Life is short – why wait to open the good stuff?

OLD RIP VAN WINKLE 10 YEAR
2019 release

MASH BILL – Buffalo Trace wheated mash bill

PROOF – 107

AGE – 10 years

DISTILLERY – Buffalo Trace

PRICE – $87

WORTH BUYING? – at that price, yes

Autumn doesn’t officially start for another week and a half or so. But since September kicked in I’ve already been there in my mind. My garden seems to be with me on that. Or rather I with it. Nature is making its turn and my thoughts are following its lead.

Fall is my favorite season. It’s a contemplative time of contradictions. Nature sets that tone, with Fall harvests yielding fruits and vegetables that make for cozy meals, while flowers and grasses gradually decline into mulch. Living and dying share time and space. Reflection and anticipation circle each other, neither in any rush, neither in competition with the other, each playing their role, like the sun and the moon.

For me personally, these early weeks of September feel like the still moment right before a curtain rises, a kind of calm before the storm. I work in theater and education, and September is when both kick into gear. One theater program I teach in is already underway. Another, of which I am the director, starts its Fall Session next week. Things are about to get very busy. And then to end the month, I’ll start rehearsals for an ambitious theater production—eleven actors playing eighty roles in a three hour play depicting forty years of early twentieth century history. And we know the early twentieth century had a lot of history!

Regarding history, I’m also aware that the day I’m posting this marks 25 years since America and the world experienced a great historical hinge moment. I can still remember with photographic clarity every passing hour of that day—September 11, 2001. The phone calls. The uncertain conversations. The images on endless repeat. The sounds. The silences.

Several decades earlier, around 1936, as the great Russian acting teacher, Konstantin Stanislavsky, was fast approaching the winter of his life, he commented that young people born after the 1917 Russian Revolution seemed to him entirely new people. I feel similarly about young people born around or after 9/11. They entered the world after a decisive change. They don’t know what life was like before. Their lived references don’t include most of my own. And for my part, I don’t know what it’s like to only ever have known our current life of heightened surveillance and the deep divisions it encourages, whether it’s the government doing the surveilling and dividing, or Google or Apple, or us scrutinizing ourselves and each other through our social media and our Ring cameras. And now the tsunamic surge of generative AI has us asking where, how, and when this current way of life will end for us. What have we done? And what will we do?

But I’m already wandering deep into the weeds. Let’s crack this bottle open and fill a glass.

I bought this bottle in 2019 at a price near its intended msrp. Those days are long gone. Now people pay even $600+ for this stuff. Silly. Nevertheless the collector in me has held on to it. Since I brought it home 7 years ago, it’s been gathering dust in a cardboard box alongside a few other special bottles, waiting… well, that’s the question. Waiting for what?

So here we are now, on an uneventful weekday afternoon. I’ve just uncorked this prized cliché of the Unicorn Bourbon Phenomenon, for no special reason at all. The day is sunny and cool. That’s reason enough. These brief notes were taken on the bottle’s first pour, after it rested in a simple brandy glass for about 25 minutes.

COLOR – soft but vibrant russet oranges

NOSE – sweet baked cherry, fresh cut apples, vanilla, caramel, oak, a dusting of brown sugar and baking spices

TASTE – a syrupy texture accented by a prickling heat from the 107 proof, with thick caramel and cherry syrup, oak wood and a dash of oak tannins, faint hints of the baking spices

FINISH – oak wood and tannin, cherry, toasted vanilla, caramel

OVERALL – a sweet ol’ Kentucky bourbon, like standing in an old-fashioned bakery

It’s abundantly clear why, beyond Anthony Bourdain’s recommendation, this bourbon became so popular. It’s very sweet, and sweet tends to win popularity contests. But the baking spice aspect and 10 years in oak help ground things, keeping the sweetness from cloying like many Buffalo Trace standard releases do.

I won’t waste more time or space here on further unpacking the endlessly unpacked unicorn phenomenon surrounding this bottle. I’m actually hoping that my finally having cracked this 7-years-ago release will be the last nudge needed to free me entirely of that care. I just want to enjoy the bourbon.

I do prefer Kentucky bourbons that offer more savory aspects to balance their sweet side. Knob Creek and Wild Turkey do this well. Buffalo Trace’s tendency to lean sweet often presses up against my tolerance for it. But I’m enjoying this bourbon like I would a good cherry or apple turnover, where the baker has allowed the fruit to handle the sweetness without smothering it further in sugary icing.

And for a moment, for a handful of sips, I forgot all about AI and 9/11 and the Russian Revolution. My impending class and rehearsal schedules were somewhere unseen over the horizon. Bourbon as a momentary respite from weightier concerns.

We need to take breaks. They help us to rejuvenate. And a break must be just that, a moment away from the important things—so that we can get back to those with renewed energy and clarity.

Something that stuck with me from Wright Thompson’s book on the Van Winkle bourbons, Pappyland, and which still resonates, is its subtitle’s reference to “the things that last.”

Bourbon isn’t one of those. No matter how long you bunker it away. It’s 2026 and I just finished a glass of bourbon bottled in 2019 and distilled in 2009. Like the bourbon I drank, none of those years are coming back. I can only reflect on them.

So, now, in September 2026, I’m contemplating a busy Fall season of teaching and theater making. This very week back in September 2019, I was doing the same, while unwittingly living in the bliss of pre-COVID life—another historical hinge moment. And on this day, September 11th, in 2009, I attended the opening night of a new play my partner was acting in, having spent that afternoon preparing for a work trip to Frankfurt, Germany, where I would have the single worst experience of my theater career! (I’ll tell you that story over another glass sometime…)

All gone. All memories. Like the aromas and flavors in my now empty glass.

Who knows how much time any of us have. Will this busy Fall be my last, or one among thirty more? However many years lie ahead for me, I’ve got the rest of this bottle to help me take proper breaks during these coming busy Fall months at least.

Cheers!