Very Olde St Nick 1973 25 Year Old Barrel Proof Bourbon / KBD

Very Olde St Nick 1973 25 Year Old Barrel Strength Bourbon / KBD 
This vintage-dated 25 year old barrel strength bourbon was bottled by KBD and exported to Japan before it was re-imported to the USA.
The Very Olde St Nick brand is owned by InterBev, a subsidiary of Allied Lomar in California, who’s other products include Rare Perfection and Wattie Boone. Its president, Marci Palatella has been sourcing barrels and bottling them for several decades. She was Julian Van Winkle III’s agent in the Japanese market in the 1980 and 1990s, and devised the Very Olde St Nick brand to capitalise on the Japanese demand for well-aged bourbon, which fortuitously was not popular in the US. Her first bottles were produced for her by Van Winkle at his Old Commonwealth bottling facility in the late 1980s, and production was moved to Evan Kulsveen’s Kentucky Bourbon Distillers who bottled Olde St. Nick from the 1990s to early 2000s at Willett.
According to Marci Palatella, this was old stock purchased from the Stitzel Weller distillery of Pappy van Winkle fame. Patlatella wrote, “At that time, Diageo didn’t want the old Van Winkle produced bourbon whiskey stocks they inherited when they acquired the historic Stitzel Distillery more than 2 decades ago, and they were looking for a buyer… Our family worked out a deal and Diageo sold us nice amounts of some very old bourbons, which over the years was used in Olde St Nick. We got lucky back when no one else wanted bourbons and rye. Contacts and dumb luck. What you see out there are many of the same items that were produced at the old Stitzel plant…”