Bourbon. It Is What You Want It to Be.
A wolf, a fox, and the only honest answer in bourbon.
Somewhere outside Jackson Hole, I slowed a snowmobile because there was a wolf standing in the trail. Or there wasn’t.
We were a few days into a ski trip when we broke up the week with a snowmobile run, me driving a double sled at the front of the pack, on a scenic stretch that ran parallel to a winding river. We came around a bend and there it was. I eased off the throttle and it slipped into the trees before anyone behind us made the turn. We were the only ones who saw it. We weren’t mic’d up, so we just kept riding.
Our guide, we’d learn, was competing that night in the World Championship Snowmobile Hill Climb at Snow King Mountain. The midpoint of the ride was lunch at a cabin reachable only by snowmobile — or perhaps an Olympic cross-country skier. As we parked the sleds and I pulled off my helmet, I turned to my copilot: “Can you believe we just saw a wolf?”
Blank look. “Wolf? That was a fox.”
Who better to settle it than the local guide who rides these trails every day? I painted the picture for him — the bend, the creature, the two of us — and asked: wolf or fox?
He shrugged, smiled, and said, “It is what you want it to be.”
Twenty years later, I still don’t know what we saw. What I know is that in the moment, each of us would have bet anything on our own version. Same bend, same animal, same three seconds — two completely different certainties.
Bourbon runs on that exact kind of certainty. The reviewer who declares the leather and the stone fruit like he’s reading it off the label. The guy at the bar telling you what you’re tasting, mid-sip, as if your own mouth needs a second opinion. Two friends with the same pour from the same bottle, having two entirely different experiences. And somehow one of them is supposed to be wrong.
If they looked over at me to settle it, I’d give them the guide’s answer, because it’s the only honest one there is.
It is what you want it to be.
What’s your version of the story — a bourbon that surprised you, or a pour you and a friend couldn’t agree on? Drop it in the comments. And if this is your first time here — welcome to Bourbon Rocks™.
—
Bourbon Rocks
bourbonrocks.org