In Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last, Wright Thompson masterfully tells the story of bourbon and deep family connection. Thompson weaves the legacy of Julian Van Winkle and Pappy Van Winkle bourbon with the story of his own family and father. The Van Winkles lost their generational family business in the 1980s, and it is heartbreaking.  The comeback story and the growth of craft bourbon is awesome. The Pappy Van Winkle bourbon is so rare now because of the family’s failure and the lessons learned from the failure.

I loved Wright Thompson’s writing (I’m reading one of his other books now), the depth of his thought, and the way he tied together multiple family stories with the history of bourbon. I found myself reflecting on my relationship with my dad and thinking about the ways I connect with my boys. Bourbon was shared at big life moments, and I appreciated the way he tied together bourbon with his own family history and tradition. 

Quotes

“Families stay together because of active decisions, because of patterns that turn into rituals, and they are torn apart most often not by anger or feuds but by careless inertia.”

“MOST EVERY MAN COMPETES WITH HIS FATHER and imitates his father, lives in fear of disappointing, and craves approval, and on the extreme ends of this potentially fraught relationship, a man often spends his entire adult life trying to be exactly like his father or nothing like him.”

“Powdered yeast is easier to manage and carries less risk of cross contamination, but while it always works, it doesn’t have the same complexities. More and more today, we don’t want to do the work or take the chances required for greatness, and we try to fix all those shortcuts on the back end with marketing and branding—modern, fancy words that mean lie.”

“It’s no coincidence that bourbon and thoroughbred racehorses come from the same place because both are made or broken long before anyone ever sees them.”

“Here’s the story they don’t want to tell: eight companies make 95 percent of the whiskey in America. When you walk into a liquor store and see all those labels, that’s marketing. Templeton Rye and Bulleit Rye, for instance, have both been made by the Orwellian-sounding MGP, which is in Indiana, not Kentucky. Whiskey is better when it’s mass produced by an expert and a team of chemists, not done in small artisanal batches by a guy who talks about craft. And all those different brand names are just that. Brands. Perhaps no word sums up the death of truth in America better than the word brand.”

“The term brand name comes from the whiskey business, according to Reid Mitenbuler, author of the excellent book Bourbon Empire. Famous brands, like Elijah Craig and Evan Williams, were created by Jewish distillers who presumed that their customers didn’t want to open a bottle of Rosenstein Straight Bourbon Whiskey. The characters the distillers invented, the alleged fathers of bourbon, were ginned up mostly out of thin air, taking tiny threads of true biography and weaving a compelling fiction.”

“Vodka is for the skinny and scotch is for the strivers and bourbon is for the homesick.”