Picking a favorite bottle from Bourbon Lore: Legends of American Whiskey is like picking a favorite child: They are all unique, and equally amazing. Each brings a treasured story to the history we are trying to tell with the book. But while it’s impossible to pick a single favorite, it’s a bit easier to pick three that speak to me personally.
The Old Overholt Rye is one of the oldest whiskeys in the book. More importantly, it stands as an emblem of one of America’s most storied whiskey heritages, that of Abraham Overholt and his western Pennsylvania distillery, founded in 1810. He and his sons made a traditional Old Monongahela rye, heavy on rye and malted barley and utterly bereft of corn. The distillery, eventually renamed in his honor, passed down through his family until his grandson, the Gilded Age tycoon, sold it to Andrew Mellon, a friend and business partner. Mellon loved the whiskey so much that he had it bottled privately, to give as gifts.
Because the whiskey was privately bottled, little information appears on the label. Rare for an American rye, the bottles are vintage dated, running from 1904 to 1912, though there is some dispute over whether the dates correspond to distillation or bottling years. What is certain is that these bottles are literally whiskey history, telling a story about the spirit, and the country, unrivaled by virtually any other expression.
After I fell in love with American whiskey in the early 2000s, Four Roses was the first distillery I visited. I was immediately taken with its recent brush with death: in the late 1990s, a series of owners considered shutting it down, until finally Kirin, the Japanese company known for its beer, stepped in to the rescue. Four Roses’s master distiller at the time, Jim Rutledge, persuaded them not only to keep the stills running, but to bring the brand back to its former glory.
While Four Roses was sold as a straight bourbon in Japan, in the United States it was an ill-reputed, bottom-shelf blended whiskey; when I told my grandfather I’d be visiting the distillery, he said, “What? That rotgut!” But Rutledge knew he could change minds with a knockout whiskey, and that’s just what he did with the 2008 Four Roses Mariage, an alluring blend of older-aged whiskeys from its vast collection. It’s a powerhouse whiskey with a singular story – a combination I fall for every time.
A.H. Hirsch Reserve 16-Year-Old is not the rarest or most valuable of the Hirsch whiskeys in the book, but it’s the one that speaks to me. Back in the 2000s, when buying now-legendary bottles of Willett and Pappy Van Winkle was as easy as picking apples off a tree, I splurged and bought a few bottles of the Hirsch 16 at my local liquor store in Washington, D.C. They were $65 each, which at the time seemed like an exorbitant amount of money to spend on an American whiskey. But I knew its reputation — the writer Chuck Cowdery calls it the “best whiskey you’ll never try” – and I wanted to see if it lived up to the hype.
What I tasted was like nothing I’d had before. Although back then I couldn’t have told you much in terms of tasting notes, to this day I recall its unctuous, almost cognac quality, its rich fruits and wood notes. But I also appreciated the story behind it: that a run of bourbon, distilled and aged in Pennsylvania, found its way to Kentucky, where Julian Van Winkle III bottled it for sale through the legendary Keg ‘n’ Bottle wine and spirits shop. It’s that intersection of quality and a compelling story that drives my interest in bourbon, and it’s what provides the through line for Bourbon Lore: Legends of American Whiskey.
