Whiskey regrets: Who’s talking and who’s not in the new Netflix series on ‘Pappygate’
Even after making “Heist,” the new Netflix documentary series that includes the infamous Kentucky theft of hundreds of bottles of Pappy Van Winkle, there is one burning question the filmmakers can’t answer: What does it taste like?
“I don’t think anyone on our production has actually tasted it,” said Nick Frew, “Heist” executive producer. “We quite enjoy Buffalo Trace and Eagle Rare but no one has actually had a bottle of Pappy.”
That rarity is what drew his company, Dirty Robber Productions, to the Kentucky story, which debuts on Netflix July 14. All six episodes will be available immediately; the first two stories involve an armored car robbery in Las Vegas and an airport heist in Miami.
“From the beginning, it was always a true-life crime drama with some wish fulfillment,” Frew said. They wanted to tell the stories of ordinary people who discovered that they were willing to step over the line, to do something extremely dangerous.
“One of the things that we really liked about whiskey is that it doesn’t fit into the traditional story, but it has a heist at its heart,” Frew said.
And it was set in the fascinating world of bourbon.
“Pappy has a special place in the imagination and that created the media furor around ‘Pappygate,’” he said. “It’s the mystique. ... It’s a very murky world. Sort of a permissive culture, where there are looser rules. It’s all degrees. Even the way they decide what is or isn’t Pappy Van Winkle is mercurial.”
Buffalo Trace Distillery, which makes the bourbon, declined to talk with the producers. All of the recreation of the crime was done on sets in Los Angeles, Frew said.
It’s in the distillery’s best interests, he said, to remain opaque about many aspects of the 2013 case, in which more than 65 cases of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon and rye whiskey worth more than $26,000 were reported stolen from the Frankfort distillery.
Eventually, an anonymous tip led Franklin County Sheriff Pat Melton to the home Toby Curtsinger, where five full barrels of bourbon, intended to become Wild Turkey 101 and Russell’s Reserve, were found. At least 18 barrels from Wild Turkey and Buffalo Trace and 25 bottles of Pappy were recovered.
Curtsinger and nine others were indicted in 2015. The purported ringleader, Curtsinger was sentenced to 15 years in prison but was released in 2018 after 30 days under Kentucky’s “shock probation” program.
“There are a lot of voices that don’t get heard. We approached everyone. Some people want to put these experiences behind them ... but some have a real desire to have their point of view come across,” he said.
Both Melton, who is no longer with the Franklin County Sheriff’s office, and Curtsinger appear in “The Bourbon King” episodes of “Heist,” and Frew said there is no love lost between them.
“If you watch the show, it’s quite balanced. We don’t let people off for doing bad things but we try to understand the motivations behind them,” he said.
Does the streaming show get to the bottom of the crime?
“I think Toby (Curtsinger) was incredibly forthcoming. Sometimes the interview becomes a sort of confessional booth,” Frew said. “I think the time he spent in that chair was deeply unguarded. He would very often offer up ‘I know what I did was wrong.’ The level of remorse was so palpable in everything he gave us. He made an enormous mistake and betrayed his family.”
This story was originally published July 9, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
