How Pappy Van Winkle Became the Ultimate Cult Bourbon
There are plenty of bourbon brands with powerful name recognition — Jim Beam, Four Roses, Maker’s Mark, Michter’s, the list goes on. There are also myriad highly sought-after bottlings, with whiskey lovers clamoring to get their hands on things like Blanton’s, limited-edition Old Forester, and the entirety of the Buffalo Trace Antique Collection. These bourbons might have rabid fan bases, but not a single one even comes close to matching the voraciousness for Pappy Van Winkle, the ultimate cult bourbon.
To understand how Pappy came to be the unicorn it is today, you have to trace things all the way back to the late 1800s when a 19-year-old Julian “Pappy” Van Winkle Sr. started traveling across the state of Kentucky, selling whiskey for W.L. Weller. In 1935, Van Winkle and his associate Alex Farnsley pooled their earnings, purchased the A. Ph. Stitzel Distillery (which produced bourbon for the Weller brand), and renamed the facility the Stitzel-Weller Distillery. There, Pappy distilled numerous brands, including Old Fitzgerald, Rebel Yell, and Weller, which he continued to do until his passing in 1965, at which point his son, Julian “Big Van” Van Winkle Jr., took over operations. But things took a turn in the early ’70s.
The whiskey trade had been booming for decades, but as the 1970s got underway, the category’s primary demographic (older men) started dwindling, and younger consumers just weren’t interested when there were products like vodka and sweet liqueurs around. There was simply too much bourbon on the market, and the Stitzel-Weller Distillery struggled. In 1972, Julian Jr. was forced by stockholders to sell the distillery to Norton Simon Inc., which later renamed it the Old Fitzgerald Distillery. (In the ’90s, the facility was shuttered, renamed Stitzel-Weller Distillery once more, and acquired by Diageo.)
There were two key conditions to the sale: Julian Jr. would still be able to purchase old stock from the distillery and — unlike the other brands produced at Stitzel-Weller — he would retain control of the Van Winkle name. So Julian Jr. revived the pre-Prohibition Old Rip Van Winkle label and launched a 10-year-old bourbon in the early ’80s with the help of his son, Julian P. Van Winkle III, who joined the team in 1977.
Following his father’s passing, Van Winkle III purchased Lawrenceburg, Ky.’s dormant Old Hoffman Distillery and renamed it Commonwealth Distillery. For the next two decades, he used the facility to process whiskey distilled by his father and grandfather before bottling it under the Old Van Winkle name. It’s also at the Commonwealth Distillery where Van Winkle III would bottle the first expression to bear the Pappy Van Winkle name.
Where Old Rip Van Winkle is aged for 10 years and Van Winkle Special Reserve (launched in ’91) matures for 12, Pappy Van Winkle expressions go for much longer. The first bottle of Pappy Van Winkle Family’s Reserve was released in 1994 and had aged for a whopping 20 years. Four years later, the brand launched an even older bottling, Pappy Van Winkle Family’s Reserve 23, and, in 2004, the brand’s most commonly available 15 Year Old bourbon entered the market. Since the beginning, Pappy Van Winkle has had limited availability; The brand only releases around 7,000 cases (roughly 84,000 bottles) annually. Every year, tasters squabble to get their hands on one, but what is it about these bourbons that makes them so adored in the first place?
Beyond the legacy of its distillers and the Stitzel-Weller facility, part of what makes Pappy Van Winkle so beloved is the mash bill itself. Per category regulations, all bourbon must be made from at least 51 percent corn, but Pappy Van Winkle Sr. dialed things up by adding a higher percentage of the grain. He also swapped out rye in favor of wheat as the secondary grain, continuing the wheated bourbon tradition created by W.L. Weller himself.
The result is a sweeter, softer bourbon with notes of caramel, toffee, vanilla, and nutty, toasted oak. To this day, all Pappy Van Winkle bourbons are made with the same mash bill as the original, even after the Van Winkle family entered into a partnership with the Buffalo Trace Distillery in 2002.
The whiskey’s stellar flavor profile and limited availability are only part of the equation, though. After all, those haven’t changed since the beginning, and Pappy didn’t truly achieve cult status until a few decades later. Aficionados were first put on notice in 1996 when the Beverage Testing Institute rated Pappy Van Winkle Family’s Reserve 20 a near-perfect 99 out of 100 at its annual competition.
Anthony Bourdain’s public obsession with the spirit certainly didn’t do much to make it any easier to find, either. In 2011, the chef posted “I am considering a full back Pappy Van Winkle tattoo,” and was seen sipping a dram on numerous occasions while filming his various television shows.
A December 2012 episode of “The Layover” proved especially important for pushing Pappy into rarified territory. “I know what I’m here for. I’m here for that incredibly wonderful bourbon whose name I’m not gonna mention because there are just too many sons of b*tches out there who want it,” Bourdain says as the camera pans to a bar shelf lined with Pappy. “Because if God made bourbon, this is what he’d make.” That month, Google search results for “Pappy Van Winkle” spiked for the first time.
By the mid-2010s, bottles of Pappy Van Winkle (and the rest of the Van Winkle lineup) were among some of the hardest-to-track-down bourbons in the world. Only a select few retailers receive shipments of the whiskey, and those that do often use waitlists or lottery systems to equitably distribute their allotments. From there, it’s up to retailers to determine the sticker price. While some may choose to stick with the MSRP, which ranges from $150 to $500, others jack up the price because they know people will pay.
On the secondary market, bottles of Pappy are listed at anywhere from $1,000 to well over $5,000 — and that’s just the core lineup. The brand has also launched numerous, limited-edition, select whiskeys that fetch eye-popping sums. Take Old Rip Van Winkle, Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Selection 23 Year Old, for example. It sells for roughly $34,000. Then there’s Old Rip Van Winkle 25 Year Old, which launched in 2017 and goes for approximately $53,000 a bottle. In fact, of the five most expensive bourbons in the world, Van Winkle bottlings account for all but one.
For those of us who don’t have a spare $50K lying around, we’ll just have to dream of the day that we can manage to maybe try a pour for ourselves. Until then, we suppose a bottle of W.L. will do — the two bourbons are distilled from the same mash bill, though one can find Weller for a much more attainable $60 a bottle.
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