For the dedicated whiskey connoisseur, getting a taste of Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve bourbon is a Tolkien-worthy quest. With a small production run and a lengthy 15- to 23-year aging process that creates a limited-supply/high-demand situation, the spirit is decidedly elusive at its starting retail price of about $120. Bars that stock it can charge $75 a shot or more, and collectors’ sites list the whiskey for $5,000 a bottle. So, what is it about Pappy Van Winkle?
Wright Thompson sets out to answer that question in “Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last.” The book is a soulful journey that blends together biography, autobiography, philosophy, Kentucky history, the story of bourbon’s origins and an insider’s look at how the Van Winkle whiskey is made and marketed. The human ley-line running through all of this is Julian P. Van Winkle III, the grandson of Julian “Pappy” Van Winkle Sr., who opened the Stitzel-Weller Distillery just outside Louisville on Derby Day in 1935 and produced various brands until he died in 1965.
“There was no way to separate the bourbon’s mythology from his personal history,” Thompson writes of Julian III. To get the story, the author spent part of three years following Van Winkle as he continued the family business he took over in 1981. Now made in partnership with the Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort, his Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve is a grandson’s liquid tribute to his ancestors. Thompson, an ESPN senior writer by way of Mississippi, comes off as the Boswell of bourbon country here — a keen literary observer and respectful fanboy with an obvious affection for his subject, even nicknaming him “Booze Yoda.”
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