Maker’s Mark VIP Gold Decanter Bottle / Gold Wax
The VIP series bottles are modeled after an 1870s glass bottle in the Maker’s Mark distillery museum and sealed with a beautiful gold wax.
Maker’s Mark VIP
Taylor William “Bill” Samuels Snr started out in the whiskey industry at his family’s T.W. Samuels distillery in the 1930s. When his father passed in 1936, Bill started running the business until 1942 when he sold it and its brands to Country Distillers. Bill has initially intended to retire to his farm, but the allure of creating a new bourbon proved too much, so he saught help in producing the recipe for the smoothest tasting whiskey that he has tried for and failed to get the family to distill over a decade before.
Among those who he reached out to were Hap Motlow of Jack Daniel’s, Ed Shapira of Heaven Hill, and the legendary Julian ‘Pappy’ Van Winkle I. Pappy’s wheated Old Weller and Old Fitzgerald bourbon were exactly the profile that Samuels was after, and with Van Winkle’s help, he debuted finessed his own wheat mashbill, and bought land in Loretto, Kentucky in 1953. He filled his first barrels the following year, and in the years that preceded his first releases, Bill’s wife Margie created the Maker’s Mark brand based on her collections of fine English pewter stamps. The first bottle of Maker’s Mark was bottled on 8th May 1958, and was hand-dipped with red wax, as they still are to this day.