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Continued from page 69 When asked how much Van Winkle bourbon he has in his personal collection, Preston holds a thumb and index fnger two inches apart and says, "Like that much of a 10-year-old bottle and that's about it. Mostly what goes home with us is left over from some show." Julian has a bottle of their 13-year-old rye whiskey and half a bottle of 20-year-old at home. Preston is in his dad's ofce, and I ask them this: "What if I were a celebrity? Ten could I get one?" Preston says, "We turn down 99.9 percent of them. "Tere's nobody else in our situation. I can't think of another product, period. Ferrari, Lamborghini? But if you have the means, you can get one of those. Tat's not necessarily true with us. We have people with literally billions of dollars who can't fnd a bottle. Tey could buy a private jet in cash. Tey'd have an easier time buying our company." Julian estimates that, 10 years from now, the Van Winkles might be producing 15,000 cases, double the current amount. "We are making more. We've been increasing right along, but it doesn't seem like it because you can't fnd it anywhere. We could make three times what we have, and we'd still be way short," Julian says. "We're just being very conservative, making a little bit more each year — three or four percent. Because who knows what demand will be like 20 years from now? Tey legalize marijuana, and nobody is drinking bourbon anymore. I don't want to get caught with a bunch of whiskey." J ulian, the youngest of three siblings, lives next door to the house where he spent most of his childhood on Woodhill Road, not far from the Louisville Country Club. He was a poor student, which led to boarding school in Virginia, followed by Randolph-Macon College. Eventually, he got a job selling clothes at Rodes when it was downtown on Fourth Street. As a teenager, he'd drive his "piece of crap" '53 Ford Falcon to work at Stitzel-Weller in the summer. "When I worked in that cooper shop, fxing barrels, I'd roll 'em up a ramp into a trough, dump 'em, take the hooks of to replace the staves, and fll the barrels back up," he says. "Rough work. I was covered in whiskey all day long; stuf is splashing you and you can really smell it. Tat was the frst time I was really exposed to the smell of that whiskey. Tat's when I realized, 'Man, this stuf really smells good.'" Here's how he describes the smell: "Rich — caramel, vanilla, all the other little nuances the wood puts in there. A smoothness. Balanced whiskey is what it is. Not too much of one thing with not enough of another. If I taste something that's not in the same favor profle, I'm just not as fond of it." Te Van Winkle bourbon ages lower in the warehouse because the extreme temperatures up high would render it undrinkable. Chuck 10 2 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 7.13 Cowdery, another bourbon writer, says, "Julian is constantly checking, constantly tasting. He has a gift for recognizing the point at which the whiskey won't get any better, when any more aging will take it in the wrong direction." Lew Bryson, the managing editor of Whisky Advocate, puts it another way: "It's really easy to get old bourbon that tastes like fngernail polish." In 1972, when Julian Jr. sold Stitzel-Weller, he'd been president eight years. Family members and stockholders forced his hand, and the distillery merged into New York's Somerset Importers, the liquor wing of the corporation Norton Simon, for "$19.5 million in Norton Simon stock," according to But Always Fine Bourbon. Stitzel-Weller closed in 1992. "He was never quite the same," Sally says. "When he sold it I was newly married. And he came to tell us what happened. We were in my kitchen, and I crawled into his lap and cried. And he cried. He might have cried when his mom and dad died, but I don't even remember that. It killed him. I've seen it time and time again that people get sick when things like that happen." In 1977, fve years after selling Stitzel-Weller, Julian Jr. asked Julian III to work with him while walking to the clubhouse at Louisville Country Club. Tey sold porcelain decanters flled with bourbon from the Stitzel-Weller barrels he'd taken with him after the sale. "If my dad had gotten sick a lot earlier," Julian III says, "I wouldn't have gone into this business." Julian Jr. got prostate cancer in the late 1970s. "It spread to his arm. He was pulling down a curtain rod or something and broke his arm because it had tumors in there," Julian says. He died in 1981, and is buried in Cave Hill Cemetery. So is Pappy. "I got stuck with the company," Julian says, "without knowing a whole lot about it." StitzelWeller stopped bottling his decanters because, he says, the distillery had only been doing so as a favor to his father after the sale. For $83,000 in 1983, he bought a bottling house and barrel warehouse near the Salt River in Lawrenceburg, Ky., where he aged barrels from Stitzel-Weller and the Old Boone and Bernheim distilleries. Julian had a young son, even younger triplet daughters, and drove 100 miles roundtrip from Louisville every day. "Distilleries all over had whiskey to sell," Julian says. "Basically, I was selling the same thing other people were, just under a diferent label. Te Pappy label originally had a diferent distillation. It wasn't wheat." A 1970 Dodge truck that came with the purchase of the property accrued some 12,000 miles while traveling the quarter mile from ofce to barrel warehouse. "I didn't ever make any money until I got rid of the Lawrenceburg place. It was a money pit," Julian says. "Tis company made money — I was selling whiskey — but owning the bottling plant, it just wasn't enough to keep it going." By the '90s, though, 20-year-old Pappy as we know it today was on the market. "I said, 'Eh, what the hell? I've got some 20-yearold whiskey left over that didn't sell at 12 years old.' I tasted it, and it was really good." (Pappy fanatics fll Internet message boards, questioning the specifc content of each bottle. Seriously, check out the blog Whisky Advocate if you have two hours to kill. "I mean, get a life. Tese are grown men acting like little old ladies, stirring up the pot," Julian says. "Do you like how it tastes? Ten what's it matter what's in the barrel?" So how many Stitzel-Weller barrels are left? Julian says the distillery stopped production in 1992 and the rest of what he has will be bottled as 23-year-old Pappy. Add 23 years to 1992. "Do the math," he says.) In 1996, the Beverage Tasting Institute held its World Spirits Championships and scored the 20-year-old Pappy a 99 out of 100, the highest rating ever for a whiskey. Tat was the tipping point. Ten, in 1999 at the Bardstown Bourbon Festival (the same one where Preston got the bug), Julian set up the booth that resembled an old study, a portrait of Pappy hanging over a fake freplace. "We set up next to Bufalo Trace," Julian says, "and we had a line clear across the tent and there wasn't any buzz for them." He sold the Lawrenceburg operation in 2002. For $83,000. O n a sweltering Wednesday in mid-June, Julian heads to Bufalo Trace in Frankfort to drop of some T-shirts for a Father's Day dinner called "Pappy for your Pappy," which sold out in two minutes after 135 tickets went up for sale online at midnight. Soon, he and his wife Sissy will travel to their home in Harbor Springs, Mich., for the summer, before the madness of the fall release. Julian has a bottle of 23-year-old with him so he can fx its leaky cork. Te amount missing is barely noticeable. "Two hundred dollars' worth of bourbon leaked out of here," he jokes. When he enters the gift shop, one of the employees spies the bottle and says, "I've never seen one of those in person before." In a laboratory that resembles a high school chemistry classroom (Julian calls it "quality control"), he notices that an unhappy customer has returned a bottle of 20-year-old Pappy. More than half of the bourbon is gone. "Look how much of it was good before it turned bad," Julian says. Back in his ofce on Brownsboro Road, I ask how many more years he plans to work. "Pssh, what else am I gonna do?" he says. "I'm just gonna do it until they shovel me out of here. Pappy was the oldest active distiller when he retired at 90." You trying to break the record? "Don't know if my brain will last that long. But I'm not the type to retire. Not at all. Tat'd drive me crazy. And this is fun." Do you think about your legacy? "It's impressive. It is. I notice it when we go to these shows, when we're pouring whiskey and people will say, 'Wow, you're a Van Winkle.' Tat's when it hits me as far as the lineage going that deep and still not screwing it up." Preston's son, Eli Boone, is three and a half years old. Twenty years from now, Preston hopes the boy will become a whiskey man, too.