Pappyland

by Wright Thompson

  “You didn’t bring a flask in here, did you?” someone asked him.

  Julian grinned, his eyes twinkling with his tiny act of rebellion.

  “What do you think?” he shot back.

  The whiskey lovers in the crowd cornered him to see what might be gleaned from an audience with Booze Yoda. I’ve spent a lot of time watching how people talk to him in person and online. He catches a ton of shit on the internet from fringe whiskey nerds who talk about his whiskey being overrated, or about how the scarcity is just a marketing plot, and online those attacks get personal. I’ve been with Julian when he was surrounded by whiskey nerds and nobody ever says that shit to his face. Some of these folks seeking an audience have no doubt attacked him online, but without the cover of anonymity their courage slips away. He poses for a lot of selfies and answers a lot of questions, which he actually seems to like, or at least tolerate. He can seem effusive enough to obscure just how private he really is.

  “What do you carry in your flask?” an acolyte asked.

  “Weller, it’s all I can get,” he said. “It’s all the same recipe as our whiskey just a younger version, so it’s like young Van Winkle whiskey. It’s the same recipe as ours, originally made here.”

  When prompted, he explained the history of this place. He gestured to the buildings sitting in darkness outside the tent. “Did you know this was an old Pappy distillery? Stitzel-Weller. They started in 1935 back here. It’s a corn, wheat, and malted-barley recipe versus corn and rye. All the wheated-recipe bourbons that are out there come from my grandfather, because Fitzgerald distilled Rebel Yell even though it’s owned by Luxco in St. Louis. Old Fitzgerald is owned by Heaven Hill. Buffalo Trace owns Weller. Now for our purpose that’s where most of our whiskey is made.”

  “How do you feel about Blade and Bow?” someone asked.

  “Well, it’s made in a different distillery,” he said. “Diageo closed this in ’92 and went with the new Bernheim whiskey distillery, which is now owned by Heaven Hill down the road. Different equipment equals a different flavor profile completely.”

  16

  LET’S GET GRANULAR. Diageo is the current name of the owners of Stitzel-Weller. It owns Guinness among many other iconic brands. Under the name United Distillers, before a merger created Diageo, executives shut down the famed Stitzel-Weller plant in 1992 and opened a new distillery at Bernheim, which some consider the worst new distillery ever built. After it shut down the facility Pappy built, Diageo sold off nearly all the bourbon brands, although it still used the Stitzel-Weller warehouses for aging. When the bourbon boom started four or five years later, Diageo pulled the I. W. Harper brand out of mothballs and bought Tommy Bulleit’s label. Diageo owned the Bernheim distillery and had access to juice. So people like bourbon historian and journalist Fred Minnick wonder whether the booze used in Blade and Bow is actually leftover juice made by Stitzel-Weller or whether it is Bernheim that was aged at the old Stitzel-Weller distillery. It’s a subtle distinction, and one that doesn’t matter to most folks but matters tremendously to bourbon obsessives.

  Often an essential trait needed to sell bourbon is the ability to artfully dodge a direct question about what’s in the bottle and how it got there. Not long ago I was on a tour at a famous distillery that shall remain nameless, and the guide said that one of its high-end offerings wasn’t called bourbon because it was aged in special barrels that didn’t match the strict government controls defining bourbon. I asked if the liquid in the barrel was all straight bourbon whiskey or if it had been cut with neutral grain spirits. She bobbed and weaved and didn’t answer the question. Bourbon has always been a little about waving one hand wildly to attract attention away from what the other hand is doing.

  Everyone with a connection to Pappy is trying as best as they can to sell that story. Stitzel-Weller talks about Pappy in its tour. Heaven Hill bought Old Fitzgerald and name-checks Pappy on its website. Weller, which is owned by the same people who now work in partnership with Julian at Buffalo Trace, is made from the same juice as Pappy—just not aged as long and not curated by Julian. Weller has become impossible to find just because of its association with Pappy. But in the end, the only real connection with Pappy and with Stitzel-Weller lives inside Julian himself. He remembers how the whiskey tastes and matching his memory remains the cornerstone of his process. “Julian’s great gift is his palate,” Minnick said. “You won’t find many people with a better palate than Julian. He has this unique ability. That’s not something you can teach. It’s a straight-up gift.”

  17

  JULIAN STOOD IN THE TENT and everything about him signaled that here was a man around whom others tended to revolve. He doesn’t orbit. People orbit him. He sipped from the flask. The Weller had that same smoothness that is familiar to wheat lovers and was made from the same juice as Pappy. “That’s why you can’t find it,” Julian said. “On account of people calling it Baby Pappy. That’s why you don’t really see Weller much.”

  “So what’s the difference between their Weller and your twelve-year?”

  “It’s basically the same whiskey,” he said, “but we—my son, Preston, and I and the staff at Buffalo Trace—taste barrels. We taste every barrel before we bottle. It’s vetted a little more seriously because we have a certain flavor profile that we’re looking for.”

  “Do you ever get tired of talking about this?” he was asked.

  “I don’t talk about anything else,” he said.

  18

  IT WAS A STRANGE NIGHT. A marketing guy gave a welcome speech about Blade and Bow in which he described this distillery as a “cathedral of bourbon,” the kind of talk that makes Julian roll his eyes. He is part of an enormous industry fueled by hype and myth and is both a beneficiary and a critic of that culture. It struck me as strange that the speech didn’t mention that the grandson of the man who made it a cathedral was sitting out there in the crowd. Julian never said a disparaging word, and Lord knows I tried. Alas, he’s far too savvy and Southern to be visibly upset in public, especially when I have an open notebook, but I could tell this rubbed him the wrong way and left him unsure of how to process it all. He literally had front-row seats as a myth was being created in real time, using his family’s story as the buttressing stones of that myth. The Blade and Bow logo even had his grandfather’s five keys on it. We sat at a long farm table lit with candles. I wore a fedora with my Churchill Downs press badge on it, which felt right on the line between appropriate and affected. The food was dressed-down fancy—chef-tuned mashed potatoes and gravy served in Styrofoam KFC cups—and Julian sat down near the end, next to me, listening to people talk with unearned authority about this place that feels as much a part of his family as his own blood.

  All this became a little much for him. In the hours after dinner, as the Steep Canyon Rangers played its set, Julian and I went looking for the bathroom, which meant walking the grounds of his family’s old distillery and heading to the office. We stepped out of the tent into the darkness. The night echoed with acorns landing on the metal roofs of the rickhouses. Julian stopped suddenly on the walkway leading up to the brick office and white columns, which were lit for maximum drama. I watched him closely. He checked out the trees and the warehouses and the footpaths. There were a dozen memories attached to everything he saw. The darkness and the shadows of the party lights made things come in and out of view, a strange strobing effect that added to the feeling that we’d entered another dimension.

  “Oh boy,” he said softly.

  He pulled out his phone to take a picture. To his left was the screen with the Blade and Bow logo, along with a bright studio light, where guests had been having their pictures taken earlier with a horse. To the right was the open field where Julian used to shoot doves and skeet and hear the shotgun blasts echoing off the corrugated-tin warehouse walls. He waited for the front door to be closed so he could take a picture and then we went inside. Some of the rooms ha
d been changed. Some looked exactly the same, with the wood trim and wainscoting. If he closed his eyes he could still hear Mary Patrick tapping away on her typewriter, and hear his father’s voice on the phone, checking in with his sales reps around the country. The old man barked like the World War II tank commander he was until the day he died. Julian and his dad had a complicated relationship; men of different generations with different ways of showing love. Those feelings added layers to his memories as he went inside the miniature Monticello his grandfather had built.

  He walked through the offices, peeked into the room where Pappy had moved when his dad took over. Mrs. Nell ran the switchboard over there. Julian stepped inside what was now Tommy Bulleit’s office. “I’ve got pictures of Pappy, my dad, and me standing there with a shotgun in front of the fireplace,” he said. “That’s the old bathroom; the executive bathroom with the shower. I would come in here after working in the warehouse and take a shower in there.”

  Soon it felt like it was time to go. This was someone else’s space now. He didn’t belong. Julian fell quiet. When we got outside, he asked if I would take his picture in front of this building where so many of his photographs of his dad and granddad were taken. The band was loud, the sound pouring out of the tent into the trees.

  I snapped the picture and he took my phone to look at himself.

  “The cover of the fucking book,” Julian said.

  He asked me what the title of this thing was gonna be.

  “Cathedral of Bourbon,” I said, and we both laughed in the darkness.

  19

  THE PARTY KEPT ROLLING. I found a seat on the couch and caught up with Chenault and Ed, who looked up at the stage with a smile as Julian grabbed a cowbell and sat in with the band. His daughter pretended to be mortified but was secretly proud. What her dad did, rising out of the ashes of the family line that ended at this distillery in 1972, was both a business lesson and a human one. Julian’s success felt like a road map, a guide for men to sort out what a son owes his father and what he should feel free to leave in the past. He took the life he’d been born into and rebuilt it so his children might enjoy it, too. Those were the things that hit me as the Derby party downshifted to the last gasps. I needed to leave soon to get some sleep before an early morning racetrack television appearance on ESPN, and Julian would take this party far into the night.

  The Steep Canyon Rangers ended its show and someone played music through the PA while the band packed up its gear. Prince came on. Julian stood around with the band and his daughter while we all sang along to “Purple Rain.” The guitar tone felt perfect, the fuzz of the riff and the heavy bass string hit, anchoring the chords in the earth, like the limestone wells beneath our feet. The sound seemed to embody Julian’s melancholy and joy, coming back to this place. Instead of letting his family’s legacy die in these old buildings, he resurrected it. He is carrying on the work. He’s making the trip.

  20

  THREE DAYS LATER, Sonia and I went to her doctor for her first blood test to see if the procedure had worked. It did. She was pregnant. It was a Tuesday, Sonia’s friend Cara’s birthday. We took that as a sign. The nurses gave us a tentative test and told us to come back on Thursday. We made the drive once again. It was Sonia’s brother’s birthday. We took that as a sign, too. The blood test came in positive again, and that confirmed for us that she was pregnant. The next day I drove to Alabama to visit my boss and dear friend John Skipper, who was giving the commencement address at the Tuskegee Institute. John and I shared a mutual love of literature and a hope that the better angels of the South might one day prevail. That night as we sat in the old plantation home that was now the university president’s house, and as we felt the immense weight of that change, not only in the faces and stories of my fellow diners but also in the air, I felt a profound and new sense of rebirth and of hope as I tried to wish the world I wanted for my child into existence. The positive news sank in slowly. I cried tears of hope and fear, then told the news to my mother, my brother, and my uncle Will—who since the death of my father has become the most important male role model in my life, a real surrogate for me. Will has never had a taste of Pappy Van Winkle, so I made a mental note to get a bottle from Julian to give to him. His smile when I hand it over will remind me of that night in New Orleans outside the Superdome, and of my father, who was present that evening and whenever Uncle Will and I are together.

  PART II

  1

  THE NIGHT BEFORE THANKSGIVING, I booked tables for thirty at Ramon’s, an Italian roadhouse I love in my hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi. The Ely family always makes me feel welcome, like I’ve come for dinner at their home. I love the Miller Lite sign glowing in the window and the way people bring their own wine and booze in cases from a bygone era. Some of the older customers bring their own miniature mobile bars, made of leather and embossed with initials. It’s my favorite place to eat in the world and I looked forward to sharing it with my family. The Thompsons do Thanksgiving big, a tradition started by my dad and his brothers when their mother died to protect them against the buffeting forces of time and distance, which create the vacuum in which family decay sets in. I’ve always admired their foresight. Now there are only two brothers left, Will and Michael, and this tradition is being passed to my generation. I worry sometimes that we aren’t up to the task. Families stay together because of active decisions, because of patterns that turn into rituals, and they are torn apart most often not by anger or feuds but by careless inertia. Few people in my generation even have a house big enough for sixty Thompsons and friends, wherein we unleash a spread that includes five beef tenderloins, a dozen desserts, two turkeys, a range of wild game and dove stew, and oysters my cousin Charles brought up from the Gulf. We still wear ties to lunch before changing into the proper attire to play a football game and then watch one.

  So this year, I added the Wednesday night dinner at Ramon’s. I took a bottle of Van Winkle Family Reserve Rye, a gift from Julian, and I went around the room pouring glasses. People understood that opening this bottle was a sign of my appreciation, the myth of Pappy serving as a show of respect and love. Each glass honored this tradition and offered the wish that it might continue. My father is buried just up the road from Ramon’s. After everyone finished, my brother and I left the restaurant together to visit him. I carried the empty bottle with me to the car. We drove into the darkness in silence. I pulled into the cemetery and placed the bottle on my father’s grave. Neither my brother nor I spoke. He just looked at me and nodded.

  2

  JULIAN AND I SETTLED INTO A PATTERN. When our schedules aligned, I’d meet him somewhere: Kentucky, Michigan, San Francisco. When I arrived he’d make jokes about how these trips would never, ever result in a book. I loved spending time with him and Sissy because what Julian lacked in the instinct to reflect, he made up for as a host. He’d allude to “difficulties” and “stress” when describing what happened in his father’s life—and then in his own life—after the family lost the Stitzel-Weller distillery. He rarely went much further. I’m not saying he avoids stuff, at least not consciously, but he is happier now than he was living his old life, when he spent two decades scratching together enough money to source whiskey and then run it through the bottling plant he owned near Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, which is closer to Lexington than Louisville, west of the Four Roses and Woodford Reserve distilleries. Whiskey aficionados love the bourbon he bottled there because he used his once-in-a-generation palate to taste different barrels of various ages and provenance and knew which ones he should blend to make great bourbon. He worked with one hand tied behind his back financially, and the work he did there remains the stuff of legend, because his skills allowed him to put out fine bourbon where other men would have failed. That’s how he built a reputation separate from his famous last name.

  I told him I wanted him to take me to Lawrenceburg. That’s where the real soul of Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve live
d. If the story outsiders tell about Julian has to do with cult bourbons and stingy allocations, the story his family tells about him is about the years he spent in Lawrenceburg.

  I also just wanted to see the place where one day it rained vodka. It’s one of his favorite stories. At some point during his Lawrenceburg tenure, he’d taken a contract bottling vodka for a guy who ended up not paying him. Julian desperately needed the money and would take any flyer who walked through the door. A truck would pull up outside and empty the pure grain alcohol into a large holding tank, which was then released a little at a time into a seven hundred–gallon reservoir connected to the bottling line. The bottling plant was three or four stories tall. That is about to become important.

  A guy working down on the line screamed, “Fuck!” People dove to find cover and yelled in fear. Julian came running. He found the entire tower raining 190 proof grain neutral spirits. He’d forgotten to turn off the pump, and so when the holding tank filled up, the liquor had nowhere else to go. Booze was just pouring through every crack in the floor, rolling in a waterfall down the stairs. Julian sprinted to the pump and turned it off and came back inside to find his employees soaked like wet dogs. That was when he noticed the entire place smelled like a lumber mill. He won’t ever forget that. It really smelled exactly like freshly sawed two-by-fours. The 190-proof firewater stripped away a century of grime and muck and gunk off all the boards and now everything looked brand-new, like it had all just been built.