The Beautiful Sadness Of The Yamazaki Distillery
by Carlos Bukowski Yamazaki Distillery. Osaka, Japan. The first thing they tell you is to be quiet. Not library quiet, but cathedral quiet. Like you’re about to witness something holy instead of just seeing how they turn grain into the kind of liquid that makes Japanese businessmen weep with gratitude. This was 1994. I’d been living in Shenzhen for over a year, running a small import business that was doing well enough to afford me trips like this one. Teaching English was behind me; now I was dealing with factories and shipping containers and the kind of money that let you take weekends in Japan to drink whisky that cost more than most people’s monthly salary. The tour group was exactly what you’d expect: American tourists who pronounced “whisky” like it had an ‘e’ in it, British expats who acted like the Japanese had stolen their birthright, a few Japanese whisky nerds, and one woman who caught my attention the moment I heard her laugh. Michelle. Vietnamese-French, living in Saigon, with mushroom-shaped hair and an angelic face that belonged on a Renaissance painting. She couldn’t have weighed more than 90 pounds, but there was something substantial about her presence, something that made the rest of the tour group fade into background noise. Our guide was a small man named Tanaka who spoke English with the kind of precision that made you aware of every lazy syllable you’d ever uttered. He wore a crisp white coat and the expression of someone who had dedicated his life to something greater than himself. “Yamazaki,” he said, “was founded in 1923 by Shinjiro Torii. He chose this location because of the water.” I was standing next to Michelle during this introduction, and when Tanaka started explaining the distillation process in rapid Japanese, I whispered a translation in Mandarin without thinking about it. She turned to me with this look of complete surprise. “Why you speak Chinese?!” she said, loud enough that several people turned around. “I live in Shenzhen,” I said, switching to English. “Business.” “But you’re…” she gestured vaguely at my obviously non-Asian face. “American. But I’ve been in China long enough to dream in Mandarin.” That broke the ice. During the tour, we ended up walking together, and somewhere around the fermentation room, I offered her one of my headphones. I’d been listening to The National’s new album, something moody and perfect for the contemplative atmosphere of the distillery. “About Today” was playing when she put the earbud in. She closed her eyes and listened for a moment, then looked at me with this expression I’d never seen before. Like she’d just realized something important about me, or maybe about herself. “This song,” she said quietly. “It’s…” “Sad and beautiful at the same time?” “Like whisky,” she said, and I knew I was in trouble. The tasting room was where things got serious. Not just the whisky – though that Yamazaki 12 was a revelation, fruit and spice and patience distilled into liquid form – but the way Michelle approached it. She didn’t just taste; she listened to what the whisky was telling her. “In Vietnam,” she said, holding her glass up to the light, “we have a saying about things that are beautiful and sad. They’re more real than things that are just one or the other.” By the time the tour ended, we’d made plans to have dinner. By the time dinner ended, we’d made plans to see each other again before our flights the next day. By midnight, we were sharing a hotel room and talking like we’d known each other for years instead of hours. I’d thought I knew what connection felt like. Mona had been magic, Melissa had been fire, but this was something else entirely. This was recognition. Like I’d been walking around with half a conversation in my head my whole life, and suddenly here was someone who knew the other half. We made love with the kind of intensity that comes from knowing time is limited. Not desperate intensity – gentle intensity. The kind that says this matters, this moment matters, you matter. When it was over, we lay there talking about everything and nothing until exhaustion finally took over. I woke up a few hours later to the sound of her voice. She was singing softly, something about closeness and distance and the space between wanting and having. Her voice was barely above a whisper, but it cut through me like the Yamazaki had – clean and precise and impossibly moving. “What song is that?” I asked. She turned to me, startled. “Just something… from earlier. From your music.” The National. She’d been carrying that song with her since the distillery, the same way I’d been carrying the taste of that whisky. Some things stick to you whether you want them to or not. We had breakfast together at the hotel, and then it was time for airports. Her flight to Saigon, mine back to Hong Kong and then the train to Shenzhen. We exchanged information, made promises about staying in touch, said all the things people say when they don’t want to admit something is ending. But walking away from her at Kansai Airport, I felt something I hadn’t felt since Mona left. That specific hollowness that comes from knowing you’ve just experienced something rare and might never experience it again. The Yamazaki I’d bought sat unopened in my apartment in Shenzhen for two weeks. When I finally opened it, I poured a proper glass and put on that National album and tried to recapture whatever had happened in that hotel room. But the whisky just tasted like whisky, expensive and well-made but no longer magical. Michelle and I wrote letters for a while. This was before email was reliable across borders, before you could stay connected without effort. The letters got shorter, less frequent, until they stopped altogether. Different countries, different lives, different timezones that made everything feel impossible. But
Patron Silver Surfer Gods
Patrón Silver. Just saying the name makes my sinuses clear up – that tequila was always the perfect cure for a runny nose which I, ahem, had a lot of during that time. But it also makes something else happen, nothing to do with congestion and everything to do with memory. This was 2003. I was living with Mona in a condo overlooking the ocean, and we had this ritual. Every Friday, we’d drive down to the store and buy a bottle of Patrón. Sometimes two, if we were feeling particularly alive. We had money then. Not rich money, but enough money to not have to work or do anything we didn’t want to do, for a little while. Enough to just be in love and enjoy life. Mona had come into some money, and I’d sold a screenplay that would never get made but paid like it might. “This won’t last forever,” she’d say, holding up the bottle, “let’s drink it like it will.” The bottle would catch the light from our ocean-facing windows, that silver liquid looking like liquid moonlight, like bottled starlight, like something you might find if you cracked open the night sky and let it pour into a glass. And when we drank it – always neat, always slowly, always with the kind of ceremony that made our beachfront condo feel like a palace – strange things would happen. Not drunk things. Magic things. I swear to God, that condo would get bigger when we drank Patrón. The walls would stretch, the ceiling would lift, and suddenly we had room to dance. Mona would put on some music and we’d move around that space like we had a ballroom, like the laws of physics bent themselves around the silver fire in our bellies. And the colors. Jesus, the colors that would bloom from that bottle. We’d be sitting on our king-sized bed – we’d finally bought real furniture, figured we might as well live like adults while we could afford to – and the tequila would hit our bloodstreams and suddenly the white walls were painted with auroras. Greens and blues and purples that had no business existing in a beachfront condo. “Do you see that?” Mona would whisper, pointing at the patterns of light dancing across our ceiling. “I see everything,” I’d whisper back, and I meant it. The Patrón showed us things. Made us see things. Not hallucinations – something realer than that. Like it stripped away the filters that normally keep you from seeing the magic that’s always there, hiding in plain sight. We’d make love on that mattress surrounded by impossible colors, tasting silver lightning on each other’s lips, and afterwards the room would hum with something that wasn’t quite music but wasn’t quite silence either. Like the universe was purring. Like we’d found the frequency that everything vibrates to when nobody’s listening. Mona was an artist too- the kind that believes art can change the world – and when she danced after we’d shared a bottle of Patrón, her feet wouldn’t quite touch the ground. I’m not speaking metaphorically here. I watched her floating three inches above our scratched hardwood floor, moving to rhythms that existed somewhere between the music and the heartbeat of the ocean outside our window. “You’re flying,” I’d tell her. “We’re all flying,” she’d say. “We just don’t know it.” We’d sit on our balcony with shots of that silver magic, watching the ocean stretch out below us like liquid mercury, like a living thing breathing light. And sometimes – I swear this is true – we could see the dreams rising from other windows along the beach. Actual dreams, colored like smoke and shaped like the things people wished for in the dark. “When we make it,” Mona would say, and the words would shimmer in the air between us like heat waves, “we’ll have a house where we can see both the ocean and the mountains.” “When we make it,” I’d say, watching my words take flight like silver birds, “we’ll drink Patrón every night.” “When we make it,” we’d say together, and the phrase would hang in the air above the water like a promise the universe was actually listening to. We thought we were playing at being adults, but looking back, I think we were actually playing at being gods. The Patrón gave us that kind of confidence, that kind of power. Like we could reshape reality just by wanting it badly enough, just by drinking deep enough from the bottle that held liquid starlight. The magic was real. I know how that sounds, but it was. The room really did get bigger. Mona really did dance on air. The colors really did paint themselves across our walls. The dreams really did rise from the windows of the sleeping beachfront like prayers made visible. But magic, like everything else good in this world, doesn’t last. The tsunami was building even then, of course. We just couldn’t see it through the aurora that surrounded us every Friday night. The money was running out faster than we’d calculated. My screenplay money was gone, and the next one wasn’t selling. Mona’s money had seemed infinite when we started, but infinity has a way of becoming finite when you’re not paying attention to the math. The fights started small, but they grew in the spaces between the magic. Whether we should start looking for real jobs. Whether this whole period had been a beautiful mistake. Whether we should let go of the condo and move somewhere cheaper. The Patrón started tasting less like possibility and more like denial. Less like alchemy and more like expensive procrastination. The magic began to fade. The walls stopped expanding. Mona’s feet started touching the ground when she danced. The colors dulled to their normal, depressing shades. The dreams stopped rising from the windows of other condos, or maybe we just stopped being able to see them. She left on
The Night Châteauneuf-du-Pape Saved My Ass
I was working estate cleanouts that summer. Real bottom-feeder work – going into dead people’s houses and hauling out everything their families didn’t want to deal with. Most of it was garage sale garbage: broken furniture, moldy books, clothes that smelled like mothballs and regret. But sometimes, if you knew what to look for, you’d find something worth keeping. The house belonged to some old French professor who’d croaked in his sleep. Lucky bastard. His nephew hired our crew to clear the place out before the estate sale. “Just get rid of everything,” he said, like he was talking about taking out the trash. Rich kids, man. They inherit the world and treat it like a burden. That’s where I found the wine. I was cleaning out the basement – damp, spider-infested hell that hadn’t seen sunlight since the Eisenhower administration. Behind a stack of moldy academic journals, there was this wine rack. Most of the bottles were covered in dust and disappointment, labels peeling off like old scabs. But one bottle caught my eye. Châteauneuf-du-Pape. 1998. Heavy as a brick and twice as expensive. Now, I’m not a wine guy. Never pretended to be. Give me bourbon or beer, something honest that doesn’t require a degree in French literature to appreciate. But I knew enough to know this bottle was worth more than I made in a month hauling dead people’s dreams to the dumpster. The smart thing would have been to slip it in my jacket and walk away. Hell, the nephew would never know it existed. But something about that bottle bothered me. Maybe it was the weight of it, solid and serious in my hands. Maybe it was thinking about the old professor, saving this thing for some special occasion that never came. So I bought it. Told the nephew I found it and offered him fifty bucks. He looked at me like I’d just offered to buy his grandmother’s dentures. “Sure, whatever,” he said. “One less thing to deal with.” Fifty bucks for a bottle that probably cost ten times that. Sometimes ignorance pays better than knowledge. I took it home and put it on my kitchen counter, where it sat for two weeks like an expensive paperweight. Every night I’d come home from whatever shit job I was working, look at that bottle, and think about opening it. But something held me back. Maybe it was respect for the dead professor. Maybe it was fear that I’d hate it and realize I’d wasted fifty bucks on fermented grape juice. Then came the night I wished I’d drunk it. I was dead asleep when I heard the front door open. Not the key-in-lock sound of someone who belonged there. The careful, deliberate sound of someone who definitely didn’t. My apartment wasn’t much, but it was mine, and I’d be damned if some junkie was going to rifle through my stuff looking for something to pawn. I grabbed the first thing my hand found in the dark: that bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. The guy was in my living room, skinny as a coat hanger and twice as nervous. Probably looking for electronics to sell, money for his next fix. He had a knife – nothing fancy, just a kitchen blade with delusions of grandeur. When he saw me standing there in my underwear holding a wine bottle, he actually laughed. “What you gonna do, old man? Get me drunk to death?” That’s when I introduced him to the business end of a 1998 French vintage. That bottle connected with his skull like a Louisville Slugger meeting a fastball. The sound was beautiful – not the sharp crack you’d expect, but a deep, satisfying thunk. Like justice with a French accent. The bottle didn’t break. That’s the thing about good Châteauneuf-du-Pape – they make those bottles thick enough to stop a bullet. Or a burglar. The guy went down like a sack of potatoes, knife skittering across my floor like a scared cat. I called the cops, and while we waited for them to show up, I figured what the hell. Might as well see what all the fuss was about. I opened the bottle – carefully, since it had just done me a solid – and poured myself a glass. First sip, I understood why wine people are so insufferable. This stuff tasted like someone had mixed grape juice with a barnyard. Not in a bad way, exactly, but in a way that made you think about dirt and animals and things that grow in the earth. Earthy, they call it. I called it drinking the French countryside, complete with the smell of cow shit and wet hay. But you know what? After the third sip, it started making sense. All that funk, all that barnyard complexity – it was honest. No pretense, no trying to be something it wasn’t. Just grapes and time and the particular piece of dirt they grew in, all mixed together in a bottle heavy enough to knock a man unconscious. The cops showed up, hauled away my unwelcome visitor, and took my statement. One of them, a sergeant with a wine gut and twenty years on the force, noticed the open bottle. “That’s some good stuff,” he said. “My brother-in-law’s a sommelier. Says Châteauneuf-du-Pape is the real deal.” “Yeah,” I said, “it’s got character.” “What’d you pay for it?” “Fifty bucks.” He whistled low. “Highway robbery. That bottle’s worth a few thousand.” I didn’t tell him about the other kind of highway robbery I’d just prevented. After they left, I sat in my kitchen and finished the bottle. All of it. Not because it was good – though it was, in its own funky, barnyard way – but because it had earned the right to be drunk. It had protected my home, knocked out a burglar, and taught me something about value that had nothing to do with price tags. The old French professor would have approved, I think. He’d
Early Times and the Weight of Memory
There’s something about the name that gets you there, right? Early Times. Not “Good Times” or “Happy Times” or “Premium Times.” Early Times. Like whoever named this bourbon knew something the rest of us are still figuring out: that the best times, the ones worth remembering, always seem to be behind us. I’ve been drinking Early Times for twenty years now. Not because it’s good – though it’s decent enough for the price – but because it’s honest. It doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not. No fancy bottles, no aged statements that sound like poetry, no marketing campaigns about heritage and tradition. Just brown liquid in a plain bottle with a name that cuts right to the heart of the human condition. It tastes like what it is: working man’s whiskey. Rough around the edges, a little harsh going down, but it gets the job done. There’s corn in there, some rye, probably some regret. It’s the kind of bourbon your grandfather might have drunk after a ten-hour shift at the factory, sitting on the front porch watching the sun go down and wondering where all the years went. My grandfather never drank Early Times. Hell, my grandfather barely drank at all. But I can picture him with a glass of this stuff, can almost see him in the amber liquid when the light hits it right. Maybe that’s what they’re selling – not just whiskey, but the idea of whiskey. The mythology of simpler times when men were men and problems could be solved with hard work and a stiff drink. Early Times doesn’t taste like the future. It tastes like memory. Like the idea of sitting on a porch that you never actually sat on, in a time you never actually lived through, talking to people who probably never existed the way you remember them Course, those times were never as simple as we remember them. Grandpa’s generation had the Depression, World War II, segregation, polio. They had plenty of problems that couldn’t be solved with anything, let alone bourbon. But somehow, from this distance, it all seems cleaner. More straightforward. Like people knew who they were and what they were supposed to do. Early Times. As if there was a specific period in history when everything made sense, when people understood their place in the world, when right was right and wrong was wrong and you didn’t need a philosophy degree to figure out the difference. I think about this every time I pour a glass. Usually around 10 PM, after another day of trying to make sense of a world that seems designed to confuse and disappoint. The whiskey burns a little, then settles into something like warmth. And for a moment, I can almost taste what the name promises: a time when things were different. Maybe better. Maybe just different. See, that’s the genius of nostalgia – it’s not really about the past. It’s about the present being so goddamn complicated that we’ll invent a golden age just to have something to compare it to. We look back at the 1950s and see prosperity and simplicity, conveniently forgetting about the Cold War and the fact that half the population couldn’t vote. We remember the 1960s as a time of idealism and change, glossing over the part where people were getting shot for having opinions. But Early Times knows better. It’s not promising you can go back to those times. It’s just acknowledging that we all wish we could. That somewhere in our lizard brains, we’re convinced that life used to be easier, that people used to be happier, that the world used to make more sense. And maybe that’s enough. Maybe admitting that we’re all just refugees from an imaginary better time is the first step toward making peace with the time we actually live in. I was at the liquor store last week, reaching for my usual bottle of Early Times, when this kid – couldn’t have been more than twenty-five – looks at my choice and smirks. “Why don’t you try something good?” he says, pointing to a shelf full of craft whiskeys with names like “Rebellion” and “Revolution” and other words that sound like they were focus-grouped by marketing majors. “This is good,” I told him. “That’s bottom-shelf garbage, man. You can get a decent bourbon for like ten bucks more.” And that’s when it hit me. This kid doesn’t understand. He thinks better means more expensive. He thinks progress means complexity. He’s looking forward to some hypothetical future when everything will be perfect and optimized and craft-distilled to match his personal preferences. He doesn’t get that sometimes you don’t want something better. Sometimes you want something that reminds you that not everything has to be improved, innovated, or disrupted. Sometimes you want something that tastes like it might have tasted fifty years ago, made by people who understood that the point isn’t to reinvent the wheel but to make a wheel that turns. Early Times doesn’t taste like the future. It tastes like memory. Like the idea of sitting on a porch that you never actually sat on, in a time you never actually lived through, talking to people who probably never existed the way you remember them. But here’s the thing about nostalgia: it’s not supposed to be accurate. It’s supposed to be comforting. It’s supposed to remind you that somewhere, somewhen, things felt simpler. Even if they weren’t. So I drink my Early Times and I think about early times. Not because I believe they were better, but because believing they might have been makes the current times a little more bearable. And sometimes, when the whiskey hits just right and the evening light slants through my window the way it probably slanted through my grandfather’s, I can almost convince myself that I’m living in someone else’s early times. That someday, some guy like me will be sitting in his apartment, drinking whatever cheap bourbon they’re making
Is Jim Beam Dodgers whiskey collectible?
A Meditation on Desperation and False Promises So there I was, standing in the liquor store on Sunset, staring at this Jim Beam Dodgers 750ml bottle (click that link to see what i’m talking about). Big blue letters screaming “COLLECTIBLE” right there on the label. And I thought to myself, Christ, when did we get so goddamn obvious about it? See, here’s the thing about collectibles that most people don’t understand because they’re too busy getting excited about owning something “special.” Real collectibles don’t announce themselves. They don’t need to. A 1952 Mickey Mantle rookie card doesn’t have “COLLECTIBLE!” printed across the top. A first edition Hemingway doesn’t come with a sticker that says “SAVE THIS FOR YOUR GRANDKIDS!” The good stuff, the stuff that actually matters twenty years down the line, it just sits there quietly, accumulating value like dust on a windowsill. Unnoticed until someone with half a brain realizes what they’re looking at. But this Jim Beam bottle? This beautiful bastard with its Dodger blue and white, commemorating another season of overpriced beer and broken dreams? It’s screaming its collectible status like a drunk at 2 AM screaming about how much money he makes. Which is to say: the louder you have to say it, the less likely it is to be true. And yet… And yet there’s something different about booze, isn’t there? See, most collectibles just sit there. Baseball cards stay in plastic sleeves. Coins live in little folders. Stamps get locked away in albums. But whiskey? Whiskey has this beautiful, tragic flaw: it’s made to be consumed. You can tell yourself you’re saving that Jim Beam Dodgers bottle for when it’s worth something. You can put it on a shelf, maybe even buy two – one to keep, one to drink, like some kind of alcoholic hedge fund manager. But life has a way of wearing you down. Bad day at work. Relationship falls apart. Dog dies. Rent’s due and the bank account’s looking thin. And there you are at 11 PM on a Tuesday, staring at your “investment” and thinking, well, it’s still Jim Beam, isn’t it? That’s when the desperation kicks in. Not the screaming, dramatic kind of desperation. The quiet kind. The kind that whispers, “Nobody’s going to pay $200 for this thing anyway. Might as well drink it.” And maybe that’s the real genius of putting “COLLECTIBLE” on a bottle of booze. The company knows exactly what they’re doing. They know that unlike a coin or a stamp, this collectible has a built-in self-destruct mechanism. It’s not just an investment – it’s an escape hatch. A way out when things get tough. So while the baseball cards and comic books pile up in storage units across America, slowly losing value as the generation that cared about them dies off, these bottles get consumed. One moment of weakness, one bad night, one “fuck it” moment, and boom – the supply gets a little smaller. Maybe that bottle really will be worth something someday. Not because it’s inherently valuable, but because most people couldn’t resist drinking their way through their retirement fund. The Dodgers will win some games, lose some games, break some hearts, give some hope. Same as always. And that bottle will sit on shelves across America, waiting. Waiting for that moment when collectible becomes consumable, when investment becomes medication, when hope becomes just another thing you swallow. In the meantime, I bought a regular bottle of Jim Beam. No team logo, no special label, no promises about the future. Just bourbon and the certainty that I’ll drink it before the week’s out. Sometimes the most honest thing in the store is the one that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is. Carlos Bukowski writes about collecting, drinking, and the intersection of both from his apartment in Hollywood. His collection consists mainly of empty bottles and full ashtrays.
The Night Blanton’s Gold Taught Me About Value
by Carlos Bukowski My friend Marcus is the kind of rich that makes you tired just thinking about it. Trust fund money, the kind where his biggest decision on any given Tuesday is whether to take the Porsche or the Tesla to his therapist. He’s not a bad guy, just… vacant. Like someone hollowed out the inside of a Ken doll and filled it with cryptocurrency and daddy issues. So when he shows up at my door last month with a bottle of Blanton’s Gold Edition, I should have known it was going to cost me more than whatever he paid for it. “Happy birthday, man!” he says, thrusting this gorgeous amber bottle at me like it’s a peace offering to the gods of working-class resentment. My birthday was three months ago. “Marcus,” I tell him, “this bottle costs more than my rent.” “Marcus,” I tell him, “this bottle costs more than my rent.” “Exactly!” He grins like he’s just solved world hunger. “You always drink that cheap shit. Time to upgrade your palate.” See, that’s the thing about rich idiots – they think expensive automatically means better, and better automatically means what you need. Like the universe is just waiting for them to throw money at problems that don’t actually exist. But it was beautiful, I’ll give him that. Single barrel, hand-bottled, each one supposedly unique. The kind of bourbon that whiskey nerds write poetry about and collectors mortgage their houses to obtain. The kind that sits behind glass cases in liquor stores with little signs that say “Please Ask for Assistance” because they know damn well that if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it. I should have put it on the shelf. Should have saved it for a special occasion. Should have done what sensible people do with gifts that cost more than their car. Instead, I opened it that night. Not because I was celebrating anything. Not because I was having a particularly good day. I opened it because Angela was supposed to come over. Angela, who’d been giving me another chance after I’d fucked up the first three chances she’d given me. Angela, who worked double shifts at the diner and studied nursing on her days off and somehow still found time to believe that I might be worth something. She was bringing dinner. Homemade lasagna, the kind that takes all day to make right. The kind you make for someone when you’re trying to say something important without having to use words. So I thought, hell, if she’s making an effort, maybe I should too. Maybe we’ll crack open this fancy bourbon and have one of those nights you remember when you’re old and everything else has turned to shit. Angela never made it over. Car trouble turned into a tow truck turned into a mechanic telling her she needed eight hundred dollars in repairs she didn’t have. She called crying, apologizing, asking if we could do it another night. And there I was, sitting alone in my apartment with a pan of lasagna that was never coming and a $400 bottle of bourbon that suddenly felt like a monument to my own stupidity. I drank half the bottle that night. Not because it tasted good – though it did, smooth as silk and complex as a jazz solo. I drank it because I was angry. Angry at Marcus for giving me something I couldn’t appreciate. Angry at Angela’s car for breaking down. Angry at myself for thinking expensive bourbon could somehow make me into the kind of man who deserved homemade lasagna. But mostly, I drank it because I could. Because unlike Angela’s time, unlike her effort, unlike the care she put into planning that evening, the bourbon was just sitting there, available. Easy. The next morning, I woke up with a hangover that felt like it cost $200 and the realization that I’d just pissed away more money in one night than Angela made in a week. When I told Marcus what happened, he just shrugged. “Don’t worry about it, man. I’ll get you another one.” And that’s when it hit me. The lesson wasn’t about the bourbon. It was about value itself. See, Marcus could replace that bottle without thinking about it. To him, it was just money, and money was just numbers on a screen that magically replenished themselves. But Angela’s lasagna? The time she took to call me even when her world was falling apart? The fact that she’d rearranged her whole day around the idea of making me happy? You can’t buy that. You can’t replace it. You can’t waltz into a store and say, “I’ll take another Tuesday evening with someone who gives a damn.” Rich idiots like Marcus think the most expensive thing in any room is whatever they bought. But the most valuable thing in that room that night wasn’t the Blanton’s Gold Edition bourbon. It was the woman who wasn’t there, and the dinner that never happened, and the chance I might have blown by confusing price with worth. Angela and I are still together. She got her car fixed, eventually. I learned to appreciate the cheap bourbon again – turns out it tastes just fine when you’re drinking it with the right person. And Marcus? He’s still rich. Still buying expensive shit for people who don’t need it, still thinking money can substitute for understanding. As for that remaining half bottle of Blanton’s? It’s still sitting on my shelf, unopened. Not because I’m saving it for a special occasion, but because I’m saving it for the right one. The next time Angela makes lasagna and her car doesn’t break down and we have one of those perfect, ordinary evenings that money can’t buy. That’s when I’ll know what it’s actually worth. Carlos Bukowski writes about bourbon, bad decisions, and the difference between price and value from his apartment in Hollywood. He still drinks cheap whiskey most nights, and has
A Humble Plea from the Bottom Shelf (Pappy Van Winkle)
Listen, I’m not proud of this: I’ve spent the better part of forty years drinking everything from rotgut bourbon to French wine that doubles as home security, and I’ve never asked anyone for anything stronger than a recommendation. But here I am, hat in hand, asking you beautiful bastards for something I’ll never be able to afford this side of the grave. Pappy Van Winkle. There, I said it. The holy grail of bourbon. The unicorn. The bottle that costs more than most people’s cars and appears about as often as an honest politician. Now, before you start rolling your eyes and thinking this is just another broke writer trying to get free booze, hear me out. This isn’t about getting drunk. Hell, I can get drunk on a ten-dollar bottle of Kentucky Gentleman just fine, thank you very much. This is about understanding what all the fuss is about. See, I’ve built a career writing about the things that separate the haves from the have-nots. I’ve tasted $400 bottles of Blanton’s Gold and $300 Châteauneuf-du-Pape, usually through the generosity of rich friends or lucky finds in dead professors’ basements. But Pappy? Pappy is in a different stratosphere entirely. We’re talking about bourbon that sells for $2,000 to $5,000 a bottle, if you can even find it. The kind of money that could pay my rent for three months. The kind of money that separates “expensive hobby” from “mortgage the house and divorce the wife.” And that’s exactly why I need to try it. Because I write about value. About what things are actually worth versus what people pay for them. About the difference between price and meaning. And how the hell can I keep writing about the absurdity of luxury goods if I’ve never tasted the most absurd luxury of them all? I’m not asking for a whole bottle, Christ knows. A pour would do. Two fingers in a glass. Hell, a thimbleful would be enough to understand what fifteen years of aging and artificial scarcity tastes like. Just enough to know whether it’s actually transcendent or just another example of people paying ridiculous money for the privilege of saying they paid ridiculous money. Here’s what I’m offering in return: the most honest review you’ll ever read about Pappy Van Winkle. Not some flowery wine magazine bullshit about “notes of caramel and vanilla dancing on the palate like butterflies in a summer meadow.” I’m talking about a real review from someone who’s never tasted anything that costs more than a used motorcycle. I want to know: Does it actually taste like liquid gold, or does it just taste expensive? Can your tongue tell the difference between twenty-year aging and twenty-year marketing? Is it transcendent enough to justify the price, or is it just good bourbon in a bottle with a fancy name? I’ll tell you if it’s worth selling your grandmother’s jewelry for. I’ll tell you if it makes you understand God or just makes you understand why rich people are so insufferable. I’ll tell you if it tastes like freedom or just tastes like you’ve been financially dominated by a dead Kentucky farmer. The truth is, there’s something beautiful about wanting something you can’t have. It keeps you hungry. It keeps you honest. But there’s also something to be said for scratching that itch, just once, so you can move on with your life. I’m fifty-three years old. I’ve worked shit jobs, written decent books, and drunk more bourbon than any reasonable human should. But I’ve never tasted the bourbon that’s supposed to be the best bourbon ever made. And that bothers me more than it should. So here’s the deal: If you’ve got a bottle of Pappy gathering dust in your liquor cabinet because you’re too scared to open it, or if you work at a distillery and can spare a sample, or if you’re just a rich bastard who thinks it would be funny to watch a working-class writer try to describe liquid unicorn tears – I’m your guy. Send me anything from the Pappy Van Winkle family tree. Ten-year, fifteen-year, twenty-three-year – hell, I’ll take the Lot B if that’s all you’ve got. I promise to treat it with the respect it deserves and the skepticism it’s earned. And if it turns out to be worth every penny? I’ll say so. If it turns out to be the biggest scam since pet rocks? I’ll say that too. Because that’s what I do: I tell the truth about things, especially expensive things that most people will never get to judge for themselves. Plus, think about it: wouldn’t you rather see that bottle go to someone who’ll actually appreciate the experience, rather than some hedge fund manager who’s going to drink it out of a crystal tumbler while complaining about his stock options? I’m not asking for charity. I’m asking for the chance to complete my education in the absurd economics of American whiskey. To finally answer the question that keeps me up at night: Is Pappy Van Winkle actually worth it, or is it just the most successful marketing campaign in the history of bourbon? Help a brother out. Let me taste the dream so I can tell everyone else whether it’s worth waking up for. You can reach me at the usual places. I’ll be the guy at the end of the bar, drinking something that costs less than your lunch and wondering what the big deal is about. Carlos Bukowski writes about bourbon, bad decisions, and the vast gulf between rich and poor from his apartment in Hollywood. He has never owned anything worth four digits except his car, and that was an accident.