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

by Wright Thompson

I thought of an old friend who once said that existing at our latitude felt like living inside someone’s mouth.

I would come to appreciate the challenge of dealing with market trends when your product gets made as many as twenty-five years in the past.

Finally the next race began with a thunder of hooves. There’s a word that describes that sound, rataplan, which evokes the incredible noise a dozen running horses can make and the way you feel that noise in your chest, loud—not like something in nature but like standing next to a tower of speakers at an Allman Brothers show. The

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.

The race ended, and Julian pulled a Cohiba out of his pocket and lit it. “My victory cigar,” he said. A grin flashed across his face. “I didn’t bet on the race,” he said. “So I won.”

He is not finding a technically perfect taste, which doesn’t exist, or trying to use his sophisticated palate to put out a product that the focus groups and market research tell him will stun the critics and wow the customer. He is trying to sell a whiskey that tastes like the Stitzel-Weller that exists mostly now in his mind. He never lost that taste, even if his family lost the facility that made it.

It’s no coincidence that bourbon and thoroughbred racehorses come from the same place because both are made or broken long before anyone ever sees them.

A bottle of bourbon is a coded way for so many unspoken ideas to be transmitted and understood. In many ways, the most important ingredient in bourbon is added by the drinker once the bottle is purchased,

eight companies make 95 percent of the whiskey in America. When you walk into a liquor store and see all those labels, that’s marketing.

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.

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.

Maker’s Mark claims the same thing—that it occupies the oldest operating bourbon distillery in the world. Here’s what I’ve learned: both are old, and both have been remodeled to look even older, which tells you all you need to know.

It’s funny: when you start to learn about bourbon, you imagine it as an art, and the more you learn, the more you discover it’s a science. But there comes a point when even the experts dissemble and shrug and admit they don’t actually know how all those factors work together and interplay, and that’s when you start to see it as art again.