Lots of people are mad at Julian P. Van Winkle III. Van Winkle is the president of the Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery, whose aged bourbons a growing body of aficionados believe to be the finest whiskeys on Earth. The trouble is that demand for his Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve bourbons has lately swollen in exasperating proportion to supply. He releases between 6,000 and 7,000 cases per year, “about what Jim Beam puts out in ten minutes,” Van Winkle says. “We’re the opposite of the Walmart business model: high profit and almost no volume at all.” The scarcity is making bourbon lovers desperate, cranky, and poor. On eBay, Van Winkle bourbons routinely command upwards of $500 a bottle. Pappy turns up on bar menus in Van Winkle’s hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, for as much as $60, usually alongside the caveat “WHEN AVAILABLE.” The bourbons are distributed to liquor stores only twice a year—in spring and fall—and a half dozen, give or take (bottles, not cases), is the average allocation. The bottles rarely touch the shelves, instead going straight to customers whose names have been on waiting lists for months or years. photo: Joe Pugliese Tastemaker So much bother for a sip of whiskey does not endear Van Winkle to the drinking public, or to shopkeepers, one of whom not long ago bodily attacked Van Winkle’s sales agent for showing up with too meager a delivery. “It can get dangerous,” says Van Winkle. “In Michigan, a guy physically ran our sales rep out of a store because he didn’t get but two or three bottles. He was so damn angry about it. Threatened him with a shoe or a gun or something. I’ve never had to deal with that kind of thing face to face, but I’m sure it’s coming someday.” One does not want to imagine what rashnesses Pappy fans might be moved to if they could see what Julian Van Winkle is doing with his bourbon this morning: He is spitting it out. Pints upon pints, pinging into the spittoon in a practiced, laminar stream.

A visiting journalist is frankly appalled to see greatness treated so brusquely. It’s like watching someone ride a moped through the Louvre. “Hard work, but someone’s gotta do it,” says Van Winkle, sixty-three, whose clear blue eyes and relatively uncreased complexion do not betray a lifelong career of concerted bourbon use. The desecration is taking place in the tasting room at the Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky. A decade ago, Buffalo Trace (which also makes such venerable labels as Blanton’s and W. L. Weller) began distilling the Pappy Van Winkle recipe, in partnership with Van Winkle. Today, the first batches of Buffalo Trace Pappy are reaching bottling maturity, and Van Winkle has made the forty-five-minute drive from Louisville to undertake what is in fact momentous spittoon duty: to assay whether Buffalo Trace’s handiwork deserves the family name.

photo: Joe Pugliese Aging Gracefully

A flotilla of forty-seven partially filled graduated goblets and half-pint bottles—each drawn from a separate barrel—are arrayed before Van Winkle on a lazy Susan. Each barrel requires individual sampling because barrel aging is not an exact science, but an ineluctable, chaotic passage through which the whiskey grows a soul. Seasoned in a charred oak barrel, bourbon acquires its dark complexion and, as it picks up oak sugars in the caramelized wood, much of its sweetness, too. The ratio of barrel staves made from sapwood to those made from heartwood affects the bourbon’s flavor, as do seemingly trifling considerations such as proximity to a window and altitude. “Whiskey on the top floors ages faster,” Van Winkle explains. “We don’t keep our barrels any higher than the middle floors because it’s going to be there so long. It would pick up too much oak.” As the whiskey ages, it evaporates volume through the wood—10 percent the first year and 4 to 5 percent each subsequent year, an attrition known as the angels’ share. On a twenty-three-year-old barrel, the angels’ share is about fifty gallons out of the original fifty-three, which partly explains Van Winkle 23’s heart-stopping expense. “When it comes to our bourbon, the angels are very greedy,” Van Winkle observes. Julian Van Winkle’s palate is the ultimate arbiter as to whether a barrel ends up in a Van Winkle bottle. But he is decidedly not a notes-of-pencil-shavings-and-asphalt sort of taster. “Mm, nice and mild,” “Man, that’s so sweet,” “A little bite to this one, a little rough,” are the comments he makes as the table revolves. “I don’t have a schooled palate,” he says. “For me, it’s: ‘This is what I like, and if it tastes like this, it’s all right with me.’” Van Winkle’s humble manner with a whiskey that critics herniate themselves describing is rooted in an abiding family aversion to high science and cold connoisseurship. His grandfather Julian P. “Pappy” Van Winkle (he appears lipping a stogie on the labels that bear his name) “had a sign at the old distillery that said, ‘No Chemists Allowed,’” Julian says. “He didn’t have a lab, just some litmus paper and a hydrometer to get the proof right. He believed all you need to make fine bourbon are Mother Nature and Father Time.” In 1893, at the age of eighteen, Pappy Van Winkle entered the whiskey business as a traveling salesman for W. L. Weller. The product he sold in those days was not, strictly speaking, bourbon. According to federal law, straight bourbon whiskey must be distilled in the United States (but not necessarily Kentucky) from a mash of at least 51 percent corn. It must be aged in new charred oak barrels, and it may not be adulterated with any additives other than water. The early Weller whiskeys were “rectified” with flavoring and coloring agents, and proof was often corrected with grain alcohol. Years later, as president of the Stitzel-Weller Distillery, after Pappy had become a vehement, exacting crusader for traditionally manufactured bourbon, he was asked about his early perfidies in the rectifying trade. “There’s no one purer than a reformed prostitute” was his reply. photo: Joe Pugliese

Through the sixties, Stitzel-Weller bottled respected bourbons under such labels as Old Fitzgerald, W. L. Weller, and Rebel Yell (a different product from the down-market, frat house libation it is today). Van Winkle’s bourbons owed their excellence, in part, to the vast substrate of limestone that filters the local groundwater to uncommon purity, and to Pappy’s recipe. In addition to corn, bourbon generally uses rye as a secondary grain. Pappy’s mash bill called for wheat, a milder, sweeter grain that picks up less barrel char and is gentler to the tongue. In 1972, seven years after Pappy’s death, stockholders forced the distillery’s sale. Julian had recently returned to Louisville after attending Virginia’s Randolph-Macon College, where he studied economics and psychology. After a stint as a clothing salesman, he joined his father, Julian, Jr., salvaging what could be salvaged of the family whiskey business. Barrels of Pappy’s recipe were quiescently marking time in Stitzel-Weller’s warehouses. Father and son kept the company alive, buying back their own bourbon and bottling it independently under the Old Rip Van Winkle label.

When cancer took Julian’s father in 1981, Julian, at the age of thirty-two with four children to support, made the not-ostensibly-wise decision to continue in the whiskey business, bottling Van Winkle bourbons with his own hands in a flood-prone ruin of a facility he purchased south of Louisville. The 1980s were dark years for bourbon and largely profitless years for Julian. The spirits market had so bafflingly and resolutely forsaken bourbon for scotch, vodka, and gin that the drinking public could be induced to pay good money for bourbon only if it was bottled in a novelty crock resembling a coal miner or a football or a dog. Julian was reduced to trafficking in these gimcracks for about a decade and a half. Then, in 1996, a Van Winkle sales rep submitted bottles of Van Winkle 20-year to the Beverage Testing Institute, a prestigious Chicago-based wine authority. The Pappy Van Winkle 20-year-old got a rating of 99, an unprecedented number for any whiskey, scotch, or bourbon. An avalanche of demand and acclaim followed, concluding most recently with a James Beard Foundation award in 2011. photo: Joe Pugliese Good Grain