Old Rip Van Winkle

Always fine bourbon.

The Van Winkle story begins in 1893, with a young travelling salesman crossing Kentucky by horse and buggy for the wholesaler W.L. Weller & Sons. Julian "Pappy" Van Winkle sold bourbon and a promise — of quality, of integrity, of a whiskey worth every penny. On Derby Day 1935 he opened the Stitzel-Weller Distillery with a quietly radical recipe: wheat in place of rye, for a bourbon smoother and softer than any then known.

Pappy remained at work until his death in 1965, at ninety-one, and his standard passed down the family line — through his son Julian Jr., his grandson Julian III, and his great-grandson Preston, who joined in 2001. In the mid-1990s the family gave the oldest stocks Pappy's own name, and in 1996 the Family Reserve 20 Year received the highest rating ever awarded a whiskey by the Chicago Beverage Testing Institute. Since 2002 every Van Winkle whiskey has been made in partnership with the Buffalo Trace Distillery, to the family's original wheated mash bill, under the family's own guidelines.

The house is still governed by the words Pappy left it: "We make fine bourbon at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always fine bourbon." Nothing is hurried, nothing is stretched, and each year there is only ever so much.