And there was this group of people and we were buying up all the Van Winkle we could. “At first it was this thing chefs were drinking. It’s not marketing, it’s the actual thing,” Thompson says. Wright Thompson’s baptism into the church of Pappy Van Winkle happened back in 2005, when his friend and acclaimed Mississippi chef John Currence introduced him to the bourbon that would become an obsession so much so that Thompson, known for his longform journalism at ESPN, just wrote Pappyland, an entire book devoted to understanding this storied brand’s journey to its outsized status in the whiskey world. A sign of recognition between two people that they both belonged to a sacred order. Bourbon For a time, it was like a secret handshake.
