Pappyland

Description

The New York Times bestseller!

“A warm and loving reflection that, like good bourbon, will stand the test of time.” —Eric Asimov, The New York Times

The story of how Julian Van Winkle III, the caretaker of the most coveted cult Kentucky Bourbon whiskey in the world, fought to protect his family’s heritage and preserve the taste of his forebears, in a world where authenticity, like his product, is in very short supply.

Following his father’s death decades ago, Julian Van Winkle stepped in to try to save the bourbon business his grandfather had founded on the mission statement: “We make fine bourbon—at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always fine bourbon.” With the company in its wilderness years, Julian committed to safeguarding his namesake’s legacy or going down with the ship.

Then he discovered that hundreds of barrels from the family distillery had survived their sale to a multinational conglomerate. The whiskey that Julian produced after recovering those barrels would immediately be hailed as the greatest in the world—and soon would be the hardest to find. Once they had been used up, a fresh challenge began: preserving the taste of Pappy in a new age.

Wright Thompson was invited to ride along as Julian undertook the task. From the Van Winkle family, Wright learned not only about great bourbon but about complicated legacies and the rewards of honoring your people and your craft—lessons that he couldn’t help but apply to his own work and life. May we all be lucky enough to find some of ourselves, as Wright Thompson did, in Pappyland.“Bourbon is for sharing, and so is Pappyland.” —Wall Street Journal

“A soulful journey that blends together biography, autobiography, philosophy, Kentucky history, the story of bourbon’s origins and an insider’s look at how the Van Winkle whiskey is made and marketed . . . Thompson, an ESPN senior writer by way of Mississippi, comes off as the Boswell of bourbon country here—a keen literary observer and respectful fanboy with an obvious affection for his subject . . . Pappyland moves smoothly through the family lore with the subtle nuances of a well-aged bourbon; it has top notes of stoicism and melancholy and a lingering finish of pride, even when recounting the hard times.” —New York Times Book Review

“A warm and loving reflection that, like good bourbon, will stand the test of time.” —Eric Asimov, The New York Times

“Pappyland is as invigorating as the smell of freshly cut Kentucky bluegrass, and goes down as smoothly as a glass of Pappy’s beloved bourbon.” —Shelf Awareness

“An amiable journey, courtesy of ESPN sportswriter Thompson, into the arcana of American whiskey [. . .] If you’re a fan of the magic that is an artful bourbon, this is just the book for you.” —Kirkus 

“A fast-paced and colorful history of 20th-century Southern culture, told through the story of charismatic cult-bourbon maker Julian P. Van Winkle III. . . . ‘Being Southern,’ Thompson writes, ‘means carrying a responsibility to shake off the comforting blanket of myth and see ourselves clearly.’ Thompson more than fulfills that burden with insight and eloquence.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)

“One of Wright Thompson’s many gifts is his ability to give language to those intangibles of life that are, to the rest of us, indescribable. So his account of the Van Winkle family and its elusive, masterful bourbon is justly rendered in profound, utterly compelling fashion. Success and failure; legacy and sacrifice; the commitments to family and the fight to reclaim something lost to time—Pappyland fits neatly alongside the traditions and scope of great Southern literature and, like the bourbon at the center of the story, captures a special kind of lightning in a bottle.” —Ashley Christensen, James Beard Award–Winning chef, fan of brown water on ice with a lemon twist

“In Wright Thompson’s beautifully written and delightful book, Julian Van Winkle’s odyssey to make whiskey in the spirit of his beloved Pappy becomes a story about how we keep faith with the past—with our ancestors and with the legacy of a great craft—and how we move on from it. Pappyland is a beautiful antidote to false sentiment; I cherished it.” —Walter Isaacson

“A bourbon-laced Book of Hours heady with history, soul-searching, southern shrines, and meditations on fatherhood. Thompson goes in search of Kentucky’s most potent heritage and slowly circles round to his own. It’s a story meant for sipping, rough and sweet on the tongue.” —Burkhard Bilger

“Frankly I don’t give a damn about bourbon. But I do care greatly about family and children, about fathers and sons, and about tradition and legacy, and it’s out of these ingredients that Wright Thompson distills this beautiful and life-loving book. Pappyland is the story of bourbon master Julian Van Winkle, told by a master writer reaching across generations for meaning. Which means it is nothing less than the story of mastery itself.” —Tom Junod

“Only Wright Thompson could tell the story of something as beloved as Pappy and make me admire it more. This is a profound book that is every bit as nuanced and lasting as the whiskey it’s about. It made me reconsider the power of mythology, history, family legacy, and the stories we tell ourselves. I also learned a lot about fine bourbon.” —Eli Saslow, winner of the Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Rising out of Hatred

“In Pappyland Wright Thompson takes his reader on a journey, indeed a pilgrimage, across times, places, and generations all deeply rooted in the bluegrass country of Kentucky in search of the almost mythical Pappy Van Winkle. In elegant prose Thompson embarks on an odyssey which, like all such endeavors, ultimately returns the hero to home, both for his subject, Julian Van Winkle III, and for the author.” —Dr. Paul M. Pearson, Director of the Thomas Merton Center

Wright Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN and the bestselling author of The Cost of These Dreams and Pappyland. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi with his family.

On the afternoon of the Kentucky Oaks, I searched the grandstand at Churchill Downs for Julian P. Van Winkle III. It was Friday, the day before the Derby, and it looked like it might just stay beautiful and clear, a miracle this time of year in the humid South. As I made my way through a crowd of people with a sheen on their faces and seersucker stuck to their thighs, I thought of an old friend who once said that existing at our latitude felt like living inside someone’s mouth. The breath of racehorses, summer humidity, Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey-the South has many forms of heat, by-products of a place perched delicately on the edge between romance and hypocrisy. The Ole Miss band used to play a slow version of “Dixie” before the game, and even as I winced at the Confederate nostalgia, I also teared up because the song reminded me of my father. That’s what Patterson Hood called the “Duality of the Southern Thing.” The Derby distills those feelings. When horses turn for home, we are all wild and free, sweating and cheering, the dream on our breath and clutched in our fists. I admit I love that blood-sport rush.

 

The pageant of the big race swirled around me. The old Louisville families gathered in boxes along the stretch, gripping drinks and pari-mutuel tickets. I was at the track to write racing columns for my magazine and Julian was here, living another day in what seemed to be the endless spring break of his life. I didn’t know him yet. We had met several times before to discuss a book about bourbon we wanted to write together. I was to help him tell the story of his bourbon, the mythical and rare Pappy Van Winkle, but it became clear that there was no way to separate the bourbon’s mythology from his personal history. But that clarity lay before me. At the moment, I just needed to find the man in the madness at Churchill Downs.

 

I finally found him holding court in a box about halfway up the grandstand surrounded by old friends, a well-tailored blue-and-white-striped sport coat draped across his shoulders and reading glasses dangling from his neck beneath a peach-colored, whiskey barrel-patterned bow tie. Julian kept on-brand with his Pappy ball cap, and a lifetime of May afternoons in Kentucky had taught him to put on duck boots before heading to the track. He smiled when he saw me and handed me his flask of Weller 12. The whiskey went down smooth, with enough burn to let you know it was working, which was what my father used to say when he’d disinfect my cuts with hydrogen peroxide. Julian loves the 12-year-old Weller. He’s got a storage facility full of it-and a bourbon club’s fantasy of other rare bourbons. If you ask him where he keeps it, he’ll wink and laugh and dissemble, but he won’t give out the coordinates. “I went to the shed,” he said. “My whiskey shed, the storage shed, whose location will remain anonymous. I’ll show you a picture of it.”

 

His wife, Sissy, saw me and waved. I think I might be in love with her. She’s pretty, with a great laugh. Her smile is an invitation to pull up a seat. I had stepped into a party that had been raging for a generation or two. They had a bag of chocolates and a Seven Seas salad dressing bottle filled with bourbon. Julian often travels with his own booze. Wouldn’t you? He is famous among friends for showing up at parties with half-pints of Pappy-used for tasting and testing barrels-and passing them around. They’re called blue caps. I love the blue caps. Once, before I was about to give a speech, his son, Preston, handed me one to take onstage. I have  this memory of Julian at a food and wine festival after-party-it was at a local Indian restaurant that had been turned into a Bollywood dance club-and he was floating around the dance floor, hands in the air, pausing only to give anyone who wanted a pull of the Pappy he kept in his pocket. In that moment, I wanted to know how someone got to be so free and if that freedom created his perfect whiskey, or the other way around. That night exists as a kind of psychedelic dream to me, the feeling of being whisked away in a black Suburban and ending up with streaky images of dancing and music and Pappy.

 

Julian looks more and more like Pappy every day. He’s got a silver cuff of hair around his bald head and is quick with a joke, usually on himself. On his right hand, he wears a family ring just like the one his grandfather and father wore. The Van Winkles have a large number of traditions, the most famous of which is their whiskey. That fame doesn’t make it any more or less important than the others. They are all just the things this old Southern family does in the course of being itself.

 

Among Julian’s many quirks: wearing fake rotten teeth, which he and Sissy sported each time they first met a set of future in-laws of one of their three daughters; searching for records to fit his old-timey jukebox in the basement; listening to music while cleaning out the big silver pots after frying Thanksgiving turkeys; setting mole traps for going on forty years now, without ever successfully catching a mole; and firing a paintball gun at the deer on his property that want to tear up his plants. One night, deep into two open bottles of bourbon, he grabbed a flashlight and I grabbed the paintball assault rifle and we went out into the neighborhood. I kept the weapon up like they do in the war movies and he swung the light through the trees. We didn’t see anything. I was bummed. He was stoic, as usual.

 

Julian almost never complains-few people know, for instance, that he’s just on the other side of cancer treatment that could have ended very differently. Normally a private man, he allowed his closest friends to see the fear in his eyes; to share in his vulnerability. His illness made him newly reflective, which would have a cascade of repercussions in his life. He’d reached the point when he had to take dying seriously. Everyone passes through that valley and everyone emerges changed. His bourbon is passing through a valley, too. In the coming months, he will taste the new liquor that will fill his bottles. The whiskey that built his success had run out, and the “new whiskey,” distilled and laid up many years ago, is now finally ready to be tasted and, with luck, bottled. 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. When I met Julian this is what loomed largest; soon it would be time for him to test the first ever Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve made from whiskey distilled by his partner Buffalo Trace. Whiskey is marketed as an antidote to change, so the spell is especially vulnerable during times of transition. That tension ran through my mind during this otherwise carefree day at the nation’s most famous racetrack. Julian was looking far into the future, to see how this brand and whiskey would be passed from one generation to the next. The Van Winkles have done most things very well, except for that: the last time the baton pass got seriously fucked up.

 

But on this afternoon Julian was in good humor: passing around whiskey, cracking jokes, waiting on the bugle to blow, being Julian Van Winkle. From our box seats, the crowd around us kept an eye on the infield scoreboard, counting down the minutes until post for the next race. People killed time with liquor and stories. A local doctor juggled apples, taking the occasional bite without missing a rotation as we cheered him on.

 

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 sound takes on physical form and lives on as psychic echo. The crowd roared and leaned in. We stopped to look down at the track as the horses left the gate and came bounding past. It took less than two minutes, the crowd swaying, clutching the white betting slips, matching numbers to silks, standing and screaming beneath the roof of the grandstand. Oh, glorious afternoon!

 

Churchill Downs has been expanded over the years, the luxury suites rising high above the spires-an unintentional and dark metaphor about the change that has come to this track. This new-money Derby attracts people who seem desperate for the lifestyle. The day-trippers wear gangster suits and outlandish patterns and hats inappropriate to the latitude, temperature, or setting. It’s amateur hour. They hold liquor like ninth graders. 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. That longing and loneliness are especially on display in early May in Kentucky.

 

From these seats, it felt possible to ignore all that change. Ignoring can be intoxicating. The view before us was the view people saw one hundred years ago. We couldn’t make out the big battleship bridge behind us that dwarfed the spires. We only saw the flash of the silks and the splashes of dirt and the blur of whip hands banging away for one more burst of speed. 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.”

US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.6900 × 5.4700 × 8.2200 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09780735221277
ISBN-10	0735221278
Author	Wright Thompson
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	BUS046000, CKB088000
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