been growing louder as I considered what being a father actually means. When I make an accounting of myself honestly, I do not like what I find. Always a pleaser, I have put satisfying bosses above myself or the needs of my family and friends. I have put worldly success at the top of my hierarchy of needs and lived accordingly, hoping that the people who loved me would love me enough to indulge and forgive. Even this walk felt illicit. It had been an embarrassingly long time since I just did something unplanned in the middle of a workday. Normally we are grinding.
I think about my wife as we walk, about what she’s doing now. Sonia is so important to every part of my life that her presence often exists as a shadow in everything I do. The happiest I ever am is when she smiles. When she’s happy, it makes me happy, and when she’s not, I spiral with her. We are connected in that way. Marriage is a strange thing. I love my wife. She bet on me at a time when maybe that didn’t seem like the best option. Her relentless desire to do things well runs through every corner of her life and now mine. I love to make her laugh. She makes me laugh all the time—her timing is professional. If you are her friend, she is there for you no matter what. I love that about her. I feel unworthy of her. My work often feels like something I choose instead of her, and I worry about how patient she is about that.
In the last years of his life, Alabama football coach Bear Bryant read a devotional over and over again, a window into how he appraised his successful and famous life; his own sorting out of the things he gained and what it cost him. “When tomorrow comes,” it read, “this day will be gone forever, leaving something in its place I have traded for it.” I feel like I am forever making bad trades. I wonder if I’m just repeating the mistakes of my father. My parents talked a lot about going to China to see those gorges. My father died and they never made the trip. Now the gorges have been destroyed by a hydroelectric dam that powers televisions and washing machines and personal laptop computers. The future is waiting, and it is never the vision the hopeful word conjures, so I want my love for my wife and child to eclipse whatever love I have for my work (which is just another way of saying “for myself”). I worry I won’t be worthy of this child, or of my wife, and that I won’t be able to find the version of myself who is called upon to stand up in this new act of life and be a man.
We walked for nearly a mile, moving through clearings and along narrow winding paths with nature close in on our shoulders. We talked about the idea that all of our human vanities—obsessing about bourbon, or writing about sports or food, or anything really—are just our attempts to fill a God-size hole in our lives. I felt closer to God, or to some higher power, than I had in a very long time.
Then we found the statues.
We saw Jesus, his face covered in agony, and Mary weeping, and we read the dedication to Father Jonathan Daniels, an Episcopal priest killed in the heat of the civil rights movement by a shotgun-carrying sheriff’s deputy, putting his body in front of a seventeen-year-old. As the cop pulled the trigger, Father Daniels pushed the young girl out of the way and threw himself into the line of fire. He took that full load of the 12-gauge and bled out. The man who killed him was acquitted and died an old man. Like the coward he was, the sheriff’s deputy claimed self-defense for killing an unarmed priest. It took me ten seconds to find the killer’s son’s Facebook page, where he wishes Trump a happy birthday and posts from a dubious news site about how anti-Kavanaugh protesters were paid to be there. There’s clearly no attempt to erase the stain of sin from his family, only to replace facts with myth, to protect a past unworthy of protection. I have shameful ghosts in my family, too, like an uncle who ran a powerful white supremacist organization in Mississippi during the civil rights movement, and I want to make sure Wallace sees them and knows that there is another way. She will inherit the power to make our family into whatever she wants it to be. After standing around and then walking alone in the woods some more, I knew we had to rejoin our day.
We walked back down to the car.
A fish jumped in the lake. The fisherman in white silently watched for ripples.
12
JULIAN LOOKED AT THE BOTTLES of 15-year-old raw Pappy in front of him.
To the side, he had a bottle of last year’s Pappy 15 release.
Normally, that control bottle served as a kind of cheat sheet to compare flavor profiles. But this year, that bottle was completely useless. This was about as real as you could ever see the whiskey business. When the bourbon came out next year, it would have the exact same label and price tag as it did the year before. But it wouldn’t be the same. Julian sat at the lazy Susan and I tried to imagine what he must be thinking. For fifteen years, ever since he agreed to bring his label into this huge liquor conglomerate, he’d known that one day he’d be proven right or wrong. Yes, the joint venture gave him a limitless future and a constant supply of whiskey. But would the whiskey be good? Would he like it? All those years ago he’d tasted young whiskey and wheated white dog and used his palate to make a judgment call. Was he right?
He wasn’t thinking any of that because he was here doing work. The world’s greatest fly rod maker once told me something that stuck: zen is a butt in a seat. That’s what craft really is. Doing something over and over again without cheating or cutting corners. Julian pointed at the bottle of last year’s Pappy.
“This is Bernheim whiskey,” he said.
That was the past.
Then Julian turned back to the half-pints and to the future. He should have said, “This is Buffalo Trace,” because that’s the distillery that made the bourbon now in the half-pint in front of him for tasting. But because Freud is a motherfucker—Julian had meant to say one thing, but something else had accidentally come out—he’d revealed inadvertently what he really thought and felt.
“This is Stitzel-Weller,” he said.
He is the last of something. The bridge, in the bourbon world and in his family, that can connect the mythology of those old whiskeys with the reality of the new ones. Someday very soon there won’t be a drop of Stitzel-Weller left. If there was a barrel somewhere that’s been poured into a stainless-steel tank to stop the aging, it will end up being used. Those old bottles will be opened and poured. When all that happens, Stitzel-Weller will only exist within Julian’s ability to remember—and in his attempts to curate and sell something that’s as close to it as his memory can get. That’s what Julian brings to the tasting room alongside Kevin’s science background: his memory. The more time I spent in Kentucky and on thinking about the South where I grew up and where I live
, the more two related themes emerged over and over again: the power and the fragility of memory. Bourbon embodies both. It can carry the past far into the future, so that Julian can drink whiskey his grandfather and father had made, and yet he can watch that whiskey start to go bad the moment he pulls the cork until it is ruined within a few hours.
They are all betting that the bourbon boom will continue. It’s a funny game. Once, the great distillers struggled because they had too much bourbon, and now they struggle because they don’t have enough. This is an industry that requires peering into the future and determining which America will exist in a decade—for Julian, it requires twice that—and that’s a nearly impossible thing to do. We’re asking people to predict a national mood; to predict our fears and hopes. It’s nearly impossible to guess what consumers will need in ten years or fifteen or twenty or twenty-three. Bourbon booms are tied mostly to a sense of nostalgia and longing—to memory—and when the brown stuff is flying off the shelves, you can bet that we are unsure of where we are going and in need of a vehicle to take us back. Vodka is for the skinny and scotch is for the strivers and bourbon is for the homesick. So sitting with Julian in the tasting room was seeing a man looking for a way back home, standing on one side of a river and needing to get across. He was trying to remember a taste from his past, and to find some modern version of it close enough to bridge that gap in his mind, between Great Buffalo Trace and Limestone Lane. He felt gratitude for Harlen Wheatley, the master distiller who’d overseen the birth of this whiskey.
Eric is someone I talk to multiple times a day, at all sorts of inappropriate hours, so I also want to thank his family for their indulgence: his wife, Gwen, and the unstoppable Tess.
Julian sipped the 15-year-old Pappy. He looked at the label to see when it was distilled: April 22, 2002. Two days before, I’d been in my first job, sitting in Rayne, Louisiana, outside Breaux Bridge, waiting with LSU wide receiver Josh Reed for him to be picked in the NFL Draft. Everyone had expected him to go in the first round, enough that his town had thrown him a party and the mayor had invited me to attend. Then hours passed and he didn’t get picked, and I wanted to be as far away as I could. That was a lifetime ago for me. Josh Reed would have a long career in the NFL, by the way.
Julian tried to remember what he was doing in April of 2002. The dates on these bottles all meant something to him. They are the story of his life and his past. Then it hit him. Of course.
On April 22, 2002, Julian was negotiating with the parent company of Buffalo Trace, deciding on the right path for his label and for the legacy of his family, and less than two months later, those negotiations led to a deal, and he signed, and he carried his tradition and palate and hopes with him away from the obscurity of Lawrenceburg and toward the bright lights of Buffalo Trace and the cult whiskey road he now knows as his own.
13
THERE WAS NO DRAMATIC BUILDUP or single moment of revelation once he started tasting. He was a working man and this was work. But after just a few samples, we both agreed that this bourbon was fantastic, and that he liked it, liked it a lot, which made for a happy, relieved Julian. I held a glass in my hand, lost in my own world where I got to just sit and drink 15-year-old Van Winkle and call it work, and when I looked over at him he nodded. Julian was a stoic man, but I knew him well enough to know when he was pleased. He was pleased. I liked that he was pleased.
“I’m glad you’re here to test this,” he said. “It will come out in the fall.”
Finding that the bourbon made at Buffalo Trace was not only good to the experts but also good to him filled him with joy—and, I think, relief. Julian had been under a cloud of anxiety that lifted immediately when he tasted these bourbons and not only liked them but loved them, and he even got taken on a memory trip when they hit his tongue. Bourbon either makes the trip or it doesn’t. A son either makes the trip or he doesn’t. A family tradition, whether it’s whiskey or simply a big Thanksgiving dinner, either makes the trip or it doesn’t.
There are endless variables that can derail, but only intention and a healthy dose of timing and luck can keep a train on the track. Julian knows he’s lucky. He knows he’s worked hard and endured but he also knows he’s lucky. He’s lucky to have found the barrels of Stitzel-Weller, and lucky to have beaten cancer, and lucky to have a family that nurtured this life out of the dirt. He remembers the hunting dogs next to the cooper shop, and Thunder hauling his granddaddy’s clubs, and the smell of that whiskey bath in the summer of 1968, and the taste that entered through every pore and remained lodged in his memory long after he’d washed that whiskey away. Julian fell in love that day and is still in love. All he wants when he drinks a glass of whiskey, or when he sells you a bottle of whiskey, is for that feeling to come alive again. For him, it only comes when he tastes Stitzel-Weller, although he knows everyone has their own personal triggers; the tastes and smells that are unique to them and their own history. What he offers to his customers, though, is the trigger to his memories. It’s an intimate transaction if you look at it right. “This is back the way that it used to be,” he said with a glow, “and if you compare this to Stitzel-Weller, it’s close.”
14
ALL WE CAN ASK FOR IS FOR REAL LIFE to get close to the impossible myths and nostalgias that drive and seduce in equal measure. Close is a miracle. Close means that Julian had to keep his business alive in Lawrenceburg and count on Jimmy Russell and so many other angels for help, and that he had to bet on Stitzel-Weller and then sign a deal with Buffalo Trace, and then he had to wait on time to prove him right or wrong. He’s been proven right. That’s nearly the end of our story, although the Van Winkle family’s journey is just beginning. Julian is thinking hard about a plan of succession. His daughters run a highly successful spin-off business, selling everything from needlepoint belts to barrel-aged maple syrup, everything emblazoned with the name Pappy & Company. Louise, Chenault, and Julian worked closely while renovating together a (now) beautiful building in Louisville that houses their business, and that time with his daughters made all the work and money worth it. His girls are dynamos and one day might generate more income for the family than the whiskey itself.
There’s a lot to sort out, for and with the next generation, about understanding how the lifestyle piece fits with the bourbon. Combining business and family is never easy, as his father learned. Some of the estate-planning meetings turned into therapy sessions, complete with tears. Julian wakes up in the middle of the night worried if his children will all get along running the family business when he’s gone. The future is out there, creeping, becoming more and more present with each passing day. He’s moving on to a new phase now. His twenty years in Lawrenceburg and his fifteen years with Buffalo Trace have put the Van Winkles back atop the whiskey world. His grandfather’s belief in wheat as a secondary grain and his desire to make the best bourbon from a native-born Kentucky crop instead of a holdover from Pennsylvania farmers have survived and emerged as victorious. Old Fitzgerald and its wheated descendants, from Maker’s Mark to Pappy Van Winkle, are the closest human beings have yet come to bottling the ethos of Kentucky.
For Julian, making a wheated bourbon the most sought after in the world is more of a monument to his family than those two marble stones out in the shade of Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery. He has held the line, and his son, Preston, will hold it after him, and the bourbon going out in their bottles, behind a label bearing Pappy’s face, will carry Pappy’s integrity, too. A few simple questions occurred to me to ask Julian: Even though you aren’t sentimental, do you ever visit your father’s or grandfather’s graves, and do you think they’d be proud of what you’ve created?
He was as introspective as I’d ever seen him.
I had to think about this one. You’re pretty correct on the sentimental part!
To be honest with you, I was so relieved to be out of that shithole in the holler in Lawrenceburg that almost killed me that I didn’t reall
y think about whether Pappy and Dad would be proud of me. Just glad to not anymore be dealing with so many other things there; maintenance that had nothing to do with the whiskey business. That place did serve its purpose, though, keeping me in business and that’s where the “Pappy” label was created and the springboard to a better life. But it sure was nice to finally get a paycheck every now and then.
I’m not much on graveyards so made no visits to Cave Hill Cemetery where they are all buried. I probably did ask my dad for help from that other dimension several times during my struggle to stay in business in the dark years.
Once things got rolling with BT, and the cult whiskey thing started a few years after I joined up with them, I often thought, and tell people this constantly, that I wish Pappy and Dad were around to see what has happened to their idea of making and selling premium, aged, wheated bourbon whiskey. Unfortunately, they were forty to sixty years too early.
Sure, they would be proud of me.
I didn’t know Pappy that well but sister Sally says she sees a lot of Pappy in me.
How’s that?
15
THE NEXT DAY JULIAN AND PRESTON worked around the table, finishing the tasting that started the day before. The mood was joyous. Julian loves to do this with his son. He often tells people that Preston has a better palate than he does. Preston combines his modern sensibilities with his inherited Limestone Lane vision quest. Pappy will keep evolving, which is as it should be, the whiskey a living crop borne of man living in concert with the dirt around him, and not a widget to be reproduced the same way forever.
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