The Search For Pappy

I love this column by Wright Thompson:

You never know where you're gonna find the greatest bourbon on the planet. Like last month, I was on a cooking team at a barbecue contest, and one of the guys on it with me was a pretty famous chef. His name is Sean Brock, and his restaurant, Husk, in Charleston, S.C., only serves stuff grown, raised or made below the Mason-Dixon Line. He traffics in all the pharmaceutical-quality narcotics of the southern food junkies: Allan Benton's bacon, Will Harris' beef, and, of course, Julian Van Winkle's whiskey. So we were hanging by the bar at our tent, the day before the cooking began, and I was looking around at all the bourbon we had brought in. He grinned. "You like bourbon?" he asked.

Out came this bottle of Pappy Van Winkle, which is hard enough to get in the first place, but this was special edition stuff, bottled just for Husk, 20 years old and 107 proof. I've never seen a movie star naked, but it's got to be something like this.