The Bourbon Capital of the World?
Downtown Bardstown. Photo Credit: visitbardstown.com.
This is how it always starts, right? A friend shares a piece on the socials and it sends you down a rabbit hole. Okay, maybe I didn’t go full-on Alice in Wonderland, but the article got me thinking. Well, what piece am I talking about? It was David Thomas Tao’s piece for Vine Pair about our shared hometown’s battle to remain the Bourbon Capital of the World.
Tao writes about that struggle and provides an excellent frame for the current state of play—the tension, the growth, and all the politics that have limited and expanded bourbon’s growth in the region. It’s an excellent primer for the uninitiated. But for those of us steeped in the narrative of Bourbon Country, there wasn’t much that was surprising.
As I almost always am when I listen to shows or read articles about my hometown and its place in the industry, I was still struck by the pervasive outlook that borders naivete.
Folks spend an enormous amount of time speaking about Napafying Bardstown or the region and competing with Louisville for tourism. It’s an ambitious approach, something I love to see. But neither Napa nor Sonoma was built to compete with San Francisco or even Sacramento. They’re a series of communities that work in conjunction with one another and have a symbiotic relationship with San Francisco. (FYI: Napa and Sonoma are two diverging vibes. One I believe folks should consider before going down either path.)
The misaligned outlook is furthered when someone is quoted as saying that Louisville will take Bardstown’s lunch as if there was anything Bardstown could do to stop it. The better question is: what will we do when they DO take our lunch? Louisville will always win out if you go toe to toe with it. Big will always eat small, though I prefer the word Alfie Solomons used when he was chatting with Tommy Shelby in the locker room during season four. Suggesting we go toe to toe with Louisville would be like believing Tranmere Rovers can compete with Liverpool or Everton. Its ambition unmoored from reality.
Heaven Hill rickhouse. Photo Credit: ElijahCraig.com
Louisville has a nightlife, luxury accommodations, and transport linkages. There’s something for nearly everyone, nearly all the time. One can walk into most bars in the city and grab a high-end bourbon made just down the street. We can’t say the same about bars in Bardstown. Not because high-end bourbons aren’t made there, but because they just don’t get sent to local bars and restaurants. If Napafying remains the goal, it also means making your product available to the local joints.
Lousiville shouldn’t be the target. The folks going there are looking for the glitz and glam, the cookie-cutter experience that allows folks to tick a box, or that themed bachelorette weekend. What Bardstown should be looking for are the folks seeking an authentic experience. Folks who want to spend a week rubbing shoulders with the locals making the bourbon they like to drink. Folks who want to get out of the big city and spend a few nights in small-town Kentucky. Folks who want to wake up smelling the sour mash as it ferments.
Sonoma County Winery. Photo Credit: Thomas Erwin.
That’s Bardstown’s comparative advantage. Where Louisville caters to the masses, Bardstown–and all the other small bourbon-based communities–offers up a more niche experience. One that will, by design, lose out numbers-wise to the macro-tourism Louisville offers, but one that will be a far more valuable experience. Bardstown will be where real bourbon aficionados go, not the wannabes who fetishize Kentucky and the nostalgia of bourbon, but never make the effort to meet the locals. Bardstown should be for the folks looking for more than just transactional tourism.
And if you’re genuinely looking to Napafy or Sonomafy the Bourbon Trail, the objective should be building a cooperative environment with the folks in the surrounding communities. That means not simply building relationships between distilleries, but also between distilleries and local restaurants–not only the ones they’re building on-site that can end up bypassing the hardworking folks downtown.
Going it alone, like in most things, just won’t get you very far. You can give it a fancy corporate feel (Napa) or you can give it a more local/friendly vibe (Sonoma). That decision is up to the tourism folks. But whatever they decide, it shouldn’t be to compete with a place that’ll consume them overnight. And it shouldn’t be at the expense of local businesses and restaurants looking to pick up a few morsels the distilleries have left behind.