In the bourbon world, there is no name that is more famous than Van Winkle. And yet the man behind the moniker, Julian Van Winkle III, is as modest as they come. The grandson of Pappy Van Winkle, Julian is the custodian of his family’s legacy, but he is also a key figure—perhaps the key figure—in the transformation of bourbon’s reputation from a rough-and-ready shot to a collectible luxury spirit. And yet he hardly drinks much bourbon at all anymore.

Van Winkle’s story may be familiar to most bourbon drinkers today, but it’s no less remarkable in the retelling. When he joined his father, Julian Van Winkle Jr., in the whiskey business in 1977, bourbon was on a downward trajectory, as baby boomers opted for clear spirits like vodka and fine wine over the brown liquor their parents favored. Faced with a glut of unwanted whiskey, distillers started offering novelty decanters meant to appeal to specific demographics like Texas fans, Ohio voters, or members of the Honorable Order of the Blue Goose, who would purchase the package without much regard for the liquid.

Surviving the Bourbon Doldrums

The Van Winkles sold decanters of their Old Rip Van Winkle brand as well, using wheated bourbon from the family’s Stitzel-Weller distillery (sold in 1972 and closed in 1992)—a means of keeping the brand going during a dark time. Later, Van Winkle began purchasing bourbon from other Kentucky distilleries to bottle, trusting that the quality would be up to snuff without the need to verify ahead of time. “I’d buy the barrels and taste them once they came to the warehouse,” Van Winkle recalled. “Ninety-nine percent of the time they were just fine.”

After his father’s death in 1981, Van Winkle continued in the bottling business at a site he called Old Commonwealth Distillery, and began to focus on overseas markets. Japan stood out in particular as a lifeline, because consumers there couldn’t get enough American whiskey, even as domestic consumption continued to tank. “It kept me alive for a while,” he said.

Van Winkle came up with numerous brands and labels exclusively for export, like Lottas Home and Society of Bourbon Connoisseurs. At the time, these flew under the radar in the U.S., but now are some of the rarest and most collectible bottles netting auction prices in the tens of thousands of dollars. In addition to his own brands, Van Winkle bottled whiskey for others, like Marci Palatella’s International Beverage. Unfortunately, he held onto very few of these bottlings. “Back then, who knew?” he said. “It was just a regular bottling for me and I saw no huge value down the road for these things like they are now. I didn't see that coming at all.”

The Age Statement Era

In 1994, Van Winkle released the first Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve, a 20-year-old Stitzel-Weller bourbon named after his grandfather, Julian Van Winkle Sr. It hit the market inconspicuously, but garnered high scores in spirits competitions and caught enough attention that Van Winkle continued to add to the lineup, releasing a 23-year-old in 1998 and a 15-year-old in 2004. The timing was fortuitous, as bourbon was just starting to emerge from the doldrums and would eventually, by the early 2010s, surge dramatically.

By that point, the Van Winkle brand—increasingly just called “Pappy” by many bourbon drinkers—was so well-known that tracking down a bottle at the suggested retail price of $90 for the 20-year-old was increasingly unlikely. “Allocation” was the magic word, as bar, restaurant, and store owners vied for a share of each annual run, which since 2002 had been produced at Buffalo Trace Distillery in partnership with the Van Winkles. Since there was so much demand for so few bottles, some retailers began to jack up the price, while others offered their customers the chance to purchase through a lottery or raffle. Charity auctions became another popular method for distributing the limited supply of whiskey. It’s not an exaggeration to suggest that the Van Winkle brand is responsible for more philanthropic largesse than any other Kentucky whiskey.

Iconic Status

All this, plus the allure of the wheated mashbill and the high-profile scandal of the “Pappygate” thefts at Buffalo Trace, have cemented the Van Winkle name in American whiskey lore. Pappy is a byword for rarity and luxury, the bottle’s sepia-toned label popping up in movies and on TV, lit dramatically on back bars from Las Vegas to London. Its desirability, bolstered by cultural icons like Anthony Bourdain, has continued to grow even as other collectible bourbons took their places in the pantheon over the past decade and a half.

None of this would have happened without Julian Van Winkle keeping faith that really good whiskey would always find an appreciative audience. It goes back to the original Pappy’s motto, which hung on a sign at Stitzel-Weller: “We make fine bourbon. At a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always fine bourbon.”

The Unicorn Review talked with Julian Van Winkle III about counterfeit bottles, unopened collections, and the infamous Pappy Jell-O shots.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The Unicorn Review: Decanters were a big thing in the 1970s and ‘80s, when there was a bourbon surplus. I’ve noticed some companies offering them in the present day. Are we back to a period where some people are trying to sell the bottle more than what’s inside it?

Julian Van Winkle III: I don't think so. I think they're just trying to do something different.

People have a lot of money these days. The decanter business went down the tubes when the retail price got to be about $49.99. That's when I quit—when the public didn't want to spend $50 for a damn decanter, not caring about the whiskey.

But it's funny, if you see these bottles and they're full, these days you save the whiskey and throw the decanter away because the whiskey was damn good. Nobody really cared about the main product back then. It's kind of ironic the way things have flipped over.

In many ways the Van Winkle brand has become bigger than your family name. Was there a moment that you noticed it had taken on a life of its own?

I think I bottled the first Pappy label in about 1994, and it got a nice rating by the Beverage Tasting Institute. [The rating was 99 points. – Ed.] That kind of kicked things off for us and that brand. But when Anthony Bourdain starts talking about it and then chefs start talking about it and wine people start talking and it ends up in magazines, movies, and TV shows… It's hard to pinpoint when it happened and there was no particular thing that set it off. It was just kind of a gradual appreciation by different people. I think it happened because it's a good product. It deserves its acclaim.

Bourbon drinkers can feel a sense of ownership in brands that they really love. How do you feel about fans being possessive and emotional about your whiskey?

It certainly doesn't bother me. It bothers me when you see some guy's collection of 50 bottles of the 12-year-old sitting on their shelf in their bar that they're not enjoying, because that's why we make it. But to see the popularity and the people just going crazy over the name, and it's hard to get—it's frustrating that there's not enough to go around. I wish there was more.

There’s a dark side to that frenzy—the thefts and counterfeits that can damage the brand’s reputation. Is that difficult for you to witness?

It’s upsetting that these crooks are out there and they do it with wine and ladies' handbags and whatever. Anything that's popular, the bad people seem to want to make money illegally.

Counterfeiting is a big deal and there's a lot of it. It's hard to determine if a bottle is legitimate or not, because they can counterfeit these things so well these days. So that is frustrating. We can't control it and some people are getting ripped off. That's the worst part.

We're trying to put these devices on the bottlings that you can scan and guarantee that it's legitimate or if it's been opened or not—that's good for the stuff from now on. But the older stuff out there, there's no way to guarantee unless you open the bottle and taste it.

I've tasted a counterfeit bottle before and they put in decent whiskey. Some of them just put junk in there and some of them put something that's fairly close so the customer will not know the difference.

Do you get asked to authenticate bottles?

Yeah, quite often since they're being used in all these charity auctions.  They want to make sure they're legitimate. I do the best I can as far as looking at the packaging and the bottling date etched in the glass and printed on the bottom of the glass bottle.

I haven't really detected that many fakes. Buffalo Trace, of course, they have a lab and they can determine in a heartbeat, once they open the bottle and check it, if it's bad or not. They probably get a lot of the questionable bottles.

Some people call everything in the lineup “Pappy.” Does that drive you crazy?

Not really. I mean, a little bit just because they're not paying attention, but that's the way it is. It's fine. It's a little annoying if they say, give me some of that Pappy rye whiskey or whatever, when it's not that particular label, but I can live with that. At least they're interested in our whiskey and not somebody else's.

What did you think of the Louisville bar owner who served his Van Winkle allocation in Jell-O shots?

I kind of go both ways on that. I think I just read the other day that his place had gone out of business. It was kind of a gimmicky thing. I think he was upset because he didn't get a very good allocation, so he decided to just say to hell with it and make something ridiculous like a Jell-O shot. I think he took advantage of the popularity and presented it as a publicity stunt. I guess it's a good idea if you're him, but not if you're the producer.

In the past few years a new company started up under the name Old Commonwealth. Did you sell them the trademark?

No, unfortunately I just let it go. I saw no need for it. I knew we weren't going to keep the Old Commonwealth brand because Buffalo Trace wasn't interested in bottling it as a spinoff brand. The name lapsed as far as the trademark.

These folks picked it up and they're using it as best they can, purchasing whiskey from other distilleries. I've tasted some of them; it's pretty good. Even the Old Commonwealth package is pretty much the same, and there's some others that they've duplicated using what we did, which is kind of screwy. They're nice folks, but I wish I had hung onto it because they probably would've paid pretty good money for it.

Fifteen years ago, you did an interview with the University of Kentucky in which you had to define wheated bourbon, and you named the five others that were available besides yours. Now there are dozens of distilleries making wheaters, due at least partly—maybe mostly—to the fact that you popularized the style in the modern era. Is this an unmitigated positive thing, or is the abundance of wheated bourbon diluting what makes it so special?

It’s an honor to have someone duplicate what you're doing. We're not sure where exactly what distillery made the first wheated bourbon. It was either the Old Fitzgerald plant in Frankfort back before Pappy bought the label, back when he started Stitzel-Weller, or it could have been the Stitzel Distillery who made whiskey for the Wellers. There’s the problem with bourbon history—none of it's written down.

Pappy liked the wheated brand, obviously, and stuck with it, so all the brands at Stitzel-Weller were wheated. It's an honor that people have seen how popular it is as far as our brand, so they're trying to duplicate it or at least make their own wheated bourbon.

Do you ever drink rye bourbon?

I like Buffalo Trace, some older Wild Turkey, and a particular Four Roses single barrel—I don't remember which one. Some of the other rye-based bourbons I am not that fond of. And I haven't tried many of the new ones because there's just too many, all these craft distilleries out there.

I drink very little anymore. We hardly ever have our whiskey sitting around the house, to be honest with you. If there's anything, it's going to be a bottle of Weller, which is the same recipe, just a younger version of ours. That would be my go-to for sure, back when bourbon was a regular drink of mine.

When we hooked up with Buffalo Trace 20-something years ago, [then-CEO] Mark Brown said, “One of the things I'd like you to do to make this thing work is promote Weller." Mission accomplished. Now it's hard to find in most places.

There’s a lot of speculation that you’re getting rich off all these inflated shelf prices for Pappy. I even found an article purporting to disclose your net worth. What’s the real story?

We sell to the distributor and the distributor has a certain markup. He makes his 20 percent or 30 percent or whatever it is, and then when it hits the retail store, it's out of our hands. That’s where the huge markup comes. We have nothing to do with that. We still split [profits] with Buffalo Trace when we sell it. We get a normal profit, but we're certainly not getting that huge profit that the retail stores are. They're obviously taking advantage of the supply and demand.

Have you ever tried “Poor Man’s Pappy”?

I can't even remember what the actual recipe is for the knockoff Pappy. I've never tried it myself. I’ll have to do that sometime.

You said you are not drinking as much bourbon these days, but are there any bottles you’ve held onto that you want to open with a grandchild or on a significant date?

I did keep some of the older whiskey that I bottled back at Lawrenceburg and some at Buffalo Trace. Through the years we've used them at my children's weddings.

I like wine a lot too, and if you’ve got a really nice bottle of wine, you never know what's the best opportunity to open it. How good an opportunity or an event does it have to be? I'm always kind of reluctant to open it up. I'm that way with the whiskeys also. But I do have supply that we can use for when a grandchild becomes 21 and so forth.

Your son Preston followed you into the whiskey industry and your three daughters opened their own lifestyle business, Pappy & Company. Do you expect the grandkids will join someday too?

They’re a little young yet. We're not going to force it on them. They’ve got to make their own decision. But we’re planning on hopefully having some of these grandkids be in the business. They’d be the fifth generation. The third generation usually screws it up, which is my generation. So I’m trying not to do that. There’s still time to screw it up, but I’m hanging in there.