Pappyland

by Wright Thompson

  They got to work.

  Barrel 164 was empty, the clipboard said. Either it leaked or it all evaporated. That happens. You put whiskey into hibernation and pay taxes and then it’s simply all gone. These are good reminders that this is much closer to farming than making steel, no matter how scientific the lab or industrial the plant.

  They both loved barrels 167, 174, 175, and 176. All of them came from the “I” rickhouse. Julian had been gushing to Preston about barrels 107 and 116, which we tasted yesterday, with Julian calling them among the best he’s ever tasted, all the way back to the Stitzel-Weller Pappy. They were from the I rickhouse, too.

  “First Floor I,” Julian said.

  “I don’t know if it’s a first floor thing or an ‘I’ thing,” Preston said.

  We finished and kept talking about those two barrels.

  “One hundred seven and one hundred sixteen,” Julian told Preston.

  “Are they gone?” Preston asked, pointing at the small bottles.

  “No, they’re in there,” Julian said as Preston went hunting.

  Julian wanted to pull his favorite and have it bottled just for him, the first single-barrel Pappy he’ll ever have pulled just for the family in forty years plus. He picked barrel 107. That’s a nearly perfect whiskey. The proof was 141.2, which was really high. For the first part of its life the barrel lived on the sixth floor of the C warehouse. Three or four years later, after a new hoist had been installed, the barrel was moved to the sixth floor of the D warehouse. Being on a high floor is what makes the proof so high. A lot had evaporated, with only seven cases instead of the expected twelve. The barrel moved a final time during its aging life, down to the first floor of the I warehouse, with the idea that the lower, cooler floor might let it finish its trip in a more graceful way.

  A few months later, Julian invited me to Louisville to pick something up. That barrel had been bottled—a one-time only, never-to-be-repeated special edition of Pappy. Calling it an essential part of my reporting, I convinced Julian to give me some. I got in the car and headed north once again. Sonia, now seven months pregnant with our daughter, rode with me. We’ve always loved a road trip. The combination of the freedom of a highway and the tight confines of a car always made us our most relaxed and happy. I remember after the last election, when we both feared that the worst of the American instinct had triumphed over the best, we drove up to Montana, just to pass through the open plains and on to switchback mountain roads. We shopped at a famous tack store in Wyoming. We visited Little Bighorn and walked through the last stand of Custer. We stayed for a night in a Montana railroad town. We explored the Badlands. We kept moving, day after day, and when it ended, we felt better. Both of us took home a feeling of hope—that the majesty of America might survive the trolls who, in fear and anger, sought to shrink it.

  I told Sonia a little about the past few years as I retraced the roads that had taken me to my meetings with Julian so many times before. The whiskey was a good-bye of sorts. Julian and I both understood that, I think. I loaded the whiskey into my trunk and then we went into town for dinner that night at their house. Carrie, one of the triplets, came and we all ate burgers. Sissy opened some red wine. Grandkids pinged around the house. They call Sissy “Diddy” and Julian “JuJu.”

  “That was my dad’s nickname, too,” Julian said.

  Afterward Julian poured glasses of Redbreast 12. He loves Irish whiskey after a meal. That’s another Van Winkle tradition. We talked about the Pappy & Company business that Carrie and Louise run. Chenault’s interior design firm was booming, too, with major press and a waiting list of clients. We finished and said our good nights, leaving behind the warm glow of Julian and Sissy’s home, still echoing with the energy of three generations in the same room. A beautiful feeling followed us back to our hotel. The next morning, we drove back home. The whiskey was in the trunk. I knew what I wanted to do with it. The bottles were very rare and valuable and I was going to give them to people who I knew would love and appreciate them. That’s what I learned in my years with the Van Winkle family: sharing this whiskey is intrinsically tied to the spirit with which the whiskey is selected and sold. Julian hates the hoarding of it, the price gouging of it, and not just because people blame him but because that’s not what bourbon was ever about anyway.

  I took a bottle over to John T. Edge’s house the night our television show premiered, and we sat and drank it together, and gave a little to his high school senior son, and the rest sits on his bar, waiting for another time when we’ll be together.

  I invited my friend Mac Nichols over to my house and made him a Vanhattan with Julian’s recipe, using the 15-year-old and the rye. Mac clocked the bottle and saw the sediment and knew it hadn’t been chill filtered and was therefore something strange and special. I gave him some to taste straight before mixing it into the drink and, with his sophisticated whiskey palate, he described the “crazy-thick, rich color of dark amber . . . sweet and powerful on the nose with a beautiful muted floral and rich grain aroma and all you feel is the perfect combination of vanilla, dark caramel, spice, wheat, and magic.” Before he left, I smiled and handed him a bottle to take home. He was speechless and tried not to accept. I made him. Mac understands how whiskey and wine are meant to be enjoyed. When he and his wife christened their first child, he found a bottle of 1985 Krug champagne—the year he and Joli met when they were five years old in rural Mississippi—and he’s saving the bottle of Pappy I gave him to open when their second child is christened. That’s what whiskey is really about, especially Julian’s whiskey. I thought about my uncle Will—which is just another way of thinking about family, about our past, and my father, and the promises we make to each other. One more bottle remained for me to give away. I knew what I needed to do.

  16

  I PACKED MY BAG for the hospital weeks before Wallace Wright Thompson was born. In it, I made sure to put one of my father’s old shirts, a black-and-white checked button-down that I can still picture him wearing, and a Phi Delta Theta dad’s weekend hat that I gave him in college and that he treasured. That’s what I’d be wearing when I held my daughter for the first time, as a way of making sure my father was in the room. I wanted him to be a part of it. Then I got the bottle of 15-year-old Pappy out of my liquor cabinet and tucked it into the bag, too. I wanted this final handoff to be symbolic. I’ve learned a lot from the Van Winkles. My time with them made me examine my own life and think about my family’s past and about what I want to bury and what I want to live on in my daughter. We must be intentional with our myths and stories, and we must live the lives we want our children to live.

  The morning Sonia went into labor, I called our immediate families, and then I let my uncle Will know. He and my aunt Becky got in the car in Yazoo City and rushed up to Oxford to the hospital. He texted me when they arrived. I was busy with the nurses. My mom texted me a picture of Will standing at the locked door separating the waiting area from the room where Sonia and I waited, and I could feel his tension in his tight shoulders and crossed arms. He was there as himself but he was also there as a proxy for my father. More than a shirt or a hat, that’s how Walter Wright Thompson Sr. would witness the birth of his first grandchild, a little girl who would share his middle name and his initials. Another WWT. I wanted to tell Uncle Will I had noticed, not just his actions today but his actions through all these years, to let him know that I loved him, and that I so appreciated the burden he recognized and shouldered. That’s a complicated thing to talk about. I worried I didn’t have the words. Thankfully I wouldn’t need words.

  I reached into the bag and gripped the neck of the bottle and walked out to the waiting room. He saw me and leapt up and we embraced. Then I handed him the bottle. Tears filled his eyes and there wasn’t a word that needed to be said. He took that bottle home and shares it with special people and on special occasions. I’m not sure what it means, but the last two gifts I’ve given Uncl
e Will were that bottle and a Thomas Merton book, because I like to talk about my evolving faith with him. There’s synchronicity at work all around us. A few weeks later, a package arrived at my house from the Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery. I tore open the box and gasped. Julian had sent a hand-labeled bottle of whiskey to Wallace, bearing her name and date of birth, safe in a plush red bag. It sits in my liquor cabinet, hopefully making the trip, waiting on a time when its presence is required to properly convey what a moment means, or what the people we are sharing that moment with mean, so we can revel in the great communal joy of being alive.

  Afterword

  by Julian Van Winkle III

  THANK YOU SO MUCH for reading this little book about my life in the Kentucky whiskey business.

  I definitely was not alone in making this brand a success.

  After my dad passed away in 1981, I was in no position to run a business after working with him for only four years. So I would reach out to friends and others in the whiskey business when I needed help. I had two great ladies working for me as secretaries, Lois Devlin, who my dad hired after selling the distillery, and later Susan McCracken. They both helped me keep the business going.

  When I purchased the old Hoffman distillery in Lawrenceburg in 1983, it consisted of a bottling house, a case goods warehouse, and one battered barrel-aging warehouse. Darlene Gillis came with the deal, thank God. She was a local and knew everyone in town. That helped when hiring people to work there. We even had the ex–Anderson County judge working on the bottling line. Getting people to show up for work was the hard part. During tobacco planting, picking, and stripping season, it was hard to get enough help for bottling. Darlene was friends with the local BATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) inspector, which helped us immensely. She kept all the required government records along with precise bottling records of every bottle or decanter filled there. Since it was fifty miles from Louisville, I only went there when I needed to unload full barrels, process whiskey for bottling, or a thousand other tasks. She was there five days a week, except when she went to see her beloved Kentucky Wildcats basketball team in the SEC championship tournament. She would stay late waiting for truck drivers to pick up a few cases of whiskey going to my distributors. She would meet the county police at the bottling house or barrel warehouse, down a very scary Highway 44 in the middle of the night, when a raccoon, bat, or spider would set off the security alarm. I knew about it because she would call to let me know.

  I could go on forever but, suffice it to say, this brand would not exist today without this lady and all the help she gave me over those nineteen years in Lawrenceburg.

  Gordon Hue’s family owned a liquor store in Covington, Kentucky, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. He is the fellow that started the A. H. Hirsch Reserve Bourbon label, which I bottled for him in Lawrenceburg. Gordon used a couple of different bottles for his brand. One of them was the stock cognac bottle that I still use today. My first label using that bottle was my 12-year Special Reserve. The original label for that package was a knockoff of a private label owned by Darrell Corti, one of Gordon’s liquor store customers in Sacramento. Darrell allowed me to use that label design for several years until I had it redesigned to the one I still use today. Gordon taught me not to be afraid to charge a higher price for a great bottle of whiskey. I was happy to get any price for my whiskey, but he taught me to take pride in what I was doing and get the money the whiskey in the bottle deserved. The two very famous and highly sought 14- and 16-year Stitzel-Weller–distilled Van Winkle Family Reserve were Gordon’s idea. It’s people with these ideas who make me look good, and I really appreciate it.

  Lance Bell ran his own ad agency in Saratoga, New York. He was frequently in Kentucky doing ad work for a couple of big-time horse farms near Lexington. Lance was stronger than new rope, sometimes not necessarily in a good way. My first contact with him was a phone call one day while Darlene and I were going over something in her dingy Lawrenceburg office. Lance’s father-in-law had heard about our whiskey and wanted him to go by the “distillery” and pick up two cases of our 12-year, that day! I told Lance that it was a little more difficult than that due to the fact that our Kentucky distributor would have to ship it to a liquor store, and he would have to pick it up there. Nope, he was flying out that afternoon and needed it then. Long story short, Lance picked up the two cases and put them in the overhead on his flight back to New York. The good ole days before September 11.

  Lance was wound tight and I was not. He was a go-getter and I was not. He was an idea man and I was only sometimes. For a few years I advertised in Wired magazine, Whisky magazine, and even the Churchill Downs racing program. He was a wheeler-dealer, getting me very low prices for magazine ad space. One day while sitting in the Lawrenceburg office, he pulled out a WSWA registration form from the trash where I had thrown it.

  On that year, I didn’t want to spend the money to set up at the yearly distributor/supplier trade show in Las Vegas. He would have none of it. I ended up going further in debt by spending a fortune renting furniture, Oriental rugs, chairs, etc., to create a mini “Pappy Van Winkle study” as my display booth for this three-day show. The eye-catching setup worked in our favor. I picked up a couple of new distributors. We used this same very expensive but novel idea at the annual Kentucky Bourbon Festival in Bardstown, Kentucky. Pappy’s study this time had bookshelves, wingback chairs, Oriental rugs, photos of the bottles, and Pappy’s oil portrait, which I borrowed from Sally, hanging over a fireplace with artificial flames. This was all created for the black-tie, two-hour tasting that took place before the sit-down dinner dance. I was in the tasting tent with all the big boys: Beam, Buffalo Trace, Four Roses, and Maker’s Mark. Our long line of people waiting to taste our whiskey, longer than anyone else’s, was backed up all the way to the Maker’s Mark booth across the room. I was loving it. Preston first got bourbon fever there. At least one of my girls and Sissy helped me pour and schmooze with the patrons. We used “Pappy’s study” for several years after that, experiencing the same crowds of people eager to taste our whiskey. Thanks, Lance.

  In 1986, I received a call from the office of Marci Tyson, now Marci Palatella. Her company, International Beverage, was an exporter of spirits to Japan. She wanted to sell our whiskey to her customers. She had her own bourbon label called Very Old St. Nick. I’ve never been clear on why that name was popular in Japan, but it was. Most of her Japanese distributors had requested a supply of very old bourbon, much older than what was available in the US. I bottled aged bulk whiskey that I had stored in my aging warehouse under her label and some of my own labels. It was a very nice piece of business. The profit margin for export was slim compared with the US market, but I was starving and it provided some cash flow. All along, she was saying that I should put Pappy’s image on a label, and it would sell like crazy. I guess it was that idea she planted in the back of my head years earlier that led me to come up with the original 20-year Pappy label. The photo on that label was the one I found buried in a file cabinet in my basement in the early nineties. Eventually she asked me to look for some aged rye whiskey for her same customers. At the time, I don’t believe I had ever tasted a Kentucky straight rye whiskey before, and neither had most of America. Fritz Maytag was making some young whiskeys from rye out in San Francisco under the Old Potrero label. That brand was gaining some traction in the US, but there were no older rye whiskeys on the market.

  I found some 13-year-old Medley Distillery rye whiskey barrels for sale that were owned by United Distillers. The whiskey was incredible! One of my all-time favorite whiskeys. A year later, two New York area writers found out I was selling an aged Kentucky straight rye whiskey in Japan and told me that I needed to start selling it in the US market also. So thank you, Marci, for giving me the ideas.

  Thank you, David Black. You are damn good at what you do!

  Scott Moyers. When this book idea first came about, I was of cours
e dubious. I have to thank Scott for his willingness and vision to be interested in this project from the get-go. This was a true leap of faith on his part from where I sit. Thank you, Scott!

  People ask me all the time how and when did this whole VW whiskey mania begin. I’m not exactly sure, but I think it was sometime around when my friend Jimmy Hagood from Charleston introduced me to John Huey, who at the time was editor-in-chief of Time. He’s into bourbon, so after trying ours he said he’d do a piece on me in Fortune. Sure, John! Well, he did not disappoint. That was in the February 2011 issue. David DiBenedetto and Rebecca Darwin published an article about me in Garden & Gun magazine in mid-2012. My recollection is that the timing of these two articles is the genesis of this whiskey craze for VW and me.

  Having world-class chefs like Tony Bourdain, Sean Brock, John Currence, and Edward Lee talk up your booze sure didn’t hurt. Word of mouth is the best advertising there is—pure and honest info from your friends on what to try and enjoy. I often jokingly ask people if they’ve ever told anyone about our whiskey. When they say yes, I say, “Well, there you go; you’ve created your own competition!” Our whiskey would show up in TV shows and movies without our knowledge. All these little pieces of the pyramid added up to the crazy popularity we are experiencing today.

  Thanks to John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance. I am sure that is where the interest for a James Beard Award nomination came from. I also want to thank my friends Sam and Mary Celeste Beall, proprietors of Blackberry Farm. Over the years, they introduced me to many great chefs and wine vintners who perhaps may have given me a vote for that cherished James Beard Award in 2011.

  Thanks to the powers that be at Buffalo Trace. In 2001, Preston and I, along with my attorney Vic Baltzell, were in negotiation for months with Chris McCrory and Steve Camisa who at the time were working at Buffalo Trace. I don’t think our deal would have gotten done without their help. And of course Mark Brown’s guidance and support then and for the last 18 years has been so very much appreciated. Our main touchstone at the distillery for these past many years has been and still is Kris Comstock. His knowledge of the business and all his help in allocating our inventory each year is invaluable.