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

The Cost of These Dreams

1

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 someones mouth. The breath of racehorses, summer humidity, Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskeythe 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. Thats 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 living another day in what seemed to be the endless spring break of his life. I didnt 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 bourbons mythology from his personal history. 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 barrelpatterned 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 hed disinfect my cuts with hydrogen peroxide. Julian loves the 12-year-old Weller. Hes got a storage facility full of itand a bourbon clubs fantasy of other rare bourbons. If you ask him where he keeps it, hell wink and laugh and dissemble, but he wont give out the coordinates. I went to the shed, he said. My whiskey shed, the storage shed, whose location will remain anonymous. Ill show you a picture of it.

His wife, Sissy, saw me and waved. I think I might be in love with her. Shes 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. Wouldnt you? He is famous among friends for showing up at parties with half-pints of Pappyused for tasting and testing barrelsand passing them around. Theyre 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-partyit was at a local Indian restaurant that had been turned into a Bollywood dance cluband 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. Hes 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 doesnt 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.