Monday, Nov 20, 2017

Skipped the “free” breakfast at the hotel. Figured any place that had four overnight guests couldn’t be planning much of a spread.

After a few dead ends, we found Callie’s Homestyle Kitchen in Versailles KY. Cute, black and white storefront, with waitresses who call you “hon”. We had pint sized glasses of oj, thick white mugs of coffee and country ham, eggs and biscuits. Most excellent.

Drove to Lexington and started the Bourbon Trail. We decided to not hit them all (gads, couldn’t do it if we wanted to – who knew how many there would be). We went to the Wild Turkey Distillery but missed the tour. The next tour would be two hours away so we decided not to wait. We wandered through the visitor’s center, read all the stories – the guy who actually invented it didn’t get any credit for it – his name has been forgotten. He was a worker who thought he could make it better. He snuck in after hours, tinkered with the family formula, hid his barrels amongst the others and finally wrangled a place on a hunting trip with the owners of the distillery. The last night of the trip, he snuck his bottle into the campfire drinking, a big time distributor loved it – what is this great stuff?? – and the forgotten worker gave credit to the owners, so he could keep his job, and they gladly took it. As they were hunting turkeys, the distributor named the brew Wild Turkey. 

I cannot begin to adequately describe the hills of Kentucky. The grass goes on forever. Houses sit on knoll tops, alone, without trees or bushes or fences to pen them in. There’s just miles of grass with houses plopped down here and there. There are horses and sheep, a few cows and donkeys, but it’s so quiet. The two lane road is narrow, marked for 55 miles an hour, there are no sidewalks or curbs, just asphalt, ditch, and then more grass.

We followed the signs to Maker’s Mark Distillery – the Garmen couldn’t find it. Again, we drove over the rolling hills, across an ancient bridge down into a dell and found black and red buildings, sprawling over more green grass. It’s a huge campus, dotted with well-spaced buildings of corrugated black metal with red shutters, all build at the turn of the 20^th century.

As we walked the grounds, we noted the trees and bushes seemed painted the same black as the buildings. We found out later that the steam and evaporation caused by the still encourages a benign black mold to grow everywhere on everything.

That’s why the buildings were originally painted black. It’s also how old time revenuers used to find still hidden the hills. They’d look for the sooty trees and know they were close. 

The visitors’ center is the original owner’s Victorian home, once an old barn. Beautiful mosaic tile walls, vivid wallpaper and lots of gilt mirrors grace the waiting rooms.

We toured the kettles, printing press – they cut the labels there on a 100+ year old machine, 60,000 a day, by hand – filling stations, wax dipping line and storage houses. Every bottle is hand dipped; a good dipper can do 23 a minute.

All Maker’s Mark in the world is produced right there. They have storage buildings in Loretto – we drove by them later, 7 story, flat, square buildings, no windows, all black, looking like prisons – but every drop is produced and packaged at this one location. We tasted 5 types of bourbon – the white dog, unaged “moonshine”, the regular stuff, and 3 premium varieties. Quite a tasty treat.

The tour was great. The grounds contained glass statuary by Chihuly, the same guy who created the ceilings at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. There was a river of red glass spears, standing straight up from the bushes; a boat of multi-colored glass kracken arms;

a swarming “sun” of glass curls,

a tower of blue and silver glass “waves”, to represent the pure limestone filtered water,

and a ceiling in a barrel warehouse – lots of glass flowers and angels floating overhead. Impressive!

Mrs. Samuel, wife of the original distiller, designed the buildings, grounds, label and bottles. Their son related the story of how mom and dad were “discussing” the design of the label at dinner one night. She finally ended the discussion with “my dear, we both graduated from (whatever) engineering college, but only one of us was valedictorian”.  Her design with the torn label, S IV makers mark (Samuel the fourth generation), waxed dipped top and cognac shaped bottle were ahead of their time. An ordinary bottle of bourbon sold in the 1900’s for $3 – Maker’s sold for $7. Big time.

We dipped a bottle and picked up a few goodies in the gift shop and headed southwest for Oklahoma.

A couple of hours of driving with the sun straight in our eyes wore us down so we called it an early day. The sun officially set at 4:47pm but it was setting for us all afternoon. Sundown found us in Calvert City KY, a wide spot in the road.

We stayed at a funky Day’s Inn. A very nice Southern lady checked us in and had to chase us down to sign the receipt she forgot to include. We picked this spot because it was handy off the freeway, there wasn’t a lot of choice, and there was a Mexican restaurant across the street. We had a really good meal, terrible margaritas, and back to the room to sack out by 7:30. Jim watched football and I caught up on my journal.