Pappyland

 

Any Good Books, February 2025

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

Wright Thompson (2020, Penguin Press)

 

         If you’re going to write a book about Kentucky, you might as well start at Churchill Downs, preferably during Derby Week, a quintessentially American meetingplace of genteel tradition and upstart gaucherie. “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 their liquor like ninth graders.” (Ouch!) Behind the Derby where folks go to see and be seen, to gamble and drink, lie rivers of money, most of it new; and deep streams of knowledge about horses and their generations. Bringing in a Derby winner takes art, science, and very good luck.

 

         But Wright Thompson was there to write about bourbon, the other great heritage of old Kentucky. He was meeting up with one Julian P. Van Winkle III, a third-generation purveyor of fine bourbon; this is a generational story about both of them. 

 

         Whiskey’s been around since before Kentucky was a state. “Without modern supply chains, and because they were living on the edge of civilization, the farmers still couldn’t monetize all of their crop before it rotted…Soon whiskey was traded as a currency, avoiding government notes and any taxes associated with them, which is why the IRS has long been obsessed with chasing down moonshiners and bootleggers. To Kentuckians, that is a federal war on working rural families, no matter what it’s called in Washington. That’s corn and wheat, not rye.”

 

              The face of the original Julian Van Winkle appears on bottles of very fine bourbon. Pappy Van Winkle was a pioneer of the business, in a couple of ways: he was on the spot at the close of Prohibition to start producing whiskey as quickly as possible; and he was one of the first producers to use locally grown wheat. (Most bourbon, then as now, contains some rye, which is grown in the cooler climes of Pennsylvania and New York; as long as the mash bill –“the list of grains that get combined to create the mash that is the foundation for whiskey”–is more than fifty percent corn, it’s still bourbon.) 

 

             The result, in Pappy’s case, was legendary, but the next generation hit hard times for the bourbon business. The 1960’s, when the second generation took over, saw vodka and other spirits become dominant. In 1972, the family’s brands wound up being sold to a larger business, and so fell prey to a very common kind of short-term thinking. They didn’t know what they had. But whiskey, like race horses, is not a short-term business. It’s a long-term investment from fermentation, to distillation, to aging and bottling. And it’s never a sure thing.

 

             Julian III is on a mission to make bourbon as good as his grandfather’s, and he’s one of the few people in the world who could do it, because he remembers how it tastes. He has a partner doing the actual distilling, but he’ll get the last word. Thompson accompanies him around the state, into the past, looking into his and his family’s history. Along the way, naturally, a lot of whiskey is drunk, and a lot of stories are shared. It all sounds delicious.

 

                “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.”