For all the talk of the impending whiskey shortage, whiskey fanatics have been battling with the frustrations of scarcity for years now—particularly when it comes to elusive brands like Pappy Van Winkle. But we happen to know one obsessive who has devised a brilliant, if seriously involved, system for obtaining rare bottles of brown. His name is Christopher Graves; he's a business analyst for a financial services company. This is what he told us to do.
1. Calculate Your Needs. "I've figured out what my consumption rate is gonna be, so I can figure out how many bottles I'd personally need, plus to share with friends and give as gifts. So when the next shipment happens in November or December—that's when distilleries do their big annual drop—I buy as much as I need for the year, and I'll stash it anywhere around my one bedroom apartment that I can find flat shelving space."
2. Call Around. "At the time I started this, Van Winkle didn't have a great website. Pretty basic. But they did list some of their registered distributors and liquor stores. I looked at all the ones within driving distance, and I made a big old list and put them in a big spreadsheet, with contact information. I called up every single one of them and explained, 'Hey I'm looking for this type of bourbon or similar ones, when do you expect getting it?' Some run a wait list. Some are first come, first serve. Some you can just talk to the owner and he'd say, 'Yeah, I'll just keep one on the side for you, and I'll give you a call when I see any.'"
3. Enlist Others. "I called my brother and sister in Rhode Island, and my father in Massachusetts, to have them do the same. My entire family is wired the same way: We like a good challenge like this where we feel like there's just some sort of market force that we should be able to overcome through either cleverness or, lacking that, just brute force." [Laughs]
4. Become a Good Customer. "Stop by your local liquor stores and say hello, and buy something else from them so they remember you. Talk to the folks. Figure out who the spirits buyer is. Charm them as best you can. Get your name on the list."
5. Or Just Bribe. "In one case, a store just got a shipment of something I wanted, and they were expecting Van Winkle soon after. So I bought the first bottle—I think it was William Larue Weller—and gave them some really nice cupcakes as a thank-you, figuring that it'd help me when the Van Winkle arrived. It did."
6. Get on the Wait Lists. "It used to be that I didn't have to deal with wait lists at all: I could just buy a bottle and leave it at that and not have to coordinate such an industrial-scale effort. Then I had to start calling maybe about a month ahead to get on a list. But as the stock has steadily dwindled, I've needed to start calling in August or September to get my annual supply of this stuff."
7. Call Around Again. "If there isn't a wait list, when the shipments come in, call a liquor store in each state or each area every day or two and kind of rotate around just to see if anybody's gotten anything. Once one person gets it in, say, northern New Jersey, probably everyone else is going to have it in northern New Jersey."
8. Embrace the Scarcity. "This is the silver lining: The more you read up about some of these specific whiskeys, the more you learn about what gives them that taste. Then you can look for other whiskeys that have a similar content of wheat or rye or corn or barley in the mash bill that you really enjoy. I expanded my spreadsheet to include all kinds. It's about 500 cells now."
