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.

“With whiskey, you just got to let it have its way.” So said Elmer T. Lee, Buffalo Trace master distiller emeritus, when I interviewed him in 2003. Mr. Lee passed away in 2013 after working in the distilling business since 1949. “You can’t rush it,” he added. The bourbons that end up on the bottom shelf in the liquor store are the ones that got rushed. If you are a fan of Justified then you know that Boyd Crowder pulls out a bottle of Elmer T. Lee bourbon for most any occasion. 

The idea of premium bourbon first entered the national consciousness in 1980 when The Wall Street Journal recognized the little distillery down in Loretto, Kentucky with a front-page article describing Maker’s Mark as “a brand of superior quality with a fine image.” 

The national attention generated by the article raised public awareness so that by the time Blanton’s Single Barrel Bourbon appeared on the market four years later and Booker’s Small Batch Bourbon four years after that, the public was already considering the idea that bourbon might be more special than they had thought.

In the early 1980s, executives at Ancient Age Distillery, now Buffalo Trace, were looking for ways to expand their market. They wanted something to compete with the single malt scotches that were growing in popularity with a developing American segment of discerning drinkers. Elmer T. Lee was the master distiller then and Colonel Albert Bacon Blanton had been his predecessor and mentor. When the Colonel had wanted something special to serve guests, he would go to his favorite metal-clad warehouse, H, to pick out a barrel he liked and have the contents bottled, a common practice for owners and master distillers. So Lee followed his mentor’s lead and went to warehouse H and picked some barrels that he determined to be exceptional. The contents were bottled straight out of the barrels and labeled Blanton’s Single Barrel Bourbon. In 1984, Ancient Age sent out a thousand cases bottled from 50 barrels taken from the middle of the six floors in warehouse H. Now they send out about 25,000 cases annually. “But it didn’t go from zero to the moon,” recalled Lee. “It took some time.”

The designation ‘single barrel’ means just what it says. The contents are from a single barrel and either bottled at barrel strength or cut with de-mineralized water to a lower proof. Brands not in the premium category are bottled from the mingled contents of thousands of barrels pulled from all over the warehouses and at varying ages with the idea that the better barrels will average out the taste of the lesser. But a single barrel brand is handpicked for its exceptional contents. No mingling. This means that the taste will vary slightly with the barrels, for no two are exactly alike, but it will fit a certain taste profile. 

In 1988, Jim Beam Distillery followed up Ancient Age’s single barrel with the industry’s first small batch brand, Booker’s, named for Booker Noe, a legendary master distiller who passed away in 2004 several months after we sat down at his kitchen table one Saturday afternoon. “I take the center cut of the warehouse for Booker’s,” said Mr. Noe. “A vertical mingling. And out of all our warehouses, there’s only a few I go to for it.”

A small batch bourbon is bottled from the mingled contents of any number of carefully selected barrels, with the number varying among distilleries. At 126 proof, Booker’s is the strongest bourbon on the market and, like its namesake, is uncut and unfiltered.  

In his decades as master distiller at Jim Beam, Noe would draw on particular barrels from a few favorite warehouses when he wanted something special. He called his stash “Booker’s” and would offer a drink to anybody lucky enough to show up at the right time. In 1987, when a company executive wanted to send out special gifts for the holidays, someone remembered Booker’s. Several hundred Chablis bottles found in a storeroom were filled with Booker’s and Noe personally wrote handmade labels for each one. The gift bottles were sent out and the response was overwhelming. The next year the company released a thousand cases and the new market for premium brands was set.

To select which barrels become single barrel and small batch brands, barrels are pulled from favored locations in select warehouses and a panel convenes to taste and make the final decisions. At Buffalo Trace it’s called the Round Table and the panel numbers 20. At Wild Turkey five people taste the samples, but not in the same room, so that one is not influenced by the expression of another, be it grimace or smile. Color, nose, taste and finish are the primary considerations, but longtime and much revered master distiller Jimmy Russell says that nose is the most critical because you taste what you first smell. 

When I asked Lee what he looked for when selecting a premium bourbon he explained that “It’s sort of like that story about the three bears, the one where the little girl tried out the chairs and stuff until she found the one that was just right. It’s the same with bourbon.”

In the time it takes for distillers to learn their craft, repetition so deeply etches skill into sensory memory that, like Goldilocks and Elmer Tandy Lee, they simply know when it’s right. And this product was right. And a market segment was ready, the same generation that once associated bourbon more with pocket flasks and college football games than with a spicy nose, a gentle vanilla backdrop, and a long finish bearing notes of tobacco or fruit.

The boon to distillers was that the premium bourbons required only brand names and bottles to get them on the shelf, for they had been in the warehouse all along. These whiskies are distinguished not by any special distilling process but by the complexities of maturation and, most of all, by the discerning palate of the distillers who select them.