Pappy Van Winkle - A Beginners Guide to the World's Most Famous Bourbon

Part One

If you know what Pappy Van Winkle is, you’re already mad at me. If you don’t, I’m about to change your life. Pappy, officially called Family Reserve, is the top-of-the-line bourbon made by The Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery. It comes in 15, 20, and 23 years old. There’s a cult. - Wright Thompson

I can hardly remember how or why I first discovered Pappy via Wright Thompson, but I do remember the first time I read Walker Percy's essay on bourbon.

This is not written by a connoisseur of Bourbon. Ninety-nine percent of
Bourbon drinkers know more about Bourbon than I do. It is about the
aesthetic of Bourbon drinking in general and in particular of knocking it back neat. - Walker Percy

If it was good enough for Walker, it was good enough for me.

Walker was a writer from the South who devoted his books to the exploration of "the dislocation of man in the modern age." My favorite is the “Moviegoer.” I liked him as a writer and I liked him and his characters, as drinkers of bourbon. If I remember correctly, Thomas More drank Early Times.

“What is the nature of the search? you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”
― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

So obviously, the search for Pappy is not the same as the existential search, but there are some parallels. Like you want something that is not easy to find. And why do you want it? Who the hell knows, and it doesn’t matter, really.

So anyway, I read this story by Wright on Grantland (God I miss Grantland). Two of my favorite things:

1) Good Writing

2) Sports

So here’s what I did. I swear. I just walked into my local liquor store and said do you have Pappy. And they didn’t laugh. Of course, it was 2011. Today “they” would call you a “Tater.” And she simply said, “I’ll put your name on the list.” And that was that. Of course, I didn’t understand the world had just pivoted on its axis.

A few months later, I got a call on my VM which says “your Pappy is here, come in the next few days and pick it up.”

To be honest, I had progressed on my Bourbon journey and kind of forgotten about it. But of course, I went in and paid $60 for a bottle ( I had never spent that much on any bottle of Bourbon before that moment) of Van Winkle Special Reserve 12 Year and the Pappy journey began.

I would get it three out of the next four years from the same place. In 2012, I even scored a bottle of the 20 YR at retail. WTF? I opened it on Christmas Eve and drank the last drop in a toast on DFW’s (RIP) birthday.

Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction's job is to dramatize what makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still are human beings, now. Or can be…I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't good art.
― David Foster Wallace

So if you haven’t noticed by now I like writers as much, or more, than I like Pappy.

And yes, it was a sportswriter, Wright Thompson, who introduced me to the best bourbon in the world — Pappy Van Winkle. He said if you ever find it on the shelf buy it all. If you find it in a bar, order it even if it is pricey.

Now I get how all the “cool” bourbon drinkers downplay Pappy these days, and I guess it is somewhat warranted because it is not made with the Stitzel-Weller distillate that made it famous.

But if you fancy yourself a bourbon connoisseur, then at least buy a sip or two at a bar—even if it costs upwards of $100. Just ask Bourdain.

“If God made Bourbon, this is what he'd make,” - AB