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Close WSJ Photo Illustration; WSJ Studio (bottle); Corbis (2); Getty Images (right)WHISKEY RUN | The mystique of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon has grown in inverse proportion to its availability.
If You Can't Find Pappy, These Will Make You HappyView Interactive
F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street JournalClick to view interactive.
THERE IT WAS, just a few tantalizing feet away: the legendary Pappy Van Winkle's Family Reserve 23-Year-Old, the most prized bourbon in the world. It was in Dallas, at a place called the Chesterfield. An eccentric cocktail guru named Eddie "Lucky" Campbell had stood on his bar in the middle of service, reached up to remove a secret wood panel behind a light sconce and brought out a bottle that seemed to emit an inner amber glow. I was getting Lucky's private stash! It was a daunting moment: Spoken of in whispers, tracked by rumor and gossip, Pappy is a kind of Maltese Falcon for hard drinkers. What if I didn't like it?
As it happened, I did. A lot. But then, it wasn't necessarily the deeply wooded, ineffably mellow taste of the whiskey that I had been after; it was the distinction of having bagged the white rhino of American spirits. In this, I was like a whole body of bourbon customers these days, ambitious souls more than willing to pay hundreds of dollars on the black market for the rarest and most prestigious brands of bourbon. On eBay, which doesn't allow the sale of alcoholic beverages (except for preapproved sales of wine), bottles selling for serious money are advertised as empty (wink, wink). Pappy 23-year-old is only the most sought-after of the lot; other bourbons, like Black Maple Hill and Eagle Rare (not to mention Pappy 20- and 15-year-old) are almost as coveted. Despite being sold for $600 or even $700 on the Internet, the 23-year-old Van Winkle isn't even the most expensive bourbon to be found on the open market: A Brooklyn, N.Y., whiskey bar and restaurant, Char No. 4, sells 24-year-old Martin Mill at an astounding $100 per ounce.
“Things can get weird when a bottle's cultural value balloons out of pace with its rate of production.”
Drinkers have been willing to pay a premium for high-end spirits such as single-malt scotch and V.O.C. cognac for many years. But I can't remember anyone hawking "empty" bottles of them online. So what is driving this bourbon frenzy? Part of it is the simple issue of scarcity. "We never know when we are going to get a case of Black Maple Hill," said Nima Ansari, the spirits buyer for Astor Wines & Spirits, one of New York's top liquor stores. "We can't really say we carry it. If we have it, word gets around, and then it's gone." The best bourbons generally take more than 15 years to age, and no one saw the current bourbon boom coming in the '90s; if anything, demand was down at the time. The bourbon producers are doing everything in their power to cope with a demand the simple physics of space-time makes impossible to fill. Some, like Maker's Mark, have been reduced to the expedient of simply watering down their liquor�a plan it quickly abandoned, though not before a public-relations disaster of New Coke proportions.
]]>BROWN DERBY | Make honey syrup: In a pan over medium heat, stir two parts honey with one part water until honey dissolves. Let cool. (Will keep, refrigerated, 2 weeks.) // Shake 2 ounces Maker's Mark bourbon, 1 ounce grapefruit juice and � ounce honey syrup with ice. Strain into a chilled coupe..
F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal, Styling by Anne Cardenas F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal, Styling by Anne Cardenas F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal, Styling by Anne Cardenas F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal, Styling by Anne Cardenas
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