For my birthday this year, Jenny and I decided to head down to Versailles to the Woodford Reserve distillery for a tour. I’d never been there before and I’d heard it was a good time. On this day, however, it most certainly was not. Before I get this rant going, let me provide full disclosure: I am a Maker’s Mark ambassador and have been to their distillery several times. Maker’s is my favorite brand of bourbon and I regularly encourage people to try it when they are giving bourbon a go. And now, on with the show!
The visit started out a little disappointing because we were trying to make the one o’clock tour. We arrived right at the top of the hour only to find that the tour had started early because it was already full. Hey, not their fault that they had a lot of interested visitors, but tours only run on the hour so we were going to have to blow an hour before the next one. After reading some of the displays in the lobby of the main house and browsing through the gift shop, we still had a fair amount of time on our hands. So, we decided to head outside and walk around the place. It was a really nice day to boot, so it seemed like a good idea.
Whiskey distilleries are pretty interesting places. There is a lot of Kentucky history in them, what with old warehouses and lots of neat things to see – if they will let you, that is. Jenny and I hadn’t been walking around for more than five minutes when some lady came and ushered us back to the main building. She gave us some speech about the place being a national historic landmark and people can’t just be frolicking about and so on. Needless to say, this seemed pretty silly to me and wasn’t helping me get my birthday on.
Maybe it is because I have been to Maker’s on “Ambassador Weekend” when they really roll out the red carpet treatment or maybe I just like Maker’s so much that I cast them in a good light in my mind, but as I remember it, they pretty much let us wander around and look at whatever we wanted (within reason, of course). Sure, they have tours, but we have walked all over that place unattended and taken all kinds of pictures. In contrast, I didn’t get a single interesting photo of anything at Woodford Reserve.
Well, “go shorty, it’s your birthday” as they say – I wasn’t going to let this little infraction get me down! The lady offered to let us watch a short video in the main building, so we figured we could kill a little time with that. Little did I know that this video would cause me to give up on Woodford Reserve and leave… forever!
To give a brief history of Woodford Reserve, they haven’t been around very long. It takes at least two years to age bourbon and most decent brands go a lot longer (Maker’s ages for six). So when Woodford first opened their doors, they didn’t have any bourbon to bottle. Instead, they put together a “blend” of whiskeys, some of which came from warehouses of other brands owned by their parent company, Brown-Forman. As a bourbon drinker and Maker’s fan, I’ll admit that it bothered me a little when everyone was so high on this “new” brand. It wasn’t really their brand at all – what if theirs sucked when they finally finished aging it? But, the years went by and Woodford Reserve made a name for itself, presumably all from their own batches.
So right at the end of this video, they throw in a blurb about their master distiller bringing in “honey barrels” from other warehouses at the end of the maturation process. A honey barrel is a best tasting barrel of whiskey from the “sweet spot” in a warehouse. Maker’s Mark is one of the few bourbon producers left that rotates their barrels in the warehouse as the years go by. Bourbon essentially gets its flavor from expanding into and contracting back out of the wood of the barrel, so rotating barrels through the warehouse allows every barrel to get the highs and lows of the Kentucky weather that makes the process possible. Other producers just let all the barrels sit in the same place, then pick out the good ones (the honey barrels) and just sparingly mix in from the others or dump them out back of the outhouse.
As it turns out, Woodford never did give up making a blend with barrels from other places. So there I sat in a distillery that claimed to be the oldest in Kentucky (maybe building-wise, but certainly not production-wise) and that is such a fancy and historic landmark that I can’t even walk around the grounds to look at anything when I catch that little blurb and it hits me that they still aren’t completely producing their own brand. A Whitaker (and hopefully any connoisseur of bourbon) would sit no longer for such rubbish. I left without a tour and I probably won’t go back. It figures, though. What did I expect from a place owned by the same company that purveys Jack Daniels – the “Milwaukee’s Best” of whiskey?! 
