Van Winkle. Pappy Van Winkle. A bottle of 23-Year Pappy is today’s holy grail for serious bourbon drinkers and collectors. There’s an app to help you find it – pappytracker.com. Really. But even that is unlikely to snag you a bottle. The 15-, 20-, and 23-Year expressions are known as Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve and are the line’s premium brands. Old Rip Van Winkle Handmade Bourbon is the everyday brand and the youngest at 10 years. Van Winkle Special Reserve comes in at 12 years and 13-Year Van Winkle Family Reserve Rye completes the line. 

New batches of 7,000 or so cases (12 bottles per case) are released in the fall, going to about thirty-five states plus a small allocation to London. They sell out instantly. Local suppliers generally have several hundred customers on a waiting list for one of the 20 or so bottles the merchant receives so bottles rarely make it to shelves. Suggested retail price for a bottle of 23-Year Pappy Van Winkle Family Reserve is $249.99 but black markets push prices closer to $5,000 a bottle. And that’s still if you can find one.

The original and actual Pappy sold whiskey for W.L. Weller and Sons in the late 1800s. In 1933, after Prohibition, Weller merged with A. Ph. Stitzel Distillery and opened Stitzel-Weller on Derby Day in 1935. Pappy served as president for three decades. He put his philosophy on a sign he had installed at Stitzel-Weller and that now graces a building at Buffalo Trace: “We make fine bourbon at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always fine bourbon.”

Julian Proctor Van Winkle, III is Pappy’s grandson and he runs the show these days with his son Preston, the fourth generation. Pappy’s son and Julian’s father was Julian Proctor Van Winkle Jr. and he started J.P. Van Winkle and Son after the family sold Stitzel-Weller in 1972. Like Weller, his mash bill for Old Rip Van Winkle specified wheat as the secondary grain instead of the more common rye. A version of this mash bill is used for Maker’s Mark, whose founder, Bill Samuels, was friends with Julian, Jr.

The Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery is located in Louisville but that’s only the office where Julian and Preston take care of business. Their bourbon is distilled and warehoused at Buffalo Trace Distillery just outside Frankfort, Kentucky. And not a drop comes out of the barrel before ten years and therein lies the holdup. Today’s whiskey shortages actually happened years ago when it was decided to produce however many barrels of white dog were warehoused that year. That decision would have been made based on how bourbon was selling in those days, not in these days of what’s been hailed as the great bourbon renaissance. Last year Beam Inc. prompted an angry backlash from fans of its Maker’s Mark brand when the company said it would reduce the strength of the spirit to make limited supplies stretch further. Beam tabled that idea.

Some distilleries are expanding as fast as they can to keep up with demand but not the Van Winkles. The family began in the tradition of making “always fine bourbon” and the tradition continues. Whiskey writer Chuck Cowdery has written that Julian is constantly checking and tasting his bourbon as it ages and has “a gift for recognizing the point at which the whiskey won’t get any better, when any more aging will take it in the wrong direction.” Van Winkle barrels age lower in the warehouse to expose them to less drastic temperature changes since they remain in the wood for so long and there’s only so much of that space available. And there’s only so much Pappy available.