Iconic Spirits An Intoxicating History

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 For my grandparents, Gus and Gertrude Gerson
And for my mother, Babette Leonore Gerson Spivak

Copyright © 2012 Mark Spivak

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval
system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn:
Rights and Permissions Department, P.O. Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

Lyons Press is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

Project editor: David Legere

Text design and layout: Nancy Freeborn

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN 978-0-7627-9000-5
 CONTENTS

Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Moonshine, Rum-Running, and the Founding of NASCAR
2 The Golden Goose that Laid the “World’s Best Vodka”
3 Transforming Bitterness into Sex Appeal
4 How the Humble Juniper Berry Almost Brought Down the British
Empire
5 The LSD of the Nineteenth Century
6 Behind the Reputation of the Greatest Luxury Drink
7 The Legacy of a Cuban Exile
8 How the World Learned to Love Partially Decayed Vegetable Matter
9 Capturing Flowers in a Bottle
10 American Whiskey Heads North
11 Premium Tequila Comes of Age
12 The Invention of the True American Spirit
Bibliography
About the Author
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

You’re reading this book because my agent, Kate Epstein, believed in it.
She nurtured the idea while functioning as a cheerleader, advocate, and
sounding board. I couldn’t begin to thank her.
I’m grateful to Holly Rubino, my editor at Globe Pequot Press, for
approaching this project with wisdom and tact. She made the editorial
process enjoyable, which is no small feat.
I appreciate the efforts of Sallie Randolph, my media attorney, who put
in extra time to help me get the manuscript in order.
Many people were kind and gracious to me along the way, particularly
Joe Michalek of Piedmont Distillers, Tish Harcus at Canadian Club, Larry
Kass at Heaven Hill, and Rob Cooper of St-Germain. I could not have told
these stories without their assistance.
Above all I’m grateful to Carolann, for believing in me while not taking
me seriously.
 INTRODUCTION

What’s a lifelong, committed wine geek doing writing a book about spirits?
For one thing, after I conceived the initial idea and began the research, I
became enthralled with the resonant and compelling nature of these stories.
Not only are they great yarns, but they’re also untold stories—at least as far
as the average imbiber is concerned. I realized that if I could bring them to
life with a fraction of their original impact, I would be helping to connect
readers with their past.
Coming back to spirits from an immersion in wine, I was struck by how
much fun everyone in the liquor supply chain was having: Bartenders,
salespeople, and executives—they all said so, but they didn’t need to—it
was apparent in the thrill of their work. There was an entrepreneurial joy in
the creation of spirits brands that I hadn’t witnessed in the wine business in
a long, long time.
We all know that the cocktail culture has exploded across America over
the past several decades. Much of the emphasis is usually placed on the
resurrection of classic cocktails, on the consumption of those drinks by
legions of consumers, and on the creation of new libations by a creative
group of mixologists. More fundamental, and ultimately more interesting,
are the stories of the risk takers who created those spirits in the first place.
These are people who put their lives, careers, and fortunes on the line to
pursue a vision that in many cases really did change the world.
From the epidemic of gin consumption that almost brought down the
British empire, to Gaspare Campari toiling away in his workshop to infuse
sixty herbs, spices, barks, and fruit peels into a mixture of alcohol and
distilled water, to Sidney Frank waking up one morning and deciding to
create the world’s best vodka, our global economy and culture have been
profoundly affected by the spirits that I have designated here as “iconic.”
Legislation was passed, moral crusades were launched and carried out, and
the nature of society was altered. It hardly seems possible over a few shots
of booze, but the twelve spirits featured in this book became the catalysts
for change in governments and our way of life. They became the vehicles
for creating the world in which we currently live.
At the end of each chapter, I’ve included recipes for the classic or most
popular cocktails involving that particular spirit. Some of these recipes are
amalgams of many different versions, collated into a form that seems to
work best. In other cases, distillers or mixologists have kindly given me
permission to reproduce their recipes.
I hope you’ll find these stories as enthralling as I did, because they are
the best kinds of tales: the type a writer could never make up.
MOONSHINE, RUM-RUNNING, AND THE FOUNDING OF
NASCAR

Drive out of the city of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the landscape
turns rural very quickly. By the time you reach Wilkes County, the soft
rippling hills have become higher and steeper, and the valleys are dotted
with frame houses, farmland, and working tractors.
Joe Michalek, the energetic and genial president of Piedmont Distillers,
is at the wheel. It’s 6:30 a.m., and we’re driving out to have breakfast with
Junior Johnson—driving on Junior Johnson Highway, an eight-mile stretch
of US Route 421 named for the famous race car driver. We ease off onto old
421, which used to be known as Bootlegger’s Highway. Sixty years ago
there were nearly 400 stills in Wilkes County, and the roads here were dirt
—“nothin’ more than cow pastures,” according to Junior. Bootleggers
turned off their headlights at night to avoid detection and navigated by the
light of the moon.
Robert Glenn Johnson Jr., known as Junior, was born in Wilkes County
in 1931. He began running moonshine out of the hills at the age of fourteen,
using his dad’s rebuilt 1940 Ford. He became the fastest man on the dirt
roads, the one bootlegger the law couldn’t catch. In time, he took his cars,
his speed, and his nerve onto the race track and became one of the greatest
drivers in NASCAR history.
Author Tom Wolfe called Johnson “the Last American Hero.” The
nickname stuck, and it became the title of a 1973 movie about his life, a
Hollywood extravaganza starring Jeff Bridges. Wolfe not only wrote at
length about the legend of Junior Johnson in his breakout 1965 Esquire
piece, he also helped create it. Junior was already an idol throughout the
South at that time but was relatively unknown outside the region. The story
captured him at the height of his racing career, and it also took the legend
and burnished it so brightly that it became visible around the country.
 The entrance to Junior’s estate has wrought-iron gates and brick barriers
chiseled with the initials jj. It almost seems palatial, but this is a working
farm with more than 800 head of cattle. We pull up in front of a large shed.
Half the building is a garage housing Junior’s 1963 Chevy racer, his son
Robert’s race car, and his rebuilt 1940 Ford bootleg car. The other half
resembles a fraternal hall. Racing memorabilia clutters the walls, and Junior
holds court on one side of a long folding table. At eighty, his once-
formidable bulk has thinned out, and his hair has turned white, but he is
alert to every nuance of every conversation, including those he seems not to
hear.
“These old Fords was the ideal car to haul whiskey in,” he tells me later
on as we stand there admiring the glistening black bulk of the restored
bootleg car. “They drove good, and they had a lot of space to pack whiskey.
It got to where you hardly saw a car out late at night ’cept this kind of Ford,
and you knew they was haulin’ whiskey. Everybody had ’em. I was drivin’
around the farm since I was ’bout nine, so by the time I was fourteen, I was
a stable enough driver to haul whiskey. It was sorta like a milk run: You had
your customers, and you planned your route. You started after it got dark,
because the revenuers knew the bootleggers, and we knew them. If they
could see you, they’d figure out the times you was travelin’ and target you,
but they couldn’t do it in the dark.” It was one big happy family, except that
the revenuers—government agents charged with stopping the sale of
improvised, untaxed liquor—had the power to arrest you if they caught you.
And given that they stood no chance of collecting the unpaid taxes on a
generation’s worth of moonshine, they’d just as soon lock you up.
Monday through Friday Junior cooks breakfast for his “boys,” a
combination of friends, business associates, and hangers-on. There are
bowls of scrambled eggs and grits, plates of biscuits, and platters of
breakfast meat. The regulars include former moonshiners such as Millard
Ashley and Willie Clay Call, father of Piedmont’s master distiller Brian
Call. Known as the Three Musketeers, they worked together in what the
locals refer to as the “liquor business” or the “whiskey business.”
Michalek mixes seamlessly with the boys, eating sausage and joining in
their good-natured grumbling and banter. He moved to North Carolina in
1995 to work for the tobacco company R. J. Reynolds, which at the time
was a sponsor of Junior’s Winston Cup racing team. His moment of
epiphany occurred at a blues jam session way out in the woods, when
someone offered him a taste of peach moonshine from a Mason jar, and he
was amazed by the smoothness of it. He left RJR in 2005 to start Piedmont
Distillers and eventually persuaded Junior to partner with him on a legal
line of moonshine called Midnight Moon.
“Because I was an outsider,” he says, “I noticed that everybody here had
very strong reactions on the subject of moonshine. I started reading about it
and became intrigued with it. There’s an incredible collection of characters
associated with it, but at heart it’s a way of life—an attitude of irreverence
born of survival, mixed with an element of competition.”
“Just about every house in the county was involved in the liquor
business,” says Junior. “They was either makin’ it, buyin’ it, sellin’ it, or
growin’ the corn for it. My dad had five stills runnin’ all the time. If they
busted one, he’d just move it somewhere else.”
Johnson Senior was the largest bootlegger in the county immediately
before and after World War II and had the reputation for making the best
moonshine. Labor in the liquor business was divided along generational
lines. The fathers and uncles made the ’shine, and their sons tended the stills
and hauled the whiskey. Some people now regard this as a romantic era, but
it was really a fight to stay alive. “Back in the hard times,” as Junior calls
them, farmers couldn’t pay their bills simply by growing corn. They either
made whiskey, or they didn’t eat.
On the dirt roads of Wilkes County, Junior developed the now-famous
maneuver known as the Bootleg Turn. When the revenuers have you
cornered, you turn the wheel hard to the left, downshift to a lower gear, and
put your foot to the floor. The car pivots 180 degrees, and you’re down the
road before the law can turn themselves around. “Anybody who don’t know
how to do this is goin’ to wreck their car every time,” chuckles Junior.
“Anythin’ you could do to gain an advantage out on the road was very
important. There ain’t no way a Highway Patrol officer could ever attempt
to do somethin’ like that.”
Junior started racing in 1948, up at North Wilkesboro Speedway.
“Racin’ was just a natural for me,” he says. “Other people had to learn all
the stuff I already knew when I got started.” At first he could make more
money hauling whiskey than from racing, but by 1953 he was competing in
major NASCAR events. He won five races in his first full season. The
tracks were still dirt back then, and Junior made the most of them. He
invented a technique called the Power Slide, which enabled him to go faster
through the turns and shoot out in front of the other cars on the
straightaways. “You’d have to be turnin’ a certain speed and downshift your
car, and make it so you could drive it in gear when you turned the wheels.
You’d practice that stuff and perfect it, and get so you could do it every
single time. But it was somethin’ that some people could never understand
—they never could drive a car that felt like that. My brother was a much
better driver than me on the roads, but not on the race track, ’cause he never
thought the car would hold on the turns.”
Junior is hitting his stride now—he’s the total master of the
conversation, just as he was once in absolute control at 180 mph.
“I had a lot of friends that was very good bootleggers, but they couldn’t
drive a race car to save their lives. I never thought I could get hurt in a car,
’cause I thought I was in control. I think the ability I learned as a youngster
taught me what cars were really all about, and I felt I had the confidence
that I could make them do what I wanted.”
Beyond technique, that confidence is the quality that Junior admires
most in a driver—call it guts, heart, or nerve. Early drivers such as Roy Hall
and Fonty Flock had it, Fireball Roberts and Curtis Turner had it, and Dale
Earnhardt Sr. had it most of all. After he retired as a driver and started his
own racing team, Junior looked for drivers with nerve: Cale Yarborough,
LeeRoy Yarbrough, Bobby Allison, Darrell Waltrip, and Mario Andretti. To
him, nerve is what separates the ordinary from the great.
During his bootlegging days, Junior went up to Charlotte and bought a
police radio. While the revenuers were driving all over creation trying to
hunt him down, he was tracking their movements on the shortwaves. One
night, though, they finally had him cornered. According to Wolfe, they had
him trapped on a road near a bridge with no way out, with their barricades
set up to stop him. While they were waiting for him, they heard a siren
approaching and saw the red lights flashing on the grille. They took down
the roadblock to let their fellow agent pass, and who sped by them but
Junior Johnson, his 1940 Ford decked out with a siren and flashing lights.
“You had to play the same games on them that they was playin’ on you,” he
says, laughing.
 Junior got to a point where he was doing well enough as a driver that he
could give up bootlegging. Finally, though, his luck ran out, and he wasn’t
even behind the wheel when it happened. “I won a race in Altamont, New
York, in 1955 and drove all night to get home. I come in around 4:00 or
4:30 in the morning. My dad was still in the liquor business at that time. He
and my brother had a still, and they had overslept. You had to fire up your
still before daylight so nobody could see the smoke, ’cause if they saw that
smoke, they might report you to the law. My dad asked me to go out and
fire up his still, and then he and my brother would come out, and I could go
to bed.
“I went out to that still, and the revenuers had it staked out. There was
eighteen of ’em, and I couldn’t fight ’em off. When they saw who I was,
they figured they had hit the jackpot. They just wanted to catch me and put
me in jail, ’cause they couldn’t do it any other way. The judge had it in for
my family anyway, since he had sent my dad to prison three or four times.”
Junior was sentenced to two years in the federal prison in Chillicothe,
Ohio, and served eleven months (in 1986, Ronald Reagan gave him a
presidential pardon for his moonshining conviction). Many times since, he
has said that prison was the turning point in his life. In a 1988 interview
recorded for the Southern Oral History Project, he called it “one of the best
things that ever happened to me.” He learned patience and discipline in
prison, along with the ability “to live with your fellow man and get along
with him.” He learned to take orders and accept responsibility for himself,
and realized that he was not the center of the universe.
Junior Johnson today is a mellow man who is soft-spoken, modest, and
self-effacing—even when his words could be taken as boasts. He has a
philosophical view of life that initially seems to be at odds with his hard-
driving image. He is gracious with others and tries to see the good side of
people. His graciousness dries up quickly when questioned about the early
days of NASCAR, however, and particularly when asked about Bill France.
Big Bill France had been a driver from the earliest days of stock car
racing in America, going back to the mid-1930s, and eventually became a
race promoter. After World War II, he echoed the sentiments of many
drivers about the need for a centralized authority in the sport. In December
1947, France convened a meeting of drivers, mechanics, and promoters at
the Streamline Hotel in Daytona Beach and founded the National
Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, or NASCAR. He installed himself
as the organization’s leader and went to work to establish NASCAR as the
preeminent racing authority in the country.
In the decades that followed, France ruled NASCAR with an iron fist.
He controlled the finances and decided on how much to pay the winning
drivers. He demanded that drivers race exclusively for NASCAR and
banned anyone who appeared in the races of the three or four competing
circuits. He blocked the establishment of a drivers’ union. He kept tight
control of the organization’s finances, even as he became first a millionaire
and then a billionaire. He owned all of NASCAR’s shares, and it remains a
totally family-owned company to this day.
“Bill France married a girl ’bout thirty-five miles from here,” says
Junior. “He was up here a lot, ’cause we had what he needed to get goin’—
we had the fast cars, and we had the money out of our bootleggin’ business.
He’d find out who the top bootleggers were in the county and try to get
money from them to get his racin’ goin’.
“They can say that NASCAR started any way they want to,” he says
emphatically, “but this race track here in Wilkesboro is where it started. No
question ’bout that. And that’s where he got his money to do what he did.”
Back in the day, North Wilkesboro Speedway was the king of the rural
dirt race tracks. It opened in 1947 and was the first NASCAR-sanctioned
track. It was owned by Enoch Staley, a Wilkes County resident who was a
fan of the stock car races organized by Big Bill France. Staley built the
track with the help of partners, along with a promise from France to
promote races there in exchange for a cut of the gate. Over the course of the
next fifty years, nearly every NASCAR great competed and won at
Wilkesboro.
In the 1970s and 1980s, however, NASCAR began to change. The tracks
became larger and more elaborate. Like baseball stadiums, they were built
specifically to host the exploding popularity of the sport. They had
skyboxes, not to mention the capability to hold tens of thousands of fans
and generate huge profits. North Wilkesboro slowly became an
anachronism, but Staley wanted to keep the original atmosphere. After he
died in 1996, the track was sold to Bob Bahre and Bruton Smith. In 1997
Bill France decided to pull the Winston Cup from North Wilkesboro in
favor of larger tracks with bigger paydays, and the Speedway went into
mothballs. It was revived briefly in 2010 but closed again.
As I spoke with Junior, the North Wilkesboro Speedway was still
shuttered. Locked gates barred access to the track, and the Winston Cup
lettering was fading on the walls of the wooden grandstand. There were
overgrown weeds in the vast lot that had once held thousands of cars,
pickups, and adoring fans. Junior knows that era isn’t coming back, and
he’s sometimes nostalgic about the early days of the sport.
“A lot of NASCAR’s knowledge and history was what I created,” he
says flatly, without a hint of boasting. “When you’re an advanced
technology person in a sport like I was, you wonder where all the engineers
come from. I didn’t have an engineering degree; I left school in the eighth
grade. So brains is sometimes more important than education.” He was the
first to drill out the wheel wells on a race car, which saved thirty pounds
and increased airflow to cool the brakes.
In 1960 Junior went to the Daytona 500 with a car he admits wasn’t
capable of winning. He was 50 horsepower and 20 mph behind everybody
else. During one of the practice runs, he noticed that if he got right behind
the lead car and stayed on his bumper, his own car was suddenly going as
fast as the leader. It was drafting, something birds had been doing
instinctively since shortly after the Earth was created, and Junior decided to
use it to his own advantage. “The race was two-thirds over before
everybody figured out what I was doin’,” he says. By the final laps the lead
cars were either blown up or wrecked, and Junior won.
Life takes most of us to strange places, and Junior is well aware of the
irony involved in his selling legal moonshine. Junior Johnson’s Midnight
Moon is distilled and bottled at the tiny Piedmont headquarters in Madison.
They use the old Johnson family recipe—still a closely held secret after all
these years, but with a few tweaks added. The ’shine is now triple-distilled,
which makes it much smoother. The whiskey still starts with fresh cornmeal
blended overnight with mash from the previous run, and the process
(including the stripping run, second run, finishing run, blending, filtration,
and bottling) takes several weeks from start to finish. We’ll never know
exactly how it differs from what the Johnson family cooked up in the
backwoods stills, nor are we supposed to. It’s still sold to the public in
Mason jars, and the taste is marked by the sweetness of the corn and the
burn of the alcohol. In addition to the basic version, the company offers an
assortment of fruit infusions: Cherry, Strawberry, and Apple Pie. The
product has resonated with some of the country’s top mixologists, liquid
chefs who are constantly hunting for something new, different, and unusual,
even if it has been around for hundreds of years. North Carolina has what
Michalek calls “a small but emerging cocktail culture,” and Midnight Moon
is featured at lounges such as Single Brothers in Winston-Salem and
Foundation in Raleigh. It has established a growing following in Brooklyn
and is gradually spreading to major US cities. In a further bit of irony,
Piedmont’s operation is far more streamlined than things were in the old
days. At his peak as a bootlegger, Junior employed seventy-five people. “I
had cars, trucks, mechanics, drivers, and still hands,” he says. “But
remember, we had to do all the transportin’ ourselves.”
Michalek believes that moonshine “has the capability to become a
category unto itself,” the equivalent of scotch or bourbon, although he’s
unsure how long it will take to get there. After Junior, his idol is Sidney
Frank, the man who created Grey Goose from nothing more than the flash
of an idea. Like Frank, and like many of the modern generation of distillers,
Michalek is essentially standing at one end of a craps table, betting the title
to his house, and staring down the long expanse of felt toward that point
where he might hit the jackpot. “Occasionally, I hear skeptics tell me that
people will never drink moonshine,” he says. “Well, you wouldn’t have
thought they’d drink Jägermeister either.” Junior’s enthusiasm is virtually
unqualified; he sees a time when ’shine will become a vodka replacement
for many people. “Vodka ain’t nothin’ but white whiskey anyway,” he says.
This is certainly true as far as it goes: You can make vodka from anything,
corn included. Nor is moonshine unrelated to some of the world’s other
great spirits. If Midnight Moon were distilled in Kentucky and placed in
charred oak barrels, it would eventually become bourbon. The fact, though,
is that Junior’s dad and others like him weren’t making an elegant vodka to
be mixed into a martini and sipped on the rocks. They were concocting raw
whiskey to be chugged out of Mason jars in the light of a backwoods moon.
Most importantly, Midnight Moon represents the closing of a circle for
Junior Johnson, a vehicle for him to finally put his bootlegging past into
what he feels is the proper perspective. When Tom Wolfe arrived in 1965,
locals asked him not to portray Wilkes County as “the bootlegging capital