Criminal - Pappy

Episode Date: April 1, 2016

When it comes to Kentucky bourbon, Pappy Van Winkle is among the most exclusive, according to food writer Brett Anderson. The bourbon is prized for its wheat base and special barrels for aging, handpicked by Julian Van Winkle III, the president of Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery. It doesn't matter who you are or how much money you have -- you can't get it unless you're exceptionally lucky or willing to break the law. The Pappy frenzy has law enforcement, bartenders, and even the Van Winkle family themselves wringing their hands. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. Generally, the way I've drank Pappy in my life has been in the company of someone who has a bottle squirreled away, sometimes under their coat, sometimes under the seat of their car. Brett Anderson is the restaurant critic for the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. Last year, he tried to buy a bottle of bourbon called Pappy Van Winkle for a wedding gift. He knew it wasn't going to be easy. Pappy Van Winkle is one of the hardest bottles of bourbon in the world to get your hands on. People camp outside liquor stores when they know the small annual allotment is going to be released.

And then it's off the shelf in three minutes. I naively thought that I would be able to just sort of Google it, you know. And of course you can't, you know, like the, but that's how stupid I was going into all this. What do you mean? Why can't you just Google it? I mean, you can Google it. You can get anything, right? Well, I thought I'd just end up on some website and I'd pay some exorbitant amount for a bottle of Pappy and it'd show up in the mail. But you can't, I don't believe, just legally do that as a seller, right? Like there's been, I've been in so many conversations

where people are talking about prices per bottle for Pappy that I thought that the marketplace would be more accessible. I found out that it wasn't that accessible. You'd think if there was one person who could track down a bottle of bourbon, it would be a restaurant critic in New Orleans. But when it comes to Pappy, it doesn't matter who you are. You can't get it, unless you're willing to be creative. I just assumed that I would have to be willing to let it get a little sketchy

if I wanted to get a bottle. Sometimes you've got to meet a guy in a parking lot somewhere. I mean, that's sort of what I figured I'd have to do. You know, in my head, I never imagined that it would get any sketchier than that. I mean, even though it's black market whiskey, it's still whiskey. It's still a legal product. I mean, we're not talking about heroin here. He asked all over town and eventually got the number of a guy in Mississippi who said he had a bottle to sell.

He had no idea who this guy was. And after a few text messages, the guy just stopped responding. I'm willing to pay an exorbitant amount. In fact, I want that to be part of the narrative of this bottle because I want it to be a special bottle to give to someone. You know what I'm saying? And even then, I don't think I would have been able to get a bottle had I not had some pretty good connections in the Southern food world. Eventually, a friend took pity on him and just gave Brett a bottle from his collection. In any situation where demand radically outpaces supply,

you might have to meet a guy in a parking lot. You might spend two months' rent on a bottle of booze. We want what we want, even if we don't know why. And with this particular Kentucky bourbon, laws about how and where we buy liquor have gone completely out the window, with smugglers making a fortune, bar owners getting death threats, and in Kentucky, a small-town crime syndicate busted for, quote, illegal trafficking in spirit of slicker.

It's like prohibition all over again. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Basically, if we wanted to find a guy to talk to us about Kentucky bourbon, you're the guy to talk to us about it. That's what they keep telling me. This is bourbon historian Michael Veach. Bourbon has been popular for as long as I've been of legal drinking age, so I didn't know there was a time when it was seen as a cheap drink,

something you took down quickly to get drunk. But then in the late 70s, things started to change for an unexpected reason. Scottish distillers started pushing single malt scotch onto American consumers. Let's face it, as a bulk, American consumers aren't very bright. So when they walk into the liquor store, they've been hearing all about these single malt scotches and everything, and they see this single barrel bourbon, they say, oh, that must be the same type thing. Yeah. And it's cheaper. You know, it's only $30 a bottle where the cheap single malt scotches were 50, you know, the expenses were a hundred. So, you know, we'll buy that and put it in there.

And the idea behind it was, is that if we could get people to try it once, they'll want to buy it again. It'll be that good. And it worked. Today, bourbon is bigger than it's ever been, helped along by Prohibition-style bars that have opened all over the country. And Don Draper drinking a million old fashions didn't hurt. Bourbon is having a moment. And right at the very top of the pyramid is Pappy

Van Winkle. One thing that makes Pappy Van Winkle different is that it's aged longer for 15, 20, and 23 years. You know, retail, I think a bottle of Pappy 20-year-old is going for like $180 a bottle, and the Pappy 23 is like $230. Which is a lot of money, but it's not crazy in the world of bourbons. But the people that are selling it really illegally, because, you know, unless you have a license to sell liquor, if you sell a bottle of liquor, it's illegal. So the people who buy the $180 bottle and then— What they call flipping it, turn around and sell it to someone else, they're getting as much as $2,000, $3,000 for that bottle. Why? How? Because people

will pay that much just to say they got a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle, because everybody knows it's so hard to get. It's hard to get because they just don't make a lot of it. They distribute about 7,000 cases a year. Compare that with Jim Beam's 7 million cases a year. I had a guy call from Texas claiming to be a billionaire. This is Preston Van Winkle. The Pappy, in the name Pappy Van Winkle, was his great-grandfather. And he said he couldn't even get his hands on any. He said he'd have an easier time buying Ferraris and Lamborghinis than a single bottle of Pappy. That was kind of amusing to me. Because it really doesn't matter, right? This is one of the things where it doesn't

matter if you have a billion dollars. If it's not out there to get, no matter what money you have, you can't get it. Exactly. My grandfather, back before 1900, started working for a wholesale liquor dealer here in Kentucky called W.L. Weller. This is Julian Van Winkle III, Preston's father. And he was about 18 years old when he started, so I gradually worked his way up in the business and ended up owning the company with some other gentlemen. That's kind of where it started. My dad worked for him and I worked for my dad. Now Preston works for me. Pappy Van Winkle is now produced by the Buffalo Trace Distillery using the Van Winkle family recipe. Just to do this quickly, the difference between whiskey and bourbon is that bourbon has to be made in America with at least 51% corn.

Whiskey doesn't. You might have heard the expression, all bourbon is whiskey, but not all whiskey is bourbon. There are three things that make Pappy Van Winkle unique. Most bourbon is made with corn, rye, and barley, but Pappy Van Winkle is made with corn, wheat, and barley. That's the first thing. Second, it's aged in barrels for a very long time. And third, those barrels have to be approved by Julian personally. We describe it as it ages a little more gracefully, so it doesn't pick up quite as much

woody notes, many woody notes as a rye bourbon does, and it just ages a little more gracefully. So it doesn't pick up quite as much woody notes, many woody notes as a rye bourbon does. And it just tastes a little different. And that seems to be, you know, a flavor profile that a lot of people like. So it was fun to age it a little longer, but the age definitely is a different product than something that's younger, obviously. So it was not easy to get people to try something

like that, but eventually it has caught on, and now there are a lot of older whiskeys out there on the market. You know, Julian will be the first one to tell you that a lot of his success is blind luck. Michael Veach. Just being in the right place. You know, when he first came out with the Pappy 20-year-old, I remember talking to him, and he's like, you know, I'm releasing this. I don't know if it's going to fly or not. He says, I may be losing my shirt on this. But he didn't. H. Bourbons may have caught on, but the real money being made off Pappy Van Winkle isn't going to the Van Winkles. It's in the black market. Some people we talked to called it the secondary market

or gray market because bourbon itself isn't illegal. But whatever you want to call it, business is booming. There's a website called Bottle Blue Book that tracks going rates. It shows that if you had a 2009 bottle of Pappy 23 in your house. You could sell it to someone else for $2,280. That's an 800% markup. People buy it and hoard it and sell it on the secondary market, which is not something we promote at all, but it's just something that happens. It's hard. There's just no way for us to control that. I wonder if you have a lot of people, both of you, I guess, trying to cozy up to you. A lot of old friends come in of the woodwork asking if you have a bottle laying around. That happens from time to time.

And they're our best friends all of a sudden. So it's human nature, and that's the way things are. But it is kind of humorous to see how that works. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving

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How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. The 20-year-old Pappy Van Winkle, often regarded as one of the finest bourbons in the world and one of the hardest to get, has been stolen. According to the Franklin County Sheriff, 195 bottles, 65 cases of the rare 20-year-old bourbon was stolen from Buffalo Trace Distillery. The distillery reported the heist yesterday. In October of 2013, 65 cases went missing from the warehouse. No sign of forced entry, no security cameras. Detectives had nothing to work with. The papi was just gone, vanished without a trace. Rumors started floating around the Bourbon blog scene that the theft was so well executed, it had to have been an inside

job. Some speculated that it could have been orchestrated by the Van Winkles themselves, a way to keep Pappy in the news. They nicknamed it Pappygate. It really annoys me when I hear people say, well, he just did this for publicity or something like that, because no, he didn't. He didn't need the publicity. He doesn't have enough whiskey to supply his market now, so why would he want to create an artificial theft shortage to make it even worse on him?

Believe me, I've been in Julian's office. He gets a lot of phone calls of people complaining because they can't get his product. And he would love to be able to supply it to everybody. But that's the problem with bourbon, and particularly a 20-year-old bourbon. It's not a product that, oh, well, you got a shortage, I'll make more. Okay, you make more, but it's not ready for 20 years. You have to be a fortune teller to know how much you're going to sell. So you think that anyone who says Julian did this because, you know. They're just being stupid.

Sorry if I offend anyone, but that's the truth. You're just being stupid if you think that. But it did drive demand big time, didn't it? The demand was already there. All it did was give him another headache. And believe me, he was pissed, to put it mildly. It's funny. This coveted bourbon has become something of a headache for just about everyone.

The Van Winkles, law enforcement, would-be buyers. But we learned that the most miserable people in this equation are bartenders. We talked with a lot of them for this story, and you could just see their irritation the minute the words Pappy Van Winkle came out of my mouth. They're just completely sick of people asking for it. The first question out of almost everyone's mouth is, well, do you have any Pappy? This is Jeremy Johnson, owner of Meta Bar in Louisville. I mean, and it's really, really wonderful bourbon.

It's absolutely fantastic. But I mean, this is so out of hand that, I mean, it's not that it's the best whiskey, it's that it's the hardest to find whiskey. Because Pappy is so hard to get, bars can pretty much charge whatever they can get away with. We heard $60, $70, $100 for a single two-ounce pour. But the problem with having it in your bar is that everyone knows you have it in your bar. You know, having that stuff on your shelf, on one hand, can make you look really good in certain people's eyes who've been looking for it. In another way, when they come in kind of

tipsy already and they're trying to get you to illegally sell them like a half a bottle and then they get upset that you're like, all right, well, if I was going to do that, which I wouldn't, I would have to sell it to you for this much. And they're like, well, I can't believe this. It's like, well, sitting on my shelf, it's worth so much more than it is in your house. So I don't understand why you don't get this. Here's Amy Fisher. She's the bar manager at Jeremy's Bar. I'd say it's a lot of guys that come in and they're from New York, let's say.

And it's quite possible that they're going to try and turn a profit on it or put it in a bar somewhere and mark up the price, you know, a whole lot. It's, and they get really pushy. Which is illegal. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. It's interesting because I feel like this doesn't happen to me that often.

I don't think I close as much as you do. But also, you know, what's interesting to me is how pushy they get. And, you know, with Amy, she absolutely is how pushy they get. And, you know, with, with Amy, she, she absolutely, I mean, she helps make the rules. So she knows exactly what to say and exactly how to put these guys in their place, but they can get really pushy and kind of try to strong arm my other bartenders. And I can't, you know, I've, I'll get texts and they know that I'm not going to do it. But what will happen is, is these douchebags will be like, text your boss, text him right now. You know, let me hear that your boss doesn't want you to do it. But what will happen is these douchebags will be like, text your boss. Text him right now.

You know, let me hear that your boss doesn't want you to do it. You know, that's when I get those weird texts at like 1230 at night or one in the morning. And I'm like, no, just tell him no. You want me to put, just put me on the phone. Yeah. Well, I think it just gets to a point. And I feel like they're both kind of bullying and insulting my intelligence at some point. And so I just spell it out.

I'm like, hey, why would I do something illegal for you? Why would I jeopardize the reputation of this bar? Why would I jeopardize our liquor license? Why would I do any of that for you? I don't care about you. The other problem for bar owners is what Jeremy described as an arbitrary and somewhat mysterious allocation process. Each year, restaurants and bars find out how many bottles of Pappy Van Winkle they'll be allowed to purchase, if they can purchase any at all.

It's a pretty opaque system. So if the bar down the street got six bottles of Pappy and you got none, it feels personal. And so I just got fed up. I saw, like, this happened two or three times where I saw a restaurant open up, and oh, wow, they managed to get some Pappy. And again, it's not like my biggest priority, but when you have guests constantly asking for it, it's a little frustrating, you know, to not be able to get your hands on it. And it just kind of made me take it.

I think it makes some people take it more seriously. But for me, it made me take it way less seriously. And I just got so fed up that I said, you know what? If we ever actually get an allocation of this, I'm just going to make jello shots with this shit. And then we got an allocation, and we did it. I guess it was like a screw you to the whole wild, nutty...

Well, yeah, it's like, this is ridiculous. I don't like the way this is set up. I don't think it's fair. I think it's ridiculous that this bourbon up. I don't think it's fair. I think it's ridiculous that this bourbon is so overvalued by so many people. I'm tired of hearing about it. I'm tired of- Cultish fervor. How much were you charging for one of these jello shots?

$10. Which is also kind of like a screw you because the other bars are charging like 70 bucks, 80 bucks. And people who had never gotten to try Pappy 20 or Pappy 15 got it. It was an old-fashioned jello shot form. They got to taste it. It was definitely very tongue-in-cheek. I don't see how you could take it so personally, except that a lot of people did.

So what happens? So it kind of gets out that you're making jello shots with Pappy. What happens next? I think that's where the death threats came in. Like, you know, someone should do something really horrible to your place. Maybe I'll just have to come down to your bar and burn it down. I actually, someone sent me a link to a subreddit. Oh, yeah. Reddit went nuts.

And it was very graphic. And, you know, they were talking about, like, I'm going to find the guy that did this. And I'm going to, you know, murder his whole family. And I believe, didn't they use, I think, I remember the sentence, piss down his neck. Yeah. Yeah, that was in there. I wasn't sure if I even wanted to share it because, I mean, you have a son. Yeah.

And I was just like, I can't even imagine receiving something like this if I had a child. The year after the Jell-O shots, Jeremy says his Pappy allocation was cut in half. He threw his hands up, said, what the hell? I'm bringing back the Jell-O shots. And he also decided to sell glasses of Pappy at cost, no markup. You know, the Jell-O shot thing initially we got death threats for. Once people were a little more desensitized to it, I think when we said we were doing it at cost, we had to line out the door and I was handing out tickets so that everyone would be limited to one. And

people were like shaking my hand and they said, thank you so much. I really never thought that I would get to try this stuff. Yeah. He'll find out this month what his 2016 allocation is, if he gets anything at all. Back in Frankfort, Kentucky, a year and a half had passed since the theft of the 65 cases of Pappy. Detectives finally got a break in the case last March when someone sent a message to their Text-a-Tip line. The anonymous tip was very specific. It said a man named Toby Kurtzinger had barrels of bourbon hidden behind his house.

When detectives reached Kurtzinger's property, they said they could smell the bourbon from where they were standing. Kurtzinger was arrested. As word of his arrest traveled around town, all kinds of people just started showing up at the sheriff's office and coming forward with their stories. I bought nine bottles. I bought nine cases. One man who'd bought a lot of bottles gathered them all up

and had his lawyer deliver them to the sheriff's office. It did turn out to be an inside job. Kurtzinger worked at Buffalo Trace and had very easy access to Pappy Van Winkle, and he was running an elaborate bootleg whiskey business, directing eight accomplices to steal and sell not only the Pappy, but also an entire pallet of Eagle Rare bourbon and many barrels of wild turkey over a period of many years. Here's Sheriff Pat Melton on the Frankfurt local news last year. This is probably the tip of the iceberg. A Franklin County grand jury indicted nine people on a charge of engaging in organized crime. Melton said the Attorney General's Cyber Crimes Unit analyzed phones and computers.

He said they turned up communications about selling the bourbon and it involved, of all things, a softball league. And that's how they interconnected throughout the state, was friends through softball. Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Zach Becker said so far investigators have recovered bottles and barrels of bourbon from Franklin, Scott, Harrison, and Laurel counties. Melton believes there's more bourbon out there. We tried to speak with Sheriff Melton and with Zachary Becker about the case. Both declined, although Becker said they're close to reaching a negotiation.

Julian and Preston Van Winkle didn't want to comment on the theft either. I tried. Well, we really don't like to talk about this theft at all, just don't even want to bring it up. Obviously we weren't happy about it, but it's just something that happened and we're going to move on. But it's too bad, but it's still an ongoing deal, so we just really don't care about talking about it. Can't really comment on it too much since it's an ongoing investigation. Last month we searched for a bottle of Pappy here in North Carolina. Not to buy it, we just wanted to taste it in a bar.

After all this, we couldn't imagine how anything could be that good. We eventually found a bartender who had some, not for sale, but he agreed to let us come and try it. It's good. There's no doubt about that. But I didn't buy the sip I tasted, which maybe made it taste better. It's a very good bourbon. It's worth drinking. Michael Veach. Is it worth the prices that people are doing. Like I said, not to me. There are many bourbons out there that

I consider just as good that are readily available that don't cost an arm and a leg. So if someone said to you, here's a glass of Pappy and here's a glass of Buffalo Trace Heritage, pick one. Would you go for the Pappy? It would really depend upon a lot of different factors. The first question is, are these free? They're free. Okay. Well, if we're talking free, I will go for, you know, I'd say, okay, I'll take both. You know, people always ask me, what's my favorite bourbon? And my standard answer is, what are you buying me? Because my favorite is free bourbon.

Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohr and me. Audio mix by Rob Byers. This episode was produced with help from Gravy, a podcast from the Southern Foodways Alliance. Special thanks to Tina Antolini, Alice Wilder, and Gary Crunkleton. Julianne Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com or on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC.

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