Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

by Wright Thompson

South has many forms of heat, by-products of a place perched delicately on the edge between romance and hypocrisy.

Julian loves the 12-year-old Weller.

The homogenization of America has left people wandering the land in search of a place to belong. We are a tribeless nation hungry for tribes.

Ignoring can be intoxicating.

Stitzel-Weller is considered by connoisseurs the finest bourbon ever made, smooth and complex. After the Van Winkle family lost the distillery in 1972, and it was sold, some new corporate owners changed the distilling process to save money and now that taste can never be re-created.

I saw him quietly using his supply of Pappy to help people. The charity sold three 10-year-old bottles, three 12s, two 15s, along with a 20, a 23, and one of the truly impossible to find 25-year-old decanters.

his family’s old distillery. It’s now home to Bulleit. Tommy Bulleit uses the old office that belonged to Julian’s father and grandfather.

the Bulleit folks talk about their old family recipe, which was once made for them by a competitor that was owned by a Japanese beer company, which was owned by the same Japanese conglomerate that long ago made the Zero fighter airplane.

Domino only produced nineteen foals yet is in the pedigree of the greatest horses that ever lived: Secretariat, Seattle Slew, Affirmed, Assault, Bold Ruler, Whirlaway, War Admiral, Gallant Fox, Omaha, Native Dancer, American Pharoah. Of the thirteen horses to win the Triple Crown, nine have Domino in their family tree.

Bourbon, among its many codified restrictions, must be at least 51 percent corn. After that, though, the bourbon distiller has some discretion in picking the mix of secondary grains. Most use rye and barley. A few, like the Van Winkle brands, use wheat. That was made popular by Julian’s grandfather. His biggest contribution to modern bourbon is that he was the first to make and sell a mass market fine whiskey with wheat as its dominant secondary grain.

There is a federal law that says bourbon cannot be put into a barrel at any proof higher than 125 (in the 1960s, the law said 110 proof, which is one of the reasons people rave about these older bourbons.

The higher the proof of the booze going into the barrel, the more liquor there will be to sell once the aging process is finished.

Bourbon must come off the still at no higher than 160 proof, and the lower that number, the less comp...

With Prohibition repealed the day before he started construction on the new Stitzel-Weller plant, there weren’t huge supplies of aging whiskey sitting around, and Pappy needed to get whiskey out the door of his new distillery and into customers’ hands as quickly as possible.

It’s a drink made for contemplating, and what is usually being contemplated is the easy and often false memory of better days.

eight companies make 95 percent of the whiskey in America.

Perhaps no word sums up the death of truth in America better than the word brand.

Look for words like produced by instead of distilled by,

For farmers, whiskey was the only way to get full value from their crops. Not everyone had access to markets and distribution methods, so to feed their family and keep their land, a man sought to do something with the surplus of a harvested crop. The dominant crop at the time was rye.

The American Revolution earned the country its freedom but cost incredible amounts of money, most of it paid for by state-financed debt. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton wanted the federal government to assume that debt and impose a sizable whiskey tax to help pay for it.

This was the first bubbling of the Tea Party Movement, the anti-government strain that continues to exert great control over American politics.

The revolt that simmered and ultimately forced Washington to send in troops is now known as the Whiskey Rebellion.

Hamilton favored concrete and tall buildings and Wall Street, where he’s buried, while Jefferson favored Main Street and the dirt of the rural America in which he’s buried.

Rye is primarily a Northern crop

1978 Old Fitzgerald

Pappy first got his start in whiskey at nineteen, when he took a job for W. L. Weller & Sons. It was 1893. He ended up buying out the Weller family and eventually merged with the Stitzels, who got their start when three German brothers moved to Kentucky in 1859, exactly a decade after the Wellers began making whiskey.

They brokered a sale with Somerset out of New York—owners of the Johnnie Walker and Tanqueray brands—which

Somerset already owned a Kentucky distillery with lots of barrels of mediocre whiskey but it didn’t have a brand to sell it with. So it wanted to water down the Stitzel-Weller’s juice

June 30, 1972, just seven years after Pappy’s death, the Van Winkle family sold Stitzel-Weller to Norton Simon.

Horses are not as smart as mules ’cause they’ll eat themselves to death whereas mules stop.

We long for a fantasy that won’t ever come true and feel surprise at our inability to create it from force of will.

Diageo is the current name of the owners of Stitzel-Weller. It owns Guinness among many other iconic brands. Under the name United Distillers, before a merger created Diageo, executives shut down the famed Stitzel-Weller plant in 1992 and opened a new distillery at Bernheim,

Diageo pulled the I. W. Harper brand out of mothballs and bought Tommy Bulleit’s label. Diageo owned the Bernheim distillery and had access to juice.

There were several interconnected reasons why the bourbon market cratered in the 1960s. First of all, the vodka lobby finally changed the laws to give itself a designation. Before, vodka had been called “neutral grain spirit,”

“We didn’t get cash,” Julian explained to me. “We got Norton Simon stock.

I wrote a story. Called “Holy Ground,” it was about our relationship with that golf tournament and how it was a proxy for something much larger.

MOST EVERY MAN COMPETES WITH HIS FATHER and imitates his father, lives in fear of disappointing, and craves approval, and on the extreme ends of this potentially fraught relationship, a man often spends his entire adult life trying to be exactly like his father or nothing like him.

British-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh.

Pappy came out and got a perfect 99-score review from the Beverage Testing Institute in 1996, which named it the greatest bourbon in the world.

Supplicants want an audience more than proof of life.

Pappygate. A loading dock employee stole around $100,000 of whiskey

poem “The Waking” by Theodore Roethke,

Buffalo Trace looks like a theme park from some bygone America, but really, science rules the day. Bourbon is chemistry.

a brand is an invented thing to sell people on an idea.

Joe Keith Bickett was a member of the famed Cornbread Mafia,

When Granddaddy found the reels and heard the black music on them, he took them all and burned them.

Muhammad Ali got sentenced to five years for refusing to fight in Vietnam. Three days before, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had commissioned the top-secret report that would show that the government knew Vietnam could not be won

The famous bluesman Big Jack Johnson worked for my uncle on the farm. My dad was his lawyer.

Kentucky wasn’t part of the Confederacy. It never seceded and yet now clearly defines itself as the South. Why would a state pretend it lost a war it actually won?

“Winston Churchill said that the Irish remember the defeats long after the English have forgotten the victories.