Oh, Pappy Van Winkle.
We know we can’t have you, but still we want you. You show up in our brown-liquor dreams and tease us every year around your rolling release date. We walk into booze stores and head straight for the bourbon, hoping there’s still a bottle of you on the shelf. We endure the not-always-silent disdain of liquor store staffers who are fed up with people like us who keep searching for one particular whiskey.
“I’ve got three things that are better than Pappy Van Winkle,” one manager told me last year. Of course he told me this after he had sold his allotted Pappy bottles at a hefty markup.
Two years ago, I sent a writer out to find a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle — ANY bottle — and he came up snake eyes. But you could always reliably find it in bars and restaurants that cared about bourbon (which, in the South, is a fair number). If you wanted a little something special with dinner, or maybe at the bar beforehand, there was always a bottle of the 23- or 20-year aged stuff, even if you had to ask for it. Of course you had to pay upwards of $40 or $50 a shot, but hey, this is celebration booze to be savored, not drink-your-troubles-away rotgut.
That’s not the case anymore. We couldn’t find a sniff of it at some of our favorite watering holes. The problem, bartenders tell us, is twofold.
First, we’re a half-year away from the release date. It used to be that Pappy came out in two batches, but the popularity has been so big that Buffalo Trace, the distiller that makes it, now only distributes it once a year in a rolling fashion around the country. For areas like us, who got our Pappy in December, we’re S.O.L.
Second, and maybe this is the most important problem, we are knowledgeable drunks. “This part of the country really knows its bourbon,” says Sam Reed, a partner at Sinema. Reed said that during a trip to Florida last year, he stopped at a dozen or more places along the way, looking for good booze, but almost never found Pappy.
So what’s a bourbon lover to do? We started looking for alternatives. (continue reading at NashvilleScene)