Louisville Magazine

JUL 2013

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/138735

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 69 of 108

T he telephone is ringing again, and Julian Proctor Van Winkle III, the Maker (a deity in the eyes of his followers, so capital "M") of the most popular bourbon on Earth, squints at the caller ID. "Seven-fve-seven? Where the hell is that?" he asks. "Tis is what happens all day: area codes that I do not recognize." Virginia Beach is 757. New Hampshire is 603, Chicago 312/773. His son, Julian Preston Van Winkle, answers the calls. A man from Northern California (area code 530) is asking the same question as everybody else: How can I get my hands on a bottle of your bourbon? "Short answer," Preston tells him, "is you can't." Callers, Preston says, talk about how "such and such" has cancer and won't make it until the next release of Van Winkle bourbon — renowned for being aged for a decade or two. Te 15-, 20- and 23-year-old bottles are known as the Pappy Van Winkle's Family Reserve line. One time, somebody claiming to work for Steve Martin reached out. Preston did some Googling, got in touch with Martin's management. "Tey'd never heard of the guy," Preston says. During a move from Louisville to St. Charles, Ill., one woman lost a bottle of 20-year-old, a gift for her 40th wedding anniversary. Te moving company reimbursed her, but she's been looking for another one ever since. "My hope," her handwritten letter says, "is that you'll allow me to purchase a bottle." A man with a medical condition that no longer allows him to drink wonders if the Van Winkles can send him 100 milliliters of their bourbon so he can replenish the three or four sips he swallowed from his bottle and resell the thing. Another guy: "What if you give me a bottle, and I make a donation for twice its retail value to the charity of your choice?" Another: "You don't have a bottle at home you could sell me, do you?" Somebody whose house burned to the ground is looking for whiskey. Sons and daughters are returning from or being deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq. "Some of the stuf is gut-wrenching," Preston says, "but there's nothing we can do. Legally, we can't sell anybody anything. And if we could and we sent a bottle to every person with a story, then we wouldn't have any more bourbon." T he Van Winkle headquarters is on the second of two foors in a Brownsboro Road brick building, where tenants occupy about half of the available space. It's called the Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery, although Bufalo Trace has been the Van Winkles' actual distillery for 11 years. Julian's Smart Car and Preston's Ford Explorer sport the Old Rip company logo and a "BRBN" bumper sticker. Te ofce is tiny, with fuorescent tube lighting and dowdy carpet. An accountant works down the hall. Julian — the son of Julian Proctor Van Winkle Jr. and grandson of Julian Proctor Van Winkle Sr., or "Pappy," who are both known for running the old Stitzel-Weller Distillery in Shively and making Old Fitzgerald bourbon — has been coming here since he started working for his father the late 1970s. Julian's dad started J.P. Van Winkle and Son in the Brownsboro Road ofce after fnally caving to family pressure and selling Stitzel-Weller on June 30, 1972. Julian has been running the show since his dad died in '81. "Tere are some other bourbons out there," he says, "but ours is probably the hottest thing going." Julian uses his father's old heavy wood desk, skyscrapers of paper rising from its surface, as messy as Pappy's was back in the day. In the mornings, he tunes his radio to WHAS or Kentucky sports talk. To his right is a painting his dad liked titled Canada Goose. On the wall behind him hang prints of Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. "Confederate boys," Julian says. "My father was a Civil War freak." Tere are Old Fitzgerald bottles (including a one-gallon jug) that date to the '50s and '60s. Preston says his dad has a "storage unit in an undisclosed location." Julian says: "Just some old Stitzel-Weller stuf. I had it in my garage, but that was making me nervous. Te location is classifed. Not even gonna tell ya what city it's in." When he talks, the word "yellow" becomes "yella." have recently covered Pappy Van Winkle), he says the hate mail will come, Pappy fans aghast that a magazine would turn new eyes on to a product that, according to one bourbon writer I interviewed, is already "unobtainium." Anthony Bourdain called it "the most glorious bourbon on the face of the planet" and tweeted that he was "considering a full back Pappy Van Winkle tattoo." Wright Tompson wrote a short piece about Pappy for the popular sports blog Grantland. "It's hilarious and almost insulting," Tompson says. "I've been to Iraq and covered civil wars in Africa. 'We loved that story about your dying father, but when are you going to write about Pappy again?' "And a lot of people said, 'Tanks, asshole!' It's like how the frst rule about fght club is you don't talk about fght club. But if you can't get it, you're not even in the fght club. Hardcore bourbon lovers wanted to banish me to a life of drinking vodka." Earlier this morning, somebody called Julian, ofering to get the Van Winkle bourbon "in front of 600,000 wholesalers around the country. I wanted to say, 'Well, you didn't really listen to me, did ya? We don't have the product for that. We don't need to sell any more. We're trying to be quiet about it.'" Julian asks what's going to be on the July cover. I joke that he "Not sure why I agreed to do this story, to tell you the truth," Julian says. "We do not need more publicity. Why get somebody else hooked on it if they're not gonna be able to fnd it?" Julian is 63. Bald on top, white on the sides. Although he wore a mustache for more than three decades, he now keeps his upper lip as freshly shorn as the rest of his face. His preferred uniform: polo shirt, khaki shorts or pants, a blue belt with ducks and hunting dogs on it, loafers or Keen-brand athletic sandals. He's almost always a pair of golf spikes away from being fairway ready. His handwriting is illegible, so he'll use his electric typewriter if he needs to get an invoice to FedEx. After he presses the power button, the machine takes a few minutes to warm up. On his wrist, he wears a "Chinese knockof" Pappy Van Winkle watch that somebody gave him at a bourbon event in Chicago. A friend who owns a bar in Tokyo gave him an imitation bottle of 86-proof "Pappys." "Not sure why I agreed to do this story, to tell you the truth," Julian says. "We do not need more publicity. Why get somebody else hooked on it if they're not gonna be able to fnd it?" His voice is soft, as if somebody is turning down a volume knob over the course of a sentence. Tough he knows our circulation isn't as large as that of, say, GQ or Te Wall Street Journal or Garden and Gun (all three of which is. "No," he says. "Don't even think about it." Which publications have not featured his bourbon? Julian laughs, a high-pitched ha three times. A few seconds pass. "Hustler." Ha ha ha. "Been in Playboy." "Bunch of times," says Preston, whose desk is on the opposite end of the ofce, one of Pappy's old canes hanging behind him. Preston's 36 and all muscle, as big around as the 53-gallon charred white oak barrels that age his whiskey. From a young age, he noticed how his dad would drink bourbon on the rocks with a twist of lemon. As a boy, if Preston was feeling sick, Julian would give him a little bourbon with honey or lemon juice, same as his dad gave him. "Didn't know there was store-bought cough syrup until I was much older," Preston says. Tey've been working together for more than 10 years. "When I started," Preston says, "I was younger than some of the stuf I was selling." He briefy went into environmental studies at the University of Colorado — "Wanted to save the planet, I don't know" — before attending the annual bourbon festival in Bardstown, where his father had set up a booth that resembled a Pappy-era study. "I got a little taste of being a Van Winkle in the bourbon 7.13 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 67

Articles in this issue

Archives of this issue

view archives of Louisville Magazine - JUL 2013