Julian got out and saw that the stump upon which his Mustang had come to rest had, in fact, smashed the engine of the car. The car was fucked. After taking off the “Rebel Yell” bourbon license plate on the front, he got it towed. Julian ended up selling the wreck for about one hundred dollars. In the years that followed, he thought about that car a lot, and about the young man who whipped it up and down the hills of Kentucky, and in some of his darker moments, he wondered what had happened to both. Not long ago, he started looking for another one, a 1966 pale-yellow with the black interior and the black top. Soon friends joined in the quest. A restaurant owner in northern Kentucky who’d heard him talking about this quest came across one online and sent the link to Julian. The car was in Minneapolis and Julian bought it.
“You’re deep in the nostalgia now,” I told him.
“You get older, you got nothing left,” he said.
When the pale-yellow Mustang arrived, he knew what to do. In his collection of odd stuff he’s accumulated over the years, he found an old tin Rebel Yell license plate. He got model-airplane paint and carefully began restoring it—“the only time I’ve ever seen him do an art project,” Sissy said, laughing—and when it looked perfect, which is to say exactly how it looked in the 1960s when everything was right in his family’s distilling empire, he screwed it into place on the front of the car.
13
WE PULLED UP TO THE GATE at Stitzel-Weller. The past was all around Julian now. Being here triggered so many thoughts, including the memory of how his family’s old whiskey tasted and smelled. His sister cried when she came back as an adult, seeing someone else inhabiting her childhood memories. Julian’s attachment is to the place as well, but also to the taste. He has spent his adult life chasing it. The past few years of his life have been dominated by a long wait to reclaim that taste. Julian’s great gift was always his ability to taste new whiskey and predict how it might taste when it aged, or to taste barrels and figure out how to blend them so they might closely approximate the taste of the old Stitzel-Weller he loved so much. In the coming months, he will taste the Buffalo Trace made and aged as Pappy Van Winkle for the first time since he partnered with them to ensure that his label would have a long life even after he died. He hopes that this whiskey will taste something like the Stitzel-Weller that made Pappy famous and rare, but there’s no way to know if it made the trip. He has bet a lot on this particular tasting in this particular year.
The man working the Stitzel-Weller guardhouse for the party was Carroll Perry, a Vietnam vet who started work here after he returned from the war. Perry was still here. A long time ago, during those hot summers working in the warehouses, he nicknamed Julian “Ripper.”
“Oh,” Julian said, smiling warmly. “I was hoping I would see you.”
“Nice to see you, sir,” Perry said. “I remember your daddy. Yeah, Ripper Van Winkle. You know what got that started?”
“I’m afraid to ask,” Julian said.
“It was in the warehouse break room,” Perry said. “And you went back there and got a case of export and was handing out the little miniatures to all of us, and we was sittin’ there when your daddy walked in. You got hell.”
“I don’t remember that part,” Julian said. “I think I blocked that out.”
“After that we called you Ripper Van Winkle.”
“Well, it stuck. Will you be around tonight for a while?”
“Yes, sir. Until closing time. It’s good to see you.”
The white tent glowed like something pitched by Victorian gentleman hunters. Sets of couches formed nooks for talking. Long tables were set for the dinner by a famous chef. Dinner would include his riff on the KFC mashed potatoes, served alongside mutton saddle and a tuned-up Derby pie. Music played and bartenders manned stations all around the place. Julian and I ordered mint juleps.
“I’ve been avoiding them all day,” he said.
“There’s good reason to at the track,” the bartender said. “How was your day?”
“I won a little money and then I quit betting,” Julian said. “Can you believe that? I finally learned that’s what you do.”
The whole experience was weird for me to watch, like he was walking through some alternate version of his own life, not fifty paces from the main office where his father and grandfather had worked—where he and his father struggled to know each other, separated by generations and joined by the shoes they both felt pressure to fill. With the Van Winkles, it always somehow came back to Pappy and the legacy he created and still inhabited from the other side.
14
JULIAN PROCTOR “PAPPY” VAN WINKLE SR. opened his distillery on Derby Day in 1935, planted in boxwood and magnolia trees and set on a fifty-three-acre tract of land just outside the city limits to avoid the taxes. Construction started the day after Prohibition ended, two years earlier. He oversaw every detail, including the installation of the largest still in the world at that time, capable of producing a barrel of bourbon every 4.17 seconds. Fourteen years later a new brick office opened, with white columns and a Monticello-inspired rotunda over the porch. Instead of a knocker on the white door, they hung five brass keys, each representative of one of the five stages of bourbon: grains, yeast, fermentation, distillation, aging. “Fine bourbon ought to make itself,” he liked to tell visitors, “with just a little help from mother nature and father time.”
Pappy Van Winkle often got his picture taken out on the front steps, alone and with his son, or with his partners, or with whoever might stop by to see him. He and those white columns became intertwined, in the public’s imagination and in the memories of his children and grandchildren. Pappy’s brick office was the center of his world. It was where he ate a frankfurter without a bun and an onion sandwich for lunch and then napped on his big tan sofa. His office was where he built fires in the winter and looked through its windows at the magnolias and the grain fields. It was where he would hunt relentlessly when the weather warmed, shooting dove and quail. He kept his gear in an office closet that smelled of leather and gun oil. Dead birds ended up on tables around the place for him to take home at the end of the day for his wife to cook. The family’s bird dogs lived in a pen next to the cooper shop: Pat, King, Thunder, and Chief. Julian and his sisters, Sally and Kitty, would often come and play with those dogs, running free in the groves and fields.
Julian saw the old shop where his granddad’s hunting dogs had lived. That was where he first understood that what they did here was a craft. “My aha moment,” he said. “I was working at the cooper shop. You dump the barrels in this trough, and roll the barrels down, take them apart, take the bad stave out, put the good stave in its place, put the cattails in between the staves. I learned how to do all that stuff; that was one of my jobs one summer. It was hard as hell. You put the barrel once it’s fixed back under the hose in the trough up here and you open the knob, and you fill the barrel back up. Well, one time the hose didn’t hit the hole right and I was completely soaked in that whiskey. And I tasted it, and that’s when I went, ‘Damn, this is really good.’ It wasn’t like sitting in a bar or sitting at home drinking whiskey, it was getting a bath in it. I was sixteen, seventeen, and I could tell how good it was. Once you taste that flavor, you never forget it.”
That flavor was Pappy’s life’s work. Not the buildings or the business. Those were mere instruments. He made and sold a luxury product, refined instead of rough, more popular in private clubs than in roadside saloons. This wasn’t cowboy booze, slamming a dirty glass down on a bar.
Pappy was an oddity in the Kentucky distilling world; he built himself up in this business from scratch, in a time and industry when nearly every other bourbon maker was from a long familial line, handed power and success by birth instead of work and luck. Pappy first got his start in whiskey at nineteen, when he took a job for W. L. Weller & Sons. It was 1893. He ended up buying out the Weller family and eventually merged with the S
titzels, who got their start when three German brothers moved to Kentucky in 1859, exactly a decade after the Wellers began making whiskey.
Pappy carried his outsider spirit with him his whole life. During a time when all the small producers were being swallowed by large corporations—most of the bourbon world was run by four large producers—he refused to let Stitzel-Weller be eaten. He testified before Congress in 1952 about the state of his industry, which was marred by price-fixing scandals and the general (and correct) assumption that there was more than a hint of organized crime involved in keeping America properly buzzed. “I think it’s often overlooked how big of a juggernaut Pappy was,” said bourbon writer and historian Fred Minnick, who has written some of the most deeply researched work on the spirit. “He took on the big guys. He looked down the barrel at the mob.”
Pappy launched an armada of salesmen out into the world, and he treated those men like family, probably because he remembered when he’d been out on the road, trying to build something approaching the life he fully realized by the mid-1950s. Old Fitzgerald was the only brand that was always 100 proof. He never watered down his liquor to take advantage of a bourbon boom. Pappy held the line. That should be on his tombstone, along with the many sayings that Julian and his sisters still remember.
“I see no sense in shipping water all the way around the country.”
“I used to be a Democrat but I soon got tired of that.”
“If I wanted to drink vodka, I’d find someone who’d sell me a can of alcohol.”
He lived the life of a country squire, bird hunting at work and training his dog Thunder to haul around his golf clubs at the Louisville Country Club. Whenever the dog arrived at the course, it leaped out and ran to the caddie shack to be outfitted for work. An acrylic painting of Pappy and Thunder on No. 18 hangs in Julian and Sissy’s kitchen, and sometimes when Julian passes it at night, he’ll smile and say, almost to himself, “There’s Pappy and Thunder.”
Pappy ruled this world until 1964 when he handed it over to Julian’s dad. It was his company now. His burden and responsibility. “In succeeding my father,” Van Winkle Jr. told Wine and Spirits magazine, “I realize I must attempt to fill the shoes of a man who has become a legend in his own time and, in fact, an institution in our industry.” Bourbon sales were declining around the country and the accountants pressed in on him. Pappy created the rise, and his son, facing forces beyond his control, would oversee the fall. That was his duty. So far the company had kept its flagship brand, Old Fitzgerald, at 100 proof, but a week after Julian’s dad took over, he put an Old Fitz on the market at a watered-down 86.8 proof. It’s clear the decision had already been made: Julian’s dad saved his own father the indignity of finally caving after an entire career built on holding the line no matter the cost. Julian Jr. took on that shame so that his beloved father wouldn’t have to take it on himself. When Julian’s grandfather, Pappy, died on February 16, 1965, at 11:10 p.m., Julian’s father stopped the clocks in his home.
Julian’s father was soon fighting to survive an eroding business and family politics. He and his sister split Pappy’s 51 percent stake, which is where the trouble began. The family who owned the 49 percent wanted more profit, and they were able to convince Julian Jr.’s sister that she deserved a higher return on investment, too, and that the whiskey business would never recover from its spiral. They brokered a sale with Somerset out of New York—owners of the Johnny Walker and Tanqueray brands—which helped solve one of the conglomerate’s problems. Somerset already owned a Kentucky distillery with lots of barrels of mediocre whiskey but it didn’t have a brand to sell it with. So it wanted to water down the Stitzel-Weller’s juice with all this subpar stuff just sitting there taking up room and costing the company money—using Pappy’s reputation to sell shitty whiskey is how the Van Winkles simplify the business calculations. Julian’s dad fought that sale off for as long as he could to protect the family’s reputation for “always fine bourbon,” but the tension caused by his efforts fractured the family. His sister basically wouldn’t speak to him, and for the first time in his life, he gave up.
He stopped opposing the sale and on June 30, 1972, just seven years after Pappy’s death, the Van Winkle family sold Stitzel-Weller to Norton Simon. Julian’s dad left all the artifacts in the glass cases around the office, feeling that the history of the place should be transferred along with the property. But the new owners came in, emptied out those glass cases, and threw all of that stuff away or put it up for auction. One day his dad’s former secretary, who’d stayed on with the new company, called them. She spoke in a whisper and told them there was an auction scheduled. The Van Winkle family treasures were being sold to the highest bidder and nobody had told them. Out of guilt and loyalty, she broke ranks to let them know.
They drove to the auction house. Julian and Sissy both remember a blizzard. There was one piece they wanted: a massive sterling silver punch bowl that came with a tray and a large set of cups, each engraved with the name of the top salesman for a particular year. The bowl, filled with eggnog, and cups would be brought out at the annual Christmas party, as the new stars of the whiskey-selling world were celebrated along with all the stars from the past. It was always a beautiful, moving evening and Julian wanted the bowl and the cups. A plant in the crowd designed to drive up the prices was bidding on everything, and when the bowl came up for sale, he bid on that, too. He and Julian were the only two people bidding and the price spiraled higher and higher until finally Sissy shot him a look, and he folded under her withering stare. The gavel came down, and for $5,000 Julian had his heirloom back. The Van Winkles still use the bowl and cups for Christmas parties.
Those are the memories that fuel his feelings of anger and resentment when he gets anywhere near the Stitzel-Weller distillery. It feels like a graveyard to him. That’s how it is sometimes. A world is vibrant and feels eternal, so the little decorations of life don’t mean much and are treated with passive contempt. Then that world is suddenly destroyed and the few remaining pieces are guarded and treasured. Even the plant’s name got changed from Stitzel-Weller to Old Fitzgerald.
I remember sitting with Julian at his kitchen island in Louisville one afternoon, looking out on the backyard where he learned to drive. He grew up in the house next door. A rare bottle of whiskey sat on the counter and he picked it up and turned it around in his hands to read the label: Van Winkle Family Reserve. Bottled December 1984. Barreled November 21, 1968. When he opened the bottle, the whiskey smelled complex and looked almost viscous, thick with caramels and burnt oak. This was Stitzel-Weller bourbon, made three years after Pappy died and four years before Julian’s dad lost the distillery. The smell filled the kitchen. He walked over to a drawer and came back with a razor-sharp French bar knife, then took a lemon and cut off two strips of rind and rimmed the glasses. He poured us each a drink, on the rocks, with a tiny bit of water to open up the flavor, and the twist.
He grinned after the first sip.
Sissy came in, carrying an old humidor. It belonged to his grandfather. An engraved brass plaque read:
Julian P Van Winkle Sr
Pappy
MARCH 22, 1963
I picked up the bottle we were drinking and found the date it had been distilled.
“Where were you on November 21, 1968?” I asked him.
Julian sat in his kitchen and let himself go back, doing math. He figured he must have been at the Blue Ridge School, his second boarding school after failing at the one where his dad sat on the board. “I was at Blue Ridge School, stealing horses, riding around in the mountains,” he said. “My roommate and I, who was from Louisville, stayed at Blue Ridge for Thanksgiving. We broke in the tack shop and tack room and saddled up some horses and went riding around the Blue Ridge Mountains. And we almost got kicked out of school because when we brought the horses back I guess we left the food bin open. Horses are not as smart as mules ’cause they’ll ea
t themselves to death whereas mules stop. And they almost died. So we almost got kicked out of school.”
The old bottle had conjured all the spirits. Julian took a sip and sighed. He seemed melancholy. I asked him how he felt about selling whiskey when he knows the best whiskey that will ever exist was made by Stitzel-Weller and all he can hope for is to come close.
“I’ve fought with that my whole life,” he said.
Close is always the only possible outcome when someone tries to make the present match up with his memory of the past. Home always seems warmer and safer than it really was. That’s where the pain comes from. We long for a fantasy that won’t ever come true and feel surprise at our inability to create it from force of will. That’s what Thomas Wolfe meant, I think. We can’t go home again because the home we remember never existed. All those ideas mixed with the ice to make the cocktail we really wanted. I asked Julian what the whiskey in his glass made him remember. He was sitting in his kitchen but was also very far away. He sighed again and told me that the taste always took him back to that long ago summer, the same year the bottle we were drinking was made, when he got soaked in Stitzel-Weller and fell in love with it. That was his baptism; he left that cooper shop changed, and so whenever he was back at the old distillery, part of him always returned to the summer of 1968. Or got as close to it as he could. He never got closer than close.
15
TIME STOPPED FOR HIM when he entered the gates on Limestone Lane. As he wandered, in a bit of a daze, I sipped on my free taste of bourbon offered by our hosts for the evening. Julian wouldn’t like me saying it—and Sissy expressly warned us not to start any shit tonight—but the Blade and Bow wasn’t great. I mean, I didn’t love it. I mean, it tasted fine, is awesome in a Manhattan I bet, and by the third drink it didn’t matter all that much. But the best whiskey in this entire place was in Julian’s pocket. Always fine bourbon—made right on the premises before this was a museum, before the accountants shut it down.
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