That’s what Pappy was bottling and sending out across the world. Using wheat in bourbon wasn’t his idea—it had been done by Weller in Kentucky and Charles Nelson in Tennessee—but he was the first to mass produce it. He was the first to become famous doing it, and that built his still vibrant legacy. He kept faith with the true idea of whiskey instead of stubborn traditions dictated by myth and custom. Each bottle of Old Fitz carried with it the God Spark of home. In those bottles, Pappy built a monument to his state, and to his family, and to himself. The wheat once and for all made bourbon truly of Kentucky. That was Pappy’s triumph. He’d finally shaken the dominion of Pennsylvania out of the bottle.
9
IT WAS NEARLY TIME FOR JULIAN AND ME to leave Churchill Downs and go to the party. Safe under the grandstand, we looked out at the black clouds rolling in across the land. The weather had turned. The skies looked ready to open and attack, menacing. It was going to be duck boot weather. Julian had come prepared. I had not. We decided to make a break for my car, which was parked on the back side of the track near the barns. It would be a short ten-minute drive to the Stitzel-Weller distillery; easy once we made it to the car. We left the box and navigated the bowels of Churchill Downs. Walking beneath the covered concourse behind the grandstand, Julian filled me in on the latest strange internet trends to hit Pappyland: people were buying empty bottles online to fill with some other bourbon and then just pretend they’re serving (or selling) Van Winkle. Not long ago, Julian got sent a counterfeit bottle, recapped by an industrial machine. When he tasted the fake Pappy, he had to give the crooks a bit of credit: they’d used good whiskey in the scam, close enough to fool an average consumer but not close enough to fool Julian. We both just shook our heads and looked up at the sky. The rain held off and we skirted the edge of the track. The back side ahead of us was its own ecosystem, the domain of the hot-walkers and grooms and stable hands, most from Mexico and Guatemala, some of them undocumented, moving together in a crew from track to track and race meet to race meet.
“It’s a wild scene back here,” he said.
Finally safe in my car and moving, we waved at the guard at the stable gate and tried to escape the tangle of cars and trucks and flashing lights that clogged the small residential streets surrounding the racetrack. People were doing whatever they wanted. Some idiot was headed right for us.
“Oh, this guy’s going the wrong way,” Julian said. “Welcome to the Derby.”
Julian gave directions: left on Fourth Street, left on Central Avenue. We passed the Wagner’s Pharmacy, which had an old lunch counter where the horse folks gather. He talked on the phone to his son-in-law, Ed, married to his daughter Chenault.
“He’s a good dude,” Julian said when he hung up. “He’s a master carpenter. If you need a mahogany library or wine cellar or whatever, he can do that. Now he’s moved up here and Chenault has her own interior design company, and she was actually in Southern Living this month. She wanted to move home.”
Julian said that Ed would be there tonight.
“He’s a hunter, fisherman, a craftsman,” Julian said, “and he’s an Elvis impersonator.”
I couldn’t hide my surprise. Julian laughed. “At weddings, like friends’ weddings, he’s got a full-blown Elvis outfit,” he said. “He had an old one but we got him a new one for Christmas. The premier Elvis outfit maker in the country is across the river in Jeffersonville, Indiana. So we went over there and got him a brand-new suit and it is amazing. It’s got rhinestones and fits him perfectly. It’s clean. It’s not all ratty like the one he had.”
“That’s the most amazing gift I’ve ever heard.”
“Well, he deserves it. He’s amazing and he can play the guitar. He’s got a wig and the glasses and he can sing. It’s pretty funny.”
The sun sank lower and lower, and we were headed toward a party with great food and whiskey and it was Derby weekend.
“How do you know you should be an Elvis impersonator?” I asked him.
“I guess he liked Elvis.”
10
I WISHED I COULD RISE OUT OF THIS CAR and look down on Julian and myself as we moved west away from the weathered tan oval of the racetrack and toward the Indiana bluffs rising on the far side of the Ohio River, just a few miles away from Stitzel-Weller; the same river that brought those rye farmers south, looking for the freedom they thought they’d found in Pennsylvania. I’d like to see it all from above. “Go up in an airplane,” Louisville’s most famous son Muhammad Ali once said. “Go high enough and it’s like we don’t even exist. It’s dust, all dust. Don’t none of it mean nothing. It’s all only dust.” Kentucky used to be the edge of civilization, the great American frontier that would continue pushing west and give birth to all sorts of American myths: Little Big Horn, Route 66, Wounded Knee, rushes for land in Oklahoma and gold in California, The Grapes of Wrath and the Oregon Trail, let’s go surfing now, everybody surfing now, look away down Gower Avenue. You can see all of the distilleries together from high enough in the clouds, and their lumbering rickhouses and brick chimneys blur and erase the idea of time and history, pressing them together into one American dimension: the farming past, the marketing present, and a future that offers the possibility that our best days are ahead or have already peaked, running on the fumes of whatever national spirit sent us first to Kentucky and then on to California in wagons, in cars, on planes, on fiber-optic cables buried beneath the farms and buffalo plains.
All these famous distilleries can be visited in two or three days: Stitzel-Weller to Maker’s Mark and Jim Beam and Willett to Buffalo Trace to Woodford Reserve to Four Roses and Wild Turkey. Bulleit’s marketing wizards call it frontier whiskey, which seems strange if you imagine the frontier as the backdrop for Dances with Wolves, but that’s really what bourbon is and what it evokes for so many: a past that might not be true but sure seems better than whatever present we’re living in. Maybe that’s why bourbon is booming. Whatever the reason, the bourbon explosion that created the fierce demand for Julian’s whiskey has also created a secondary market for “vintage spirits,” for the old bourbons that don’t get made any longer, and at the top of most collectors’ lists are bottles made at Stitzel-Weller by Julian’s grandfather and his father. The star of that world remains Old Fitzgerald, S-W’s flagship brand. Those bottles go for exorbitant prices on the secondary market, a modern side effect of the whiskey boom that constantly brings drama to Julian’s door: the prices people pay for his bourbon are not the prices he himself gets paid for them, which means he doesn’t make anything and lots of people blame him for being gouged. But as the internet taketh away, it giveth, too: for a few years, until Sissy demanded he stop, Julian would stay up late online and buy these old bottles of Old Fitz, which can go for as much as $15,000—chasing something just like people chase Pappy Van Winkle—because he wanted to hoard as much of that vanishing taste as he could. He’s got a storage facility full of these bottles to ensure he’s always able to get that taste of his youth.
I love the image in my head of Julian at his computer, a few drinks deep into a melancholy nostalgia buzz—“crying about your daddy drunk,” as the writer Dan Jenkins said—seeking out these bottle auctions. He’s looking for dates that mean one thing to whiskey collectors but something much more personal to him, because they mark time in the passage of his life, and in his father’s and grandfather’s lives before him. He’s got a lot of old, valuable bottles collecting dust. One afternoon, Julian brought out one of the rarest whiskeys in the world, the original Pappy Van Winkle that set the bourbon world on fire, and he sat it on his kitchen island.
“There are probably only five bottles of that left on earth,” he said.
“We’re not opening it!” I insisted. “I would feel terrible.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I guess I better give that to my children. Or I’ll drink that when I’m in the nursing home. I’ll call you.”
W
hen I started working on this book I bought a bottle of vintage Old Fitzgerald. Research. It sat in my bar waiting for the right time. I needed a reason to crack it open. Then a few years ago, Ole Miss, the team that I support and that my father supported before me, played in the Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day. It was the first time the Rebels had made a Sugar Bowl since my father was a junior in college. We did our usual New Year’s Eve dinner at the City Grocery in Oxford, Mississippi, and then we went to the airport and boarded a small plane to make the midnight run to New Orleans. I brought along a bottle of 1978 Old Fitzgerald and we drank it the whole way down. That’s how we acknowledged the ghosts who’d be at that game with us. That’s how we toasted them while we flew.
The whiskey was twelve years old, barreled in 1966—before I was born, before my parents ever met, back when my father was still a young man, his life still made of dreams. My dad was a freshman in college the year the Stitzel-Weller men ran corn and wheat and water through their still and then loaded it into barrels to age. Some piece of 1966 existed in the bottle, and in our glasses and on our tongues—inside of us—while the plane bumped and hopped through the air on the way south. As we landed, glasses in hand, the midnight New Year’s Eve fireworks lit up the sky as we made our final approach into New Orleans Lakefront Airport. The magic of those exploding starburst shells, and knowing we’d be watching a game my father didn’t live long enough to see, burned the images deep into my memory. I won’t ever forget them. I believe that’s why we covet bourbon so much. That is its great gift to us. It allows us to see clearly through dimensions, as long as we don’t abuse it, because then it fucks up our lives and the lives of everyone who loves us.
Ole Miss won that game, and as our group walked away from the Superdome, we passed a restaurant and heard banging on the glass. I turned and saw a big group of my family sitting at a long table, celebrating the win. The first face that came into focus belonged to my uncle Will, the second of the four Thompson boys and my dad’s beloved older brother. He’s got one of those smiles. Some people’s voices remain in your memory, or the way they walk, or a gesture. For Uncle Will, it’s his smile. He waved me inside the restaurant. I hadn’t known they were coming but I wasn’t surprised, and a little part of me believed that they had been summoned by that bottle, that we had been brought together in communion. We embraced and toasted the Rebels and those of us who love them and those who loved them and had died. Uncle Will and I held eye contact for just a moment longer than customary, and a supercomputer of information passed between us in those long seconds. A century of people and places, faded but alive, suddenly became as real to me in that restaurant as any of the living, he and my dad in the bedroom where all four boys lived, or driving the Chevy SuperSport they shared in college, or having babies and raising families, or my dad going in for a checkup and leaving with a death sentence, or he and Uncle Will during their final visit with each other. I wasn’t there but I bet they prayed together, knowing that they would see each other again, in another place and world.
11
JULIAN AND I DROVE to the outskirts of town. We were less than a mile now from the distillery where he grew up, a boy king, son and grandson of the company president. Some of his earliest memories are from these shaded acres but until a few months ago, his children had never visited, not even once.
“When was the last time you were out here?” I asked.
He looked around.
“I haven’t been on this stretch of this road for a long time,” he said.
“Isn’t that strange?” I asked him.
“Right, right,” he said, quiet and curt, suddenly very far away.
“What did your kids want to see?”
“They just wanted to see the old office building and the look and the feel of the place and kind of learn a little bit about it,” he said. “It’s funny what Diageo has done to it, it’s full of experience, the tour, and the Blade and Bow thing.”
“What’s Blade and Bow?”
“Oh, it’s their new brand,” he said.
Diageo is capitalizing on the cultlike following that Stitzel-Weller now has in the bourbon world. That’s a dramatic shift in strategy. After acquiring the distillery the company stopped using Pappy’s yeast and got rid of all the machinery. The old-fashioned rollers and grinders weren’t the most efficient machines but they added complexity and depth in ways nobody really understood until they were retired. Diageo used the Stitzel-Weller warehouses to age booze but abandoned the rest of the facility to rot on the outskirts of town. And even though the company stopped making whiskey like Julian’s dad and granddad made, and then stopped using the plant altogether, there were all these barrels of the old Stitzel-Weller left over. They eventually became the most valuable and sought-after things in all of the bourbon world. But before the boom, most of those old Stitzel-Weller barrels got shipped by Diageo to Canada, where they became a tiny percentage of the Crown Royal blend. Diageo threw away hundreds of millions of dollars, although nobody realized it at the time.
“It’s like the accountants take over the whole business,” Julian said. “‘Why don’t we just use this existing shit that’s in Kentucky?’”
The modern bourbon boom is built largely on Julian’s grandfather and on the Stitzel-Weller bourbon that survived the spirit’s time in the wilderness—when it was wasted on Crown Royal, for instance—and on replicating the connoisseurship and mythology of Pappy. It was a blueprint, and the industry followed it with enthusiasm and with a savvy understanding about who was buying their product and, more important, why. Julian has risen to the top of this boom because he’s a five-tool bourbon player: he’s got the most famous last name in a brand-obsessed world; he has a whiskey built on the famed and scarce Stitzel-Weller juice; and he has an organic connection to his juice, which seems unremarkable but is quite rare; and while those three would be enough to carve out a living, he’s also got his grandfather’s connoisseurship and is a living extension of his mythology. His family might have lost the distillery but Julian still has his inherited palate and his memory of how he believes great whiskey is supposed to taste. Lots of people are searching for the taste his family made famous, or at least hoping to draft in the Van Winkle’s success.
“That’s what this Blade and Bow is,” Julian said. “They’ve got this Solara process. Have you ever heard of this? It’s where you take some whiskey of a certain age and you take some of that barrel and put it in with some other barrels of different distillation; blend it with those. There might be a tiny piece of what was made at Stitzel-Weller that they kept, which they closed in ’92, so it would be pretty old at this point.”
Only a few turns remained. I made a left onto Ralph Avenue. We could see the old barrelhouses peeking up into the sky. I pulled up to Stitzel-Weller, turning onto Limestone Lane past the ivy-covered stone pillars he saw so often growing up. The hulking gray barrelhouses looked like a fleet at anchor. The replacement plaque with his grandfather’s company motto is there: WE MAKE FINE BOURBON AT A PROFIT IF WE CAN, AT A LOSS IF WE MUST, BUT ALWAYS FINE BOURBON.
12
JULIAN HAD BEEN FEELING NOSTALGIC, which I only recently learned comes from the Greek words for home and pain. That seems about right. Home and pain. He was acutely aware that he was not immortal, no matter what working in an industry built on imagining a distant future tried to tell him. Maybe that was why he had been thinking a lot about his old 1966 pale-yellow Mustang with wire wheels and a black vinyl top and a black leather interior. Actually, it was his sister’s car first and he just inherited it. He always showered at the distillery in the worker’s locker room. That way he wouldn’t get the seats dirty. His family got a deal on Mustangs because his dad bought a fleet of them for his salesmen from a local dealer. They were all white. But his was yellow, and it sat low to the ground and made a noise he loved, one he’s still chasing: his current car is an Audi.
He loved that Mustang.
He laughs.
There was a passenger in the front seat, his girlfriend at the time, a woman by the name of Frances. They were driving a winding road in Boyle County, following some friends to a roadhouse restaurant. A cooler of beer sat in the back. That’s the gun on the mantel.
Julian pressed down on the gas, letting the throaty engine shake in its mountings, and as he topped a hill he found himself confronted with a hard-left turn he had not anticipated. Julian lost control and the Mustang slid off the road. The back end of the car got loose and he went into a ditch, the car rolling down the embankment until it landed upright on top of a tree stump. Julian was wearing his seat belt. Frances was not.
Julian collected himself and turned to check on his date. The passenger seat, previously occupied by the lovely Ms. Frances, was empty. He turned around and found her perfectly healthy and mightily annoyed, sprawling in the back seat, surrounded by an empty cooler and a lot of full cans of beer. The ice and water that had previously joined that cooler with those beers had been redeposited all over Frances’s perfectly coiffed and sculpted bouffant, which now slumped in dejection.
“Totally drenched with ice water,” he said.
Pappyland Page 4