There’s something about limited edition wheated bourbons that just whips up the whiskey geeks into a frenzy, isn’t there?
And no, we’re not just talking about Buffalo Trace releases (W.L. Weller, Pappy Van Winkle) anymore. Heaven Hill’s premiumized wheated bourbons seem to be nearly as hype-inducing these days as well, proof that the distillery’s decision to re-imagine the likes of Old Fitzgerald Prime—once a dust-collecting bottom shelf staple—was a strategically brilliant one. Along with the still-recent addition of Larceny Barrel Proof to the lineup, it’s helping Heaven Hill to stake a serious claim to the top-shelf wheated bourbon market.
Old Fitzgerald Bottled-in-Bond is a particularly interesting release, though, because so little about it is specifically consistent. The first two batches in 2018 were 11 years old and 9 years old respectively, but the next two swelled to 13 and then 15 years old, with floating price tags that essentially just added a zero after the age statement. Now, after trending upward, the Spring 2020 release of Old Fitzgerald is right back to 9 years old, an indication that the distillery tends to treat each release as its own animal. All have been warmly embraced by critics and whiskey geeks, not least of all for being housed in what is perhaps the most beautiful bottle on the bourbon market today.
But they’ve also projected a certain unattainable aura to fans, and the odds of obtaining a bottle seems increasingly unlikely when so few of the bottles actually seem to be sold at anywhere near their MSRPs. It seems to be endemic to the whiskey world as it exists today—make a well-aged wheated bourbon, and watch as the retailers jack up the price in an attempt to mint the next Pappy Van Winkle.
This is particularly noticeable in this newest Old Fitzgerald Bottled-in-Bond release, which, at a smaller 9 years of age carries a fairly attainable $90 MSRP, at least in comparison with the $150 MSRP of the 15-year-old version in the fall of 2019. The problem comes when trying to pick up a bottle via package stores, which are all too happy to utterly gouge the consumer for all they can get. A quick glance at Google shows how bad it is here in particular: Multiple liquor stores are offering online sales of this $90 bottle for $400 each, a more than 400% uptick. Not one is available for less than $400, in fact. Cruise over to Reddit, and you’ll find a thread of guys discussing their purchases of these bottles for $300 a pop, also presumably from local liquor stores. And really, I get it: An uptick from MSRP is absolutely to be expected when you’re dealing with sought-after bourbon. But 300% markups? 400%? Now we’re getting into the realm of lunacy, where probably few bourbons on earth could justify the cost. But if people are still willing to buy at that price, then retailers will have little reason to care.
Keep in mind, those prices are from the retailers, people. We’re not even talking about the secondary market yet, and we can absolutely assume that some percentage of those buying bottles at $300 and $400 are doing so with the intent to re-sell them. And they wouldn’t be buying at those prices if they couldn’t still turn it into significant profit by selling even higher.
Understandably, distilleries like Heaven Hill are frustrated by these kinds of reports of their MSRPs being inflated to such a degree by retailers. With limited ability to directly set prices due to the regulatory standards of the industry—outside of the bottles they sell directly from their own gift shops, of course—the distilleries are kept at a distance. At the end of the day, they can only do so much to shape prices. I reached out to Heaven Hill for comment specifically regarding this Old Fitzgerald release, and received this from Heaven Hill Master Distiller Conor O’Driscoll: