Black Maple Hill Single Barrel 23 Year Rye Whiskey

Black Maple Hill is among the most coveted American whiskeys, with a history that connects it with some of the biggest names in Kentucky distilling. Like several other extremely limited-release brands from the early 2000s, Black Maple Hill did not make its own whiskey, or even bottle it. Rather, its owner, a California-based company called CVI Brands, hired Julian Van Winkle III to find high-quality barrels of whiskey and bottle it for them. At the time, Van Winkle was working out of the disused Hoffman Distillery in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, where he bottled whiskey for his own brand, Old Rip Van Winkle, as well as for clients like CVI, all of which have long since achieved legend status among collectors.

It is assumed that much of those early Black Maple Hill releases drew from Van Winkle’s barrels that he inherited from Stitzel-Weller, which his grandfather had helped found but which his father had been forced to sell. The rye whiskey he bottled for CVI at 23 years old came from a legendary batch made at the Bernheim distillery, the same whiskey that went into near-mythical bottlings like LeNell’s Red Hook Rye. Both the bourbon and the rye were released in minuscule amounts. Most of the releases were old, over twenty years old, and released in minuscule batches. By many accounts, it was some of the best bourbon whiskey ever sold, ranking with early releases of Old Rip Van Winkle, Olde St. Nick, and others legends.