Those were hard years for him.
“What was difficult about it?” I asked.
“Well, let’s see . . . old building. . . . This was ’83 when I bought it and I sold it in 2002 for the same thing I bought it for. There was a bottling house and a cased-goods place and three barrel warehouses, one of which was usable. But the place had been there forever and shit was just breaking down, the creek flooded, fucking decanters floating around in the basement. Roof leaking, equipment not working. Bumping my head on the warehouse. Raccoons would go in the warehouse and shit in the elevator. Raccoons are the nastiest animals on earth, by the way, they’re just gross and there was just raccoon shit all over the place.”
Here’s the thing about all these horror stories. He grew up a sort of prince, sent to the finest Southern boarding school and then to romp his way through college. All the down years are funny now, sitting in a fancy hotel bar that serves the world’s most sought-after bourbon that bears his family name. It all feels somehow preordained. That’s not how it felt as it was happening. Everything about his whiskey operation in Lawrenceburg, when compared with the beautiful, pristine campus his grandfather and father ran, seemed like part of a cruel, extended metaphor for how far this once-grand family had fallen. Life magazine once featured Pappy’s genteel Kentucky Derby party in its pages, with pictures of frosted julep cups engraved with J.P.VANW. And now his grandson was wading through a flooded basement, dodging raccoon shit. That’s not the life of easy gentility for which Julian had been raised.
“I had an old 1970 Dodge truck that had thirteen thousand miles on it from going from the warehouse to the bottling house, which is like a quarter mile, back and forth for millions of years. . . . I was fixing that fucking truck half the time. I learned how to put in new alternators. You just gotta learn by the seat of your pants. One of my employees put a clutch in there. Thank goodness. I couldn’t do that. The starter kept going out and the alternators and shit. I spent almost every day of my life in that son of a bitch.”
Listening to him, I sometimes wonder if his ultimate goal wasn’t to succeed in Lawrenceburg but to fail with honor. As if the point wasn’t to sustain the success of his family but to replicate the work ethic and the dedication—to leave it all on the field, if we’re throwing around sports metaphors. Julian would laugh at such a suggestion. He’s a guy who gets up and handles that day’s business, one foot in front of the other, which is its own kind of zen. He also wouldn’t like that I called him zen.
“I’m just glad I got rid of it. And some guy has got it now and I went by there a few months ago and it’s really scary looking. I think he’s living there. There were some bad things crawling around that place at night. I just can’t imagine. But it served its purpose; it created the Pappy Van Winkle brand. That’s what we should call the book: ‘A Weird Thing That Happened: The Pappy Van Winkle Story.’”
That’s why I want him to take me out to Lawrenceburg.
15
MANY BOURBON DISTILLERIES sell you a fake story that their corporate overlords try to make sure never gets punctured. Julian is the opposite. His biography gives him as much legitimacy as anyone in town, and yet he is not the crowned king of a dynasty. He saw his family sell its whiskey business and he went away to try to rebuild it, or to keep some small piece of it alive. He did it with the help of countless people, many of whom remembered his grandfather and were called to action by their loyalty and respect. Julian needed a lot of help in Lawrenceburg.
“How hard was it to find people to repair those old bottling machines?” I asked him.
“I actually called Jimmy Russell once a month, the Wild Turkey master distiller,” Julian said. “He’s the oldest, last one left.”
Wild Turkey had long ago left behind whatever archaic systems Julian was still forced to use, being a big, modern bourbon brand like Pappy’s Stitzel-Weller used to be. But some of the old code still mattered. Russell had guys on staff who were old enough to remember tinkering with whatever Julian ran in Lawrenceburg. So he’d send help. Those are the kindnesses that Julian won’t ever forget, and if you love Pappy but can’t get it, maybe raise a glass of 101 Wild Turkey instead.
“How did he help?” I asked.
“Well, he would send his mechanic over because the filler wasn’t working,” he said. “One day the thing just quit, and so . . . ‘Jimmy, can you send one of your guys over here . . . I got no idea what the hell is going on.’ At the bottom of this tank, where I’d captured the whiskey, there’s an elbow joint down there that had two clamps on it, one here and one here, so I unclamped the elbow and took it off because I thought something had gotten caught in it. So that came off and nothing’s in there, so the guy finally gets his flashlight and looks in the tube going to the filler. One of the little rags we use to clean shit up with—some dumb motherfucker had dropped it in the tank and it sucked it up into the filler . . . clogged it up completely. Pulls this thing out with a coat hanger. . . . ‘There’s your problem!’”
Julian admires men like Jimmy Russell.
Russell is a famously long-tenured master distiller and ran Wild Turkey at the same time Pappy ran Stitzel-Weller. He’s part of the old tribe of bourbon people who compete, sure, but who also help one another out; a connection to the farming culture that gave birth to the spirit. Not long ago, my cousin Thomas raced to get his cotton out of the fields before a coming torrential rainstorm. A neighbor finished his own crop around five p.m., and called up Thomas and asked if he could use the help. Thomas said yes. The man brought his equipment over and worked all night, the last of the cotton picked just before the clouds opened and the storm began. That kind of neighborly instinct is vanishing in a business run by brand managers, accountants, and private equity firms. People call Jimmy “the Buddha of Bourbon.” He started at Wild Turkey sweeping floors as a nineteen-year-old: that was 1954. Bourbon was the number one spirit in America. Ike was president. Pappy was seventy-nine. Julian was five. Grantland Rice died that year. The first Fender Stratocaster came off the line. On July 5, Elvis Presley stepped in front of a microphone at Sun Studio on Union Avenue in Memphis for the first time. Julian’s father, a war hero and executive at his family’s business, looked to a future much like his past. He had no way of knowing that his extinction had already been set in motion, that the cultural forces unleashed by Elvis and those California-made guitars would tear down his world, and that his son would be left with the wreckage and a deeply personal mandate to try to put it all back together again.
16
WE SAT AROUND A TABLE at the hotel restaurant in Louisville. I’d eaten a lot of meals with Julian by now and had come to enjoy these marathons most of all. Julian is at his best at a table, I believe. We talked about ceviche, pancreatitis, and the beautiful, hyperviolent plays of British-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh. Shit devolved. We got in the car and listened to the Who on the way home. Everyone sang along. The Doors came on next.
“Were you into the Doors?” I asked.
“Yeah, I got the first Doors forty-five,” Julian said.
“Did you eat acid?” Ed asked, laughing.
“Naw,” Julian said. “‘Hello, I Love You’ was the first stereo forty-five, and I had it.”
“What’s the first band you saw live?” I asked.
“Probably the Beach Boys or the Stones,” Julian said.
He loves the Rolling Stones, which must have driven his tank captain father absolutely nuts. “They’ve been here several times,” Julian said. “I saw them from the parking lot at the old Cardinal Stadium at the fairgrounds. I saw them at Churchill Downs.”
We got home. The party wasn’t over. We were at the best bar in the world: Julian’s house. As a rule, I always let him pick what we’re drinking. It feels rude to start shot-calling: Uh, yeah, can you get some Stitzel-Weller white dog from when your granddad ran the place? Maybe a 1964 Old Fitz? Maybe some 20-year-old Pappy?
We drove around the neighborhood on a golf cart, then we dropped Julian off and started talking about getting guns to “shoot shit.” Ed played Widespread’s “Driving Song,” which always leaves me melancholy and nostalgic:
The leaves seen through my window pane
Remind me that it’s time to move my life again.
We drove the cart onto a highway overpass. I leaned out over the concrete railing and looked down. Cars rushed beneath our feet, and the tires whined below in a blur of white and red lights. That’s when Ed started talking about Julian. He told me the real story of Lawrenceburg.
All those years out in the wilderness, Julian wasn’t breaking even. He went close to a million dollars in debt, taking out loans, spending through his inheritance, doing whatever it took to keep Old Rip in bottles and in stores. The whiskey business cost him nearly everything and yet he endured. And he wasn’t waiting for a boom. He didn’t see the future. That would make him a genius but would also somehow cheapen how far he was willing to go to put out another year of bourbon. Julian is a man willing to go down with the ship.
“This story has got to be told,” Ed said, “because it’s not like he was Pappy’s son and he had it made and he just fell into this. He was beating the machines with a wrench to make them operate. You’ve gotta talk to Aunt Sally about it. Aunt Sally was the one telling stories the other night about him in the flood, standing on top of the thing, beating it with a wrench. She told it last night. You’ve gotta have those stories. It’s rags to fucking riches. He’s spent all the money from the sale of the distillery keeping it alive and trying not to drop out of the country club where he’d grown up. They didn’t have any money. Fucking peanut butter and jelly at the club. Sissy will tell you, she’d take the kids out to the car to eat sandwiches and bring them back into the pool. This thing didn’t just happen overnight, and my biggest respect for Julian is that . . . man, I get it.”
I thought about Julian asleep up the hill. He grew up in the house next door to the one where he lives now. His entire adult life has been in the shadow of what his family built and lost. I think about the ultimate Southern act: the keeping up of appearances. During some lean years as a boy and a young man, my own family did the same thing. Something Preston Van Winkle told me came to mind. Julian loves these big cans of Hubs Virginia peanuts a friend mailed him every year for Christmas—“like, guarded them with his life,” Preston said—and after a long day out in Lawrenceburg, Julian used to love coming home and pouring a drink and eating the peanuts. Or, he’d come home and mow the yard with an ice-cold can of Budweiser, a pattern his son would find himself emulating as a grown man, and then he’d come in to eat his peanuts. And he would always share them with Preston. In the moment, Preston didn’t understand how much weight his father carried on his shoulders. That was his takeaway. Not the peanuts. But that his dad was under tremendous pressure and yet somehow never allowed that to be communicated to his only son, who adored him. “As busy as he was trying to keep the lights on in the eighties and nineties,” Preston said, “he always made time for me. Whether it was playing basketball, throwing the football or baseball, or going to sporting events and the like. We went to tons of minor league baseball, soccer, and ice hockey games. Air shows, tractor pulls, and monster truck rallies. We’d go out to my uncle’s piece of property and shoot oranges with shotguns and pistols and find vines to swing on. Because he always made sure to make time, it didn’t occur to me until later how hard he was busting his ass to keep things afloat.”
I looked back up at the darkened house on the hill. I could imagine Preston and Julian crowded over the big can of peanuts. I could see Julian’s children playing with the other kids at the country club pool and then skipping the expensive chicken tenders for a homemade sandwich in the car. I could see Julian with bank statements, or going into the bank to get another loan, or moving money around to keep his whiskey on the shelves. He did all of that and then he made it out the other side.
17
NOW HE WAS BACK.
Julian and his son stood out front of the black haunted house of a bottling plant, overgrown and with the Salt River running through the back. They walked around the side, taking it all in. We were in Appalachia, if not geographically then certainly spiritually. The place gave off a serious no-fucking-trespassing vibe.
“We might get shot,” Julian said.
“This guy is definitely armed and doesn’t like strangers,” I said.
“Don’t you think we should tell him we’re here before we go snooping around?” Preston asked.
We walked back around to the front and stepped inside. The place was full, floor to ceiling, with enormous and intricate signs, one in the shape of a guitar and another in the shape of a piano. It was a madcap workshop, cavernous and packed with all kinds of leftover electronics and machinery.
A man approached.
Julian stuck out his hand.
“Julian Van Winkle.”
The man clocked the name.
“Lou Defino,” he said.
“I drove by a few months ago and no one was here,” Julian said.
“Well, there’s definitely some history here, isn’t there?” Lou replied. Lou told him that the old tanks and bottling line have been sold to a guy who set up a distillery up the Highway 151. He thought about hanging on to them but decided he’d rather have the cash and be rid of the headache and the temptation.
“I’m getting old,” Defino said. “I’m seventy-one years old and I still work every day with my hands; get tired and hot. You may know of him. Three Boys Distillery, the name is.”
Julian recognized the name. “We saw him yesterday at Buffalo Trace,” he said. “I signed some decanters for his three grandchildren.”
The coincidence felt eerie; he met some upstart bourbon guy inspired by the boom Julian helped create, and that guy bought the same old bottling line that Julian fought and wrestled all those years ago. I could feel Julian’s metabolism change, suddenly open to the cosmic ideas floating around above us. The confluence of meeting the guy who bought his old bottling line, and then being forced by me to come out here and see the building where it once rattled away day after day, year after year, it was almost like this part of his life was stalking him, forcing him to reckon with these things.
Lou explained the barrel brands he’d found down in the dirt, and old bottles, and all manner of remnants of the whiskey making that once happened here. Julian left me and Preston to carry the conversation while he wandered around in a daze, finding his old fire extinguisher with his name still on the registration plate. The building looked different, but it was familiar enough to take him back to a place he didn’t like to go.
“There’s my old tow-motor,” Julian said.
He turned to Lou.
“Still working?”
Lou nodded.
Preston stared at the mobile lift.
“I can’t believe that thing is still around and still working,” he said.
“So you used to work here?” Lou asked Preston.
“My sisters and I used to ride that thing around,” he said.
There were so many memories out here that when Julian drifted away from the conversation with Lou, it was clear he’d gotten lost in his own past. His kids grew up out here as he kept the business alive. They called the winding highway to the plant the Roller Coaster Road. Julian would accelerate over the hills in his Honda Accord and the bottom would drop out from the kids’ stomachs. They grew up smelling whiskey just like he did. While he worked, they’d play in the Salt River, or slide down the box chute, or drive down to the warehouse in the old truck. Carrie
loves stories about them going into work with their dad. “Some of our favorite memories were down at the bottling plant,” she told me. “We’d get to pack a lunch and eat chips and Doritos and get Cokes out of the vending machine. We’d ‘surf’ on the conveyor belt, make the push forklift a ride toy, play down in the creek and find salamanders and crawdads and put them on Dad’s steering wheel for when it was time to go home. We did like the part where we rolled the barrels off the truck and into the dump room, banged the bungs out, and spilled the whiskey into the filter. We’d climb the ladder to the top of the tank and take a big whiff of the pre-proofed whiskey. We loved the smell and it will always remind me of Lawrenceburg.”
Those were some of the memories rushing back to Julian as he stood around and half-listened to Lou tell stories. Finally he emerged from his own world, looking into the guts of the tow-motor to see how Lou had it wired and powered. It was starting to occur to him that Lou was a kind of genius.
“I’ll be damned,” Julian said. “It’s got four golf cart batteries in there. Six volt. Man, that’s bad to the bone.”
“They don’t make anything even close to that now,” Lou said. “It’s fast and it’ll pick up four thousand pounds just like that.”
We realized pretty quickly that Lou not only worked in the dilapidated building, he lived there, too. I hope he doesn’t ever read this, because I don’t want to be rude, but the place had a horror movie vibe to me. Like, I would never, ever come out here alone and unarmed. And that doesn’t even take into account the rats and raccoons and all manner of creepy crawlies who’d taken up residence in parts of the building not occupied by Lou and his lady friend.
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