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

by Wright Thompson

The monuments we erect—shouting into the wind that we were once alive and had hopes and dreams—often end up becoming a shrine to the fallacy and futility of that desire itself.

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. . . . Turns out, your grandfather’s whiskey really was better).

https://www.whiskyadvocate.com/secret-science-proof-and-barrels/

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

The term brand name comes from the whiskey business, according to Reid Mitenbuler, author of the excellent book Bourbon Empire. Nearly all pre-Prohibition whiskey was sold in barrels that were rolled into bars and tapped; the makers used a hot metal brand to sear their name into the top of the barrel so they could be identified.

A lot of the famous brands, like Elijah Craig and Evan Williams, were created by Jewish distillers who presumed that their customers didn’t want to open a bottle of Rosenstein Straight Bourbon Whiskey. The characters the distillers invented, the alleged fathers of bourbon, were ginned up mostly out of thin air, taking tiny threads of true biography and weaving a compelling fiction.

Close is always the only possible outcome when someone tries to make the present match up with his memory of the past. Home always seems warmer and safer than it really was. That’s where the pain comes from. We long for a fantasy that won’t ever come true and feel surprise at our inability to create it from force of will. That’s what Thomas Wolfe meant, I think. We can’t go home again because the home we remember never existed.

Families stay together because of active decisions, because of patterns that turn into rituals, and they are torn apart most often not by anger or feuds but by careless inertia.

Once, in New York, Preston leaned against a bar and ordered a Van Winkle how he drinks it, as Julian drinks it, as Julian Jr. and Pappy drank it: on the rocks with a twist. The bartender snootily told him he didn’t feel right serving such fine bourbon like that. Preston grinned. He paused, for dramatic effect, and then delivered the kill shot: Well, sir, that sure is disappointing, given that’s how my grandfather and father taught me to drink it, and my family made the stuff after all. Hi, I’m Preston Van Winkle.

There’s the story of the Kentucky Derby party when a group of famous people, including baseball star Cal Ripken, had cornered Julian to talk whiskey and Wayne Gretzky kept coming up and interrupting, until Julian finally wheeled around and said, “Why don’t you shut the fuck up, Wayne?”

Being Southern means carrying a responsibility to shake off the comforting blanket of myth and see ourselves clearly. I was bringing a child into this world, and into our long history of trying to do the right thing while benefitting mightily from the wrong thing, and I wanted her to love our home and our family, but to see it clearly and without the nostalgia that so often softens my anger and desire to tear it all down and build a new world in its place.

A historian we interviewed for our Kentucky episode of TrueSouth named Charles Reagan Wilson told us that the losers of the Civil War had to make sense of having been defeated in what their leaders called a “holy war,” and he said something that resonated with me: “Winston Churchill said that the Irish remember the defeats long after the English have forgotten the victories. And in a sense, that was true of the Union sympathizers in Kentucky. They went on to other things. But the people who lost, their cause became the Lost Cause. And so, they’re the ones, the white Kentucky Confederate sympathizers, after the war, who decide they’ve got to put the Confederate stamp on Kentucky for the future. . . . The ministers had told them they were fighting a holy war. How do you lose a holy war? The typical wording on a Confederate monument in Kentucky, and in other places, was, LEST YE FORGET. It’s on almost all of them.”

I’ve learned a lot from the Van Winkles. My time with them made me examine my own life and think about my family’s past and about what I want to bury and what I want to live on in my daughter. We must be intentional with our myths and stories, and we must live the lives we want our children to live.