On a recent Tuesday evening at Louisville’s Speed Art Museum, the oldest and largest art museum in Kentucky, well-dressed guests gathered among exhibits that included Black avant-garde artwork. They had each paid $3,000 per table for the opportunity to bid on rare bottles known as the “Art of Bourbon.” The proceeds from the hammer prices would benefit the non-profit museum.
There was a George T. Stagg Distillery Prohibition-era bottle as well as a 20-year-old A.H. Hirsch, supposedly “the best bourbon you’ll never taste.” Both went for low five figures.
But the marquee lot at the auction was a Pappy Van Winkle 23 Year from 1998, the inaugural release of the now most famous bottle on the American whiskey market. It sold for an astonishing $35,000, a great fundraising boon for the nearly 100-year-old art museum.
“This auction fires on all cylinders,” claims Tom O’Grady, a bourbon collector who serves on the museum’s board of trustees and has regularly put some of his own bottles up for auction. “Proceeds support an important institution in our community, and I get my hands on ridiculously rare bourbons.”
Forget government assistance, and step up your game GoFundMe: If you want to raise money for people in need these days, you have to deploy Pappy the Philanthropist. In fact, it seems that as of late, the only way to get one’s hands on Pappy Van Winkle, that ridiculously rare unicorn of unicorns, is to bid for it at charity auctions.
PappyFundMe
Last summer, when biblical
