The good news is that you can hop on eBay right now and buy a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle 23-year-old for $200. Heck, score a vertical of all six Van Winkle bottles for $1,499. The bad news is that those bottles are empty. Not a drop of bourbon in them. Although another listing for an empty of Old Rip Van Winkle 10-year helpfully discloses that it’s “unrinsed,” so at least you’d get a good whiff for your sixty bucks, maybe.
Even those fully abreast of the cult that surrounds Van Winkle whiskey might scratch their heads at why there exists a robust market for buying and selling empty bottles. Time for a lesson in Van Winklenomics, which, like regular, boring economics, has much to do with the forces of supply and demand—in this case applied several times to one product. First, there’s the original supply of Pappy bottled at Buffalo Trace Distillery, a mere dribble compared to the public’s vast, thirsty demand for the stuff. As a result, even if you’re gold-nugget-in-the-garden lucky enough to find a bottle of Pappy 23 on the shelf in a price-control state, MSRP has steadily risen to $450. Otherwise, most liquor stores shelter it behind the counter at ten times retail. Or, in the next link on a slippery supply chain, original bottles get resold via the sometimes illicit “secondary market” for similarly exponential prices, especially vintage bottlings. (The legal online liquor retailer Frootbat has kindly reserved you a 1998 bottle of Pappy 23 for just $37,762. That’s not a typo.)
Given such mania, it’s easy to see how a beautiful bourbon made to be drunk can become an exploitable commodity. And how when true devotees finally do obtain, open, and pour a bottle dry, they may feel some feelings about eighty-sixing the empty. “I just couldn’t throw out my Pappy 20 bottle when it was done, not because it was so rare or valuable, but because it was linked to such a fond memory,” says Charles Coxe, editor of The World’s Best Whiskeys guide. “I opened it the night before my sister’s wedding to share with my family visiting from Norway, and we had the most amazing night.” Coxe more or less repurposed his cherished Pappy vessel as a decanter, inevitably leading to hijinks. “I thought it would be funny to refill it with Weller Special Reserve—same distiller and mashbill, but only $30 a bottle—and serve it to friends to see how they react when they think I’m filling glasses with one of most coveted bourbons in the world. But I always fess up right after getting their glowing reviews.”
As an example of how some empties can wind up for sale, a close blood relative of mine didn’t believe his drained bottle could be worth anything—until his daughter slapped it on eBay. It quickly sold for slightly more than he’d paid at retail before the big boom, making him one of the few people on the planet to drink a bottle of Pappy at a profit.
But what prompts people to pony up for the empties that others are willing to part with? Some could be pulling a similar prank as Coxe with their whiskey-tasting buddies. Or if you can’t find or afford an unopened Pappy, year after year, you might settle for an empty bottle just to own at least some tangible connection to the brand’s history and allure. The typical buying motive, though, is much less innocent, according to no less an authority than Julian Van Winkle III, the president of Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery. “The easy answer is that they’re counterfeiters,” he says. “They refill the used bottles. You can order very similar stoppers and neck wraps off the Internet, heat-shrink them on, and make a bottle good as new—except for what’s on the inside. It’s nuts.”
“There’s millions of dollars of counterfeit wine and whiskey out there right now,” Van Winkle continues, with Pappy’s Holy Grail status making it a top target for fakes. This is where the sketchier, more unregulated end of the secondary market comes into play. “Whatever you do, don’t buy stuff on Facebook or Craigslist,” he says. “It’s better to buy at licensed liquor stores, but sometimes even that can’t be trusted because if they can’t get enough supply from the distributor, they’ll turn to the secondary market to meet customer demand.” (Sheesh, the supply-and-demand maze is tricky enough without having trapdoors to fall through.)
Van Winkle says that Pappy counterfeits started appearing around a decade ago. An eye-opener was when a son-in-law ordered a pour in an upscale Colorado bar that tasted like rye or a high-rye bourbon but definitely was not the famously wheated Pappy. By the time he returned with Julian, the bottle had disappeared. The problem grew so persistent that recent Van Winkle bottles incorporate a tiny chip into the neck wrap that, in conjunction with a phone app, can detect if a bottle has been opened.
“That’s a stab at fighting counterfeiters,” Van Winkle says. But he emphasizes that there’s another, surefire way for fans to ensure that used Pappy bottles never get counterfeited: Destroy them. “Break them to make sure someone else doesn’t fish them out of the trash. Or, like when we set up at a festival or tasting, we take a knife and slice through the label to deface it. That takes care of that problem.”
