Four Roses: The Legend Beneath the Spanish Towers

The building itself stops people cold. Driving into Lawrenceburg on US One Twenty-Seven, you round a bend along the Kentucky River and there it sits: a long, low distillery with cream-colored stucco walls, red-tile roofs, and arched colonnades that belong more to a California mission than to Bourbon County hill country. When the distillery was built around nineteen ten, its owners wanted their visitors to think of a winery. A century later, the building is on the National Register of Historic Places, and the whiskey made here has its own complicated story worth knowing.

The Four Roses name traces to Paul Jones Junior, a Louisville spirits merchant who trademarked the label in eighteen eighty-eight. The romantic legend holds that Jones had proposed to a Southern belle and arranged that she would signal her acceptance by wearing a corsage of four roses to a dance. She wore them; he named his bourbon in her honor. A more prosaic theory credits a man named Rose, not Jones, with founding the brand. Both stories have been circulating for over a century, and neither can be definitively proved.

What can be proved is what happened to Four Roses through most of the twentieth century. When Seagram's acquired the brand in the nineteen forties, they continued selling it in Asian and European markets where it became enormously popular, particularly in Japan. But in the United States, Seagram's quietly downgraded it to a blended whiskey and used the name on a product that bourbon purists considered inferior. For five decades, Americans who asked for Four Roses at a bar were often handed something quite different from what the rest of the world was drinking.

The reversal came in two thousand two, when the Japanese brewing company Kirin acquired Four Roses and immediately restored it to straight bourbon status in the American market. The distillery returned to its original practice of combining ten distinct bourbon recipes, using two mash bills and five proprietary yeast strains, to produce its signature character. The Spanish Mission building, the Kentucky River, and a century-old name were suddenly worth reclaiming. Ownership has changed hands many times, the latest chapter in a history that has always moved at the pace of the aging barrels in the rick houses behind those red-tile rooftops.