Meet Pappy Van Winkle’s Billionaire Pappy

William Goldring’s Sazerac Company produces some of the world’s most collectible spirits, but it’s the bottom shelf that made him rich. Fireball, anyone?

_{By Christopher Helman, Forbes Staff}

At the top of the hill behind the Buffalo Trace distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky, overlooking what used to be a farmstead, sit 18 seven-story buildings clad in red metal siding. These rickhouses are each filled with some 58,000 wooden barrels, which will yield roughly 18 million bottles of whiskey. And not just any whiskey, but some of the most coveted and expensive bourbon in the world, including Pappy Van Winkle, which, theoretically, costs around $300 a bottle, W.L. Weller ($50) and George T. Stagg ($100)—but good luck finding them at those prices in your local liquor store. Their cost can go up as much as twentyfold on the secondary market.

All told, the Sazerac Company boasts 3 million barrels of inventory, which will retail for more than $9 billion once it all comes of age. “My father said, ‘Never go into the bourbon business, because one day you’re going to wake up and have a lake full of bourbon,’ ” laughs the 80-year-old chairman of Sazerac, William Goldring, who debuts on this year’s Forbes 400 with a net worth of $6 billion. “Now we have many lakes.”