“Nope,” she replied, opening a U.S. road atlas. A dog-eared page showed the state of Kentucky, and the nail of her index finger rested just below the city of Bardstown, heart of the Bourbon Trail. Heaven Hill and Jim Beam are there, of course, but also the so-called small-batch bourbons, aged longer and made in, well, smaller batches. We keep them hidden in the back of our liquor cabinet when company comes: Woodford Reserve, Elijah Craig, Basil Hayden’s. This is booze that honors the Scotch-Irish clans of the American South, people who came to this country with the alchemical skill to turn corn into whisky. People who realized their crops were worth more as liquor than as pig feed. People who Melissa wouldn’t mind having a drink with.
So off we went, as the French visit wine chateaux of the Loire or the Germans visit the Rhine. We expected a Kentucky of backcountry stills and toothless old guys turning out tiny quantities of ambrosia, aged in kegs of the finest oak and all that. But that was not to be.
Our first clue that something was wrong was the pamphlet of distillery tours I picked up at our hotel. There were only seven. Of 130 or so different bourbons marketed in the United States, it turns out, all are made in just half a dozen distilleries. Swallowing our perplexity, we drove out to the Labrot & Graham Distillery, home to our favorite Woodford Reserve. Lincoln Henderson, master distiller, walked us across lush grounds to a building with several giant cypress tanks, set deep in the plank floor and filled with bubbling yellow foam. “Taste this,” he said, dipping in a finger.
It tasted like something between polenta and beer. Lincoln explained: if you distill a fermented mixture of grain, water and yeast, you get whiskey. If you do it with corn (or at least 51 percent) you get bourbon–a rougher, macho drink, not the sort of thing to be appreciated for “legs” or “bouquet.” Bourbon is what you keep in your bottom desk drawer, to be offered to a walk-in client who wants you to find her missing little sister.
Of course, that after-the-pale froth we had just tasted was run through the three huge onion-shaped copper stills that squatted in a row at L&G like spaceships. Lincoln’s assistant poured clear fluid from a graduated cylinder into a glass and handed it to Melissa. “White dog,” he called it, freshly distilled bourbon before it’s kegged. It smelled of pears and nail-polish remover. Melissa sniffed, sipped and smiled. A real badass.
So where was the Woodford? The same place as Old Forester and Early Times, apparently. We walked to a warehouse stuffed with barrels stacked 50 feet high. It seems that during the last decade, distillers saw an opportunity to market hooch to a higher-class drinker than ole Country Joe. They dreamed up a bunch of new labels for brews that tasted different. You see, bourbon starts out as white dog, but its taste alters with the conditions and time of its storage. A barrel on the floor, where it’s cave cool, will differ from one near the roof, where it’s hot. So any number of bourbons can come from the same warehouse, whether it’s Buffalo Trace, Blanton’s, Heaven Hill or Evan Williams. Who decides what’s what? Why, Lincoln, of course, a taster sans pareil, who sips and decides which barrels become what. My beloved Woodford, it turns out, is basically a product of inventory control.
How unromantic. Contrast that with the French wine country. You’d never mistake a Chardonnay from Burgundy for a Viognier from the northern Rhone. Similarly, a peaty, briny single malt from Islay, off the coast of Scotland, tastes almost nothing like a honey-and-heather Highland. But bourbon? It felt like a shell game.
At lunch, I was a bit in shock. We each had two tasting glasses, one of white dog, the other Woodford. “You can smell apple, pear,” said Lincoln, swirling the first beneath his nose. “I smell cherry,” said the PR guy eating with us. “That’s benzaldehyde,” said Lincoln. Then came the Woodford. Note the vanilla and caramel, said Lincoln, from aging in wood barrels. Also the smell of spice–cinnamon, maybe? Leather? It tasted like the fruits we smelled, candied and marinated in cognac. Good bourbon. Everyone was quiet for a minute.
After we got home, I set up six bottles on the dining table and poured a tiny glass of each. “Come help me with an unscientific experiment,” I said to Melissa. We sniffed and tasted. Each was different. The Woodford beat a cheaper brand. An 18-year-old knocked down a 10. Our faith oozed back. They were robust, solid, sense-filling drinks. And if there was a faint aroma of a con mixed with the benzaldehyde, so what? Maybe that’s quintessentially American, too.
