“Why, then, do we continue to pursue joys without substance?” Merton wrote. “Because the pursuit itself has become our only substitute for joy. Unable to rest in anything we achieve, we determine to forget our disconnect in a ceaseless quest for new satisfactions. In this pursuit, desire itself becomes our chief satisfaction.”
That’s why I find Julian so intriguing and worthy of respect. He lives and works in the business of selling the myth of his own family to people who long for it in theirs—and not just the whiskey and the cigars and the hats and embroidered belts, but the old over-and-under shotguns and rings and traditions like the Derby and Michigan, the whole gestalt of Van Winkledom, of Pappyland—and while selling this myth, he doesn’t let it consume the actual him at the center of it. That’s his greatest gift, I think, and what each bottle I own of Van Winkle represents to me. That’s the mask I put on Pappy, which means either I see the bourbon more clearly than anyone else or I’m the biggest sucker of them all.
Do everything to avoid the noise and the business of men.
I have spent two decades obsessed with the noise and business of men, of trying to figure out what my work means, when Merton says it means nothing at all.
Keep as far away as you can from the places where they gather to cheat . . .
The decision to focus on the joy of creation and family instead of ambition lies with me alone.
Be glad if you can keep beyond the reach of their radios.
I feel like some vibrating need has been briefly silenced.
Do not bother with their unearthly songs.
Who do I want to be during the time I have left?
What does Julian want to pass on when he’s gone?
Do not read their advertisements.
Pappy Van Winkle was many things: father, husband, honorable businessman, craftsman, wing shot, Derby party host, but perhaps most of all he was an ad man. He could see into the hearts of men and know what they desired and how to sell it to them. All great whiskey barons have that skill in common. And yet, the closer and closer I get to Julian, the more I see someone who isn’t trying to sell anyone anything. He’d prefer this book didn’t exist, I believe. He’d prefer his whiskey didn’t have such an expensive secondary-market price, because that would save him a lot of angry phone calls. He doesn’t get any of that markup. What he really cares about is that he lives up to the promise that kept him going all these years—ALWAYS FINE BOURBON—and that promise is not to Pappy or to his father or to Sissy or his children. Julian’s whiskey is the public expression of a private promise to himself, a return to the success of his grandfather and, maybe as important, a chance to soothe the pain his father felt when he lost what Pappy had built.
PART III
1
THERE IS AN ORCHID that lives for only one night. It grows in the wild on cactuses. Old bourbon is a lot like these flowers. Once you crack the seal and pull the cork the whiskey sometimes has only minutes to live. I think of that poem “The Waking” by Theodore Roethke, about how we begin dying the moment we are born. That’s true for bourbon, too. One afternoon Julian and I drank an old Stitzel-Weller that had been made in the late 1960s. His father was living when this whiskey got distilled and barreled, and so when he opened the cork—he needed to gently pull it out with a wine key as it crumbled—a world in which his father was still alive briefly filled Julian’s kitchen, on our noses and tongues when he poured a glass for each of us. We sat at his kitchen counter and drank in silence.
“This starts to oxidize fast,” he said. “Matter of fact, it’s already gotten a bit funky.”
I couldn’t believe how quickly the whiskey changed. The taste Julian loves most and longs to replicate is like one of those desert orchids that flashes beautiful and is gone before the sun.
“It’s been open for . . . ,” I said.
“. . . ten to twenty minutes,” he said.
“If that,” I said.
“Why is it so sensitive?” he said. “Why is it so fragile?”
2
THE DAY OF THE TASTING HAD FINALLY ARRIVED, the one that I’d been waiting on since I first started to hang out with Julian. Once more I drove north through rural Mississippi and Tennessee, passing the National Bird Dog Museum about sixty miles east of Memphis. I followed I-65 into Kentucky, passing the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green. I found myself thinking about how those two museums spoke to each other—a lot of time alone in a car can lead to a lot of theories. It was a solid seven hours from my house to Buffalo Trace.
The tasting that awaited me was the first year that Pappy Van Winkle would be bottled from whiskey made and aged on-site at Buffalo Trace. The juice already poured in glasses with oxidation proof covers was fifteen years old. Julian’s opinion of that whiskey would help determine whether Pappy had a long future or whether it will be one of the many top-shelf brands that come and go like topsoil in a hard wind. That’s the unspoken harsh reality in every room where bourbon is made and consumed and discussed.
So many things have changed in the bourbon business since the Stitzel-Weller plant stopped making its flagship bourbon. There is no more Stitzel-Weller. Nobody is making any more and most bourbon experts believe all the old stuff has been used. So all that’s left of the greatest bourbon ever made is memory, and the only physical manifestation of that memory lives in Julian’s attempt to put out bottles that come close, as he told me a long time ago. He’s been chasing the taste and now he’ll find out if he’s caught it or not. In this business, Julian is a legendary connoisseur, and after all the hype and cult bourbon press and backlash, the expertise he cultivated is what will determine the future of his brand and his business. Those are the stakes. Julian downplayed them, and is probably rolling his eyes as he reads this, but I believe I’m right and I think he agrees with me. That’s what I was driving to Buffalo Trace to see. I knew the roads by heart now, turning at the top of the holler and winding my way down toward the water tower that peeks through the trees, built like a shotgun shell with a Coco Chanel wig on top.
When I got out of my car, that familiar smell of corn and young whiskey hit me once again. Smoke rose from the stacks. Heavy machinery jerked and pirouetted to the soundtrack of shrill warning beeps. No matter how romantic you want to make it, a distillery is still an industrial space—a little bit of the rust belt grown up in mountain hollers. There’s something magic about that intersection that lives in each bottle. Buffalo Trace claims it’s the oldest continuously operating distillery in the country, and that might well be true. It’s hard to know when you’re talking about whiskey. Maker’s Mark claims the same thing—that it occupies the oldest operating bourbon distillery in the world. Here’s what I’ve learned: both are old, and both have been remodeled to look even older, which tells you all you need to know.
Buffalo Trace looks like a theme park from some bygone America, but really, science rules the day. Bourbon is chemistry. This is where Julian or Preston tastes every barrel that ends up in a bottle bearing his family name, looking for off-tasting samples to throw out. We left the gift shop and turned right. It felt like going backstage at a rock show. I never got tired of walking through the distillery with Julian, because even if we didn’t talk, he made more sense to me when surrounded by his natural habitat. We passed the brass buffalo surrounded by a small waterfall and pond. Julian looked over to the left. He loved the grassy hill planted with blooming dogwood trees. He’d grown up in a place like this and he always seemed relaxed when surrounded by the familiar sounds and smells, and by the men and women who rushed around him, doing their work. Their continued existence in a changing world seemed to comfort him. A small stream ran down the hill. On the right was a trompe l’oeil painting that depicted the inside of a barrel warehouse. We kept on going until we reached a door. He opened it and we both went inside and the rattling screech of the high-speed bottling line hit us. It was hard to hear.
We went up the back stairs toward the Buffalo Trace lab. The staircase was industrial, the kind of steel girders that connect the decks of a warship. The hall to the lab itself was narrow, and once we were inside, the room felt small and cramped. The science happened here, and the expertise that the marketing department would later sell as magic. Two specially built tables with two different levels of lazy Susans were covered in linoleum to minimize damage from spilled whiskey. None of the staff knew how long the tables have been used. Like a lot of things at a distillery, they predated the longest tenured employee. They’d seen photos of former Master Distiller Elmer T. Lee sitting at the table. He started at the plant in 1949. Several years ago, a local artisan replicated a table when they remodeled the lab. On each lazy Susan sat row upon row of half-pint bottles, each carefully marked, and small wineglasses containing bourbon from each barrel of a particular vintage. A glass coaster rested on top of each one to stop the oxidizing process. Julian had done this maybe a thousand times in his life. Mostly these sessions come and go without much notice being paid. He took a sip and spat the whiskey into a big brass spittoon, no big deal. Everyone, me included, was always stunned at how much great whiskey gets tossed; there was a law against taking these half-pints out of the lab. “I’ve tasted 23-year-old with someone who didn’t spit,” Julian said, laughing, “and they almost fainted when I told them we had to throw out what’s left over.”
3
MY UNCLE WILL IS THE PATRIARCH OF OUR FAMILY. Not long ago, he brought over a beautiful white dress that was now our turn to have. All the girls in the family had worn it, and he wanted to make sure that tradition continued. He told us the story, how Becky had bought it nearly fifty years ago for their daughter, Susan, to wear to my uncle Michael’s wedding. Beautiful and handmade, it came from the Women’s Exchange in Memphis. I promised to take care of it and to make sure it got passed to the next little girl to come along. We talked about how impossible it seems that he has a daughter who is more than fifty years old. He smiled and said, “Life isn’t designed to the stay the same.”
Will says things like that a lot. He’s funny and fun, with that rare kind of devout faith that attracts people with its promise of peace and an eternal life with God, rather than repels with its dogma and arrogance. He dances at weddings. He cheers for his favorite team without any self-consciousness. His old glory days as a high school football player still work in his memory. When he moved to Yazoo City to set up his medical practice, he started to work for a local high school, Manchester Academy, as the team doctor. A recurring dream began. He’d be wearing the Manchester uniforms, his current age, surrounded by the teenagers, suited up, ready to play a game again. The lights glowed and tiny bugs swarmed the halogen bulbs. His adrenaline spiked and the cheers coming from the metal bleachers echoed inside his helmet, and the noise rose and just before the ball got kicked off to start the game, he woke up. It happened like that every time. He never got to dream about actually playing in the game and eventually the dreams stopped. He’s still the team doctor and now gives motivational speeches. Uncle Will loves feeling the radiating energy of their youth and power and remembering when he and my dad played together for Bentonia High School, my dad the quarterback and Will his protective lineman, who’d take on the entire opposing town if he felt like they were attacking his little brother.
In his church, which is much more conservative than I’m comfortable with to be frank, he’s led a group that is working through the idea of racial reconciliation. Will is the kind of man who is always open to questions and discovery and debate. That’s probably hardwired in him—a mixture of whatever mental acuity drew him to the medical profession and his deep empathy. He now hosts breakfasts at his house with people of different races and political ideologies, so they can walk a mile in one another’s shoes. If America had more people like Uncle Will, then we wouldn’t be in this mess in which everybody just shouts and sits down in satisfied certitude.
Lately he’s gotten into bourbon. I think it’s an aging and nostalgia thing. Like Julian, he’s been battling cancer, which he’s so far kept at bay. But Uncle Will knows he is in the last act of life. There are angels around him now, waiting to take him home to be with his parents and with his brothers. I never knew if he and my dad had ever talked about dying or if they’d ever said goodbye, but after talking to Julian about all the questions he wishes he’d asked his dad, I didn’t want to make the same mistake. So I asked Will. He took a day to compose his thoughts and then told me the story. “I never said goodbye,” he said, “nor did your daddy. I don’t recall ever talking about death with Walter. Not sure why. To me death is not a frightening thing.”
My mama and daddy refused to ever give voice to the idea that this might be a losing fight. So Will felt he should respect that warrior spirit. Daddy could hear his high school football coach screaming in his ear across the decades. You. Are. Not. Gonna. Quit. So Uncle Will got in line and encouraged as best he could. The closest they ever got was when my mom took my younger brother to college in the last year of Daddy’s life. Uncle Will went to stay with Daddy, who had less than a month to live, although we didn’t know it then. I didn’t. Will seemed to understand things I never allowed myself to see. That, he told me, was “the last time to see my brother whole.” They grilled outside and Daddy took him to the chair he had set up looking out over the backyard. That’s where Daddy made his peace with dying. Once when I was home, my mom wept and pointed out back and said, “I think he’s scared and it breaks my heart.”
Will said Daddy slept a lot. When he woke up, he asked his older brother to read the Bible to him. Mostly Psalms. The closest Will came to addressing what they both knew was when he read from 1 Corinthians 15, about the resurrection and how our earthly body is just temporary, and the glories of eternal life await. Neither said much about the verses. Will left that visit hopeful and at peace. The night Daddy took a turn, Mama called Uncle Will and told him he needed to hurry. Will and Becky wept during that long drive up through the Mississippi Delta toward the hospital in Memphis. They got to his bedside a half hour too late. Daddy was cold and lifeless. Uncle Will leaned over and hugged him. He kissed him and told him he loved him. Even with his faith in a coming eternal life together, Will said he had a hard time leaving his brother alone in the ground at the cemetery. He said he wanted to take him home. I felt the same way.
Since my father died, Will has worked hard to make sure that my mom, brother, and I know that he is there for us, and that he misses his brother as much as we miss our husband and father. I appreciate that about him. He makes a sustained and visible effort to be at events at which his beloved brother would have been, from family funerals on my mother’s side to book events for me. He is always there, and by showing up, he has shown his love for his brother.
I love being around Will and seeing the world through his lens of childlike enthusiasm that hasn’t been dimmed one bit by time. That’s why, when he mentioned that he’d never been to New York City and longed to go, I told him that was a problem I could solve. So we went together, checking into a fancy SoHo hotel and spending four or five days eating bagels and pastrami from Katz’s, and riding the subway, and sitting front row at Jersey Boys, when the old songs from his past and the memories they evoked made him cry and then stand on his toes and cheer when the cast came out to bow. We had a magical time together. My favorite night was taking him to Peter Luger with my cousin Kyser, where we ate huge steaks and had cocktails and Will told us stories about our fathers and their childhoods that we’d never known. I don’t want to air family business here, but suffice it to say that it was difficult, and I understood better why the four Thompson boys were so close; their own kind of tribe. But Will’s favorite thing, I believe, was when we sat at the bar at Eleven Madison Park. I saw a bottle of 23-year-old Pappy sitting on the shelf and I ordered us each a drink. I’ll never forget the look on his face. I ordered us another, and we sat there, me and my father’s older broth
er and best friend, and we sipped this beautiful, rare, expensive whiskey and we didn’t need to say a thing.
4
JULIAN SPENT THE FIRST PART OF HIS LIFE not saying much. One of his father’s friends called him Silent Dan. Once he got invited onto local television as a child and froze on-screen and seemed to try to fold into himself; a little boy making insecure origami out of his skinny body. That little boy has been replaced by a confident man who moves in the sophisticated world of high-end spirits, wine, and food. Julian knows his stuff. One night at dinner in Louisville at a restaurant he loves on Bardstown Road, he passed around ceviche and then nodded at this Spanish white wine he’d ordered. He wanted us to have the proper experience.
“Now take a sip of that,” he said.
His older sister, Sally Van Winkle Campbell, laughed and turned to me.
“See, he was never like that,” she said. “He used to be the silent type. No more!”
I considered the man I now call a friend. He wasn’t always the first version of him I ever saw, dancing to Bollywood music at a late-night party. He had to learn how to be Julian Van Winkle. It’s an ongoing education of a lifetime. Once he was a quiet, intense man with a mustache. That’s been shaved, which is cosmetic but also symbolic. He’s been reborn with his third-act success, and he has learned how to be like his grandfather, to become, through time and intention and centripetal force, the man on the bottle of whiskey he made famous. He regularly plays drums with bands. There’s the story of the Kentucky Derby party when a group of famous people, including baseball star Cal Ripkin, had cornered Julian to talk whiskey and Wayne Gretzky kept coming up and interrupting, until Julian finally wheeled around and said, “Why don’t you shut the fuck up, Wayne?”
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