Few things in the culinary world are anticipated annually as much as the release of Pappy Van Winkle. Colorado gets its share of the esteemed bourbon whiskey typically later than the rest of the country, and so November and December are prime Pappy-spotting months in the Centennial State.
This year, liquor stores and spirits retailers will once again deal with an ever-growing throng of Pappy hunters, who have been known to follow delivery trucks, call merchants daily, camp outside of liquor stores and, most commonly, shell out beaucoup bucks for a bottle of one of the brand’s vintages.
All this hullaballoo has created a myth around Pappy Van Winkle, and it’s a story whose grandiosity has only grown over the years, adding more pressure on the makers of the spirit and on those who sell it.
The bourbon started humbly. The story goes that before the turn of the 20th century, Van Winkle patriarch Julian, or Pappy, worked at the W.L. Weller & Sons liquor wholesaler, before eventually buying the company with a co-worker a decade or so later. If Weller sounds familiar, it’s because you see that brand of whiskey on store shelves today — we’ll get to that later.
Van Winkle and his partner then bought the Stitzel distillery in Kentucky, which had supplied much of the liquor to the Weller wholesale enterprise. Prohibition shut down the operation, and over time all the brand names of the company, including Weller, Rebel Yell and Old Fitzgerald, were sold off, save for one: the Old Rip Van Winkle brand.
In 1972, Julian Van Winkle Jr. resurrected the brand and used old, forgotten stocks of barrels to fill his Old Rip Van Winkle bottles. Initially, they were seen as the dregs of other producers, and Van Winkle Jr., just trying to make a buck and keep the brand alive, kept producing from old barrels.
Van Winkle Jr. died in the early ’80s, bequeathing the company to his son — you guessed it — Julian Van Winkle III. Facing stiff competition from other producers making spirits that were more in vogue than bourbon at the time, like vodka and gin, Van Winkle III resorted to bottling Old Rip Van Winkle in novelty bottles that acted as gimmicks to persuade people into drinking the old bourbon his family had laying around.
Eventually the market crushed the Van Winkle dream, and the Stitzer- Weller distillery, which had already changed hands many times and which was producing the Old Rip Van Winkle brand, closed in 1991. Van Winkle III had all these old vintages of his family bourbon and no one wanted them.
That is until 1996 when the Beverage Tasting Institute in Chicago, which gives out ratings to spirits on a scale of 1-100, got a hold of a bottle of 20-year Pappy Van Winkle. The Institute gave the 20-year a score of 99, which was the highest ever for a whiskey. Bottles began to fly off the shelves, as you might imagine, and the Pappy Van Winkle brand skyrocketed to the cult-like popularity it enjoys today.
In the early 2000s, the Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery company partnered with the esteemed Sazerac Company and started producing Pappy Van Winkle vintages in the Buffalo Trace Distillery. The move allowed Van Winkle to produce enough to meet future demand, instead of relying on the old stocks, which were producing only 6,000 bottles a year — a paltry amount in the global whiskey trade, and a reason for its desirability.
On shelves at secretive, various places this month, the thing is that you won’t be able to find any Pappy Van Winkle culled from the original Stitzer-Weller stocks. Van Winkle III said the 2013 vintage was the last of the original barrels, and that future 23-year Pappy Van Winkle whiskeys will have been produced and barreled outside of the circumstances that lead to the brand’s initial warm reception.
What you will find on shelves are the following Van Winkle brands, in order of price: the Old Rip Van Winkle 10 year, Van Winkle Special Reserve 12 year, the Van Winkle Family Reserve Rye (aged 13 years), Pappy Van Winkle 15 year, Pappy Van Winkle 20 year and Pappy Van Winkle 23 year.
Van Winkle III has come out against price gouging, but you see it with such a rare commodity like Pappy Van Winkle. A bottle of the 15-year should cost $150, while a bottle of the 23-year should cost $250. But I’ve seen rogue bottles of some of the lesser brands like the Old Rip Van Winkle 10 year show up for $500 in liquor stores (none in Boulder County, thankfully).
It brings up a larger point about paying for what you get when it comes to Pappy. Is it worth shelling out major cash to have your own bottle of a bourbon that’s no longer produced and aged as it was when it gained esteem? (Pappy brands are still rated in the high 90s, but this will only be the second year the 23-year from new stocks is on the market.) More importantly, do you want to rub shoulders with a bunch of hipsters and old men trying to rush into a store when a delivery arrives in order to get a bottle?
It’s long been rumored that the W.L. Weller 107, which sells for less than $30, is made from the same recipe as Pappy Van Winkle. While we can’t prove it, we can say that it’s produced at the Buffalo Trace Distillery, like Pappy is, its mash bill is heavy in wheat like Pappy, they’re both 107 proof, they do taste pretty identical and you’ll remember that Weller was the company out of which Pappy was born way back in the early 1900s.
Furthermore, the Sazerac Company dumps a lot of other bourbons at the same time that won’t be as sought after and are more cost effective, namely the fantastic George T. Stagg.
But there is something to be said about the allure of Pappy Van Winkle. The joy, maybe, is in the chase. As much was evidenced when 200 bottles were discovered stolen in 2013 from the Buffalo Trace Distillery by an employee who had been siphoning off bottles for several years.
If you do decide to go after it this year, here’s some advice: Call every liquor store you’re willing to drive to at a moment’s notice once a day. It’ll annoy them, but if you want it, then you have to call. You might find that some liquor stores, like Davidsons in Highlands Ranch, have special programs in place to distribute Pappy and limit the madness. Davidsons is giving priority to customers who have accrued a minimum number of purchases over the last 12 months. Those customers will then enter a lottery and winners will have the first opportunity to buy this year’s batch.
Or, you can just head down to a place like West End Tavern, order up a flight of Pappy, and skip the lines and lotteries entirely.
