by KIRSTEN PARK

Making sense of Utah’s alcohol laws is not easy. There’s hard liquor and hard seltzer; there is lite beer and craft beer. There are beers that can be sold cold and beer that must be sold warm. There are beer licenses, beer and wine licenses, full licenses and licenses that get passed around to the highest bidder like Salt Lake real estate. If you’re a corporate hotel chain, you’re gold. The laws are written to encourage you to open more and more structures. If you’re a local café or a new eatery waiting for a liquor license to make your economics work, good luck waiting for the golden ticket.

But nothing quite illustrates Utah’s nonsensical liquor laws, and the Legislature’s lack of faith in the free market than these three words:

Pappy. Van. Winkle.

To those in the know, Pappy Van Winkle, a rare but popular whiskey label, is the ultimate “get.”

Here’s why: spirits take time to make. Compared to a vodka or gin, which can be distilled and bottled in weeks, a bourbon that is aged for 23 years, well, takes 23 years to bring to market. Sometime, before the turn of the century, someone had to make it, bottle it, and hope it turned out tasty enough to sell today. If there ends up being a greater demand than expected (whisky sales have nearly doubled in the last ten years, outpacing every category of spirits) there is no do-over. You can’t go back in time and double your production to meet the current market.

(This is why you see so many less expensive blended whiskeys on the market. Distilleries use their supplies of less exclusive product and mix them together to successfully create the desired flavor. Think of blended whiskeys as the lab-grown diamond version of spirits: still beautiful and valuable, but not as rare as the one that is found naturally in the mine.)

So, if you sell spirits, and find yourself with a bunch of bottles of Pappy (retailing $200-$500 a bottle), you do what any free market supplier worth their Federalist Society membership card does: price it accordingly. Retailers around the country routinely sell their Pappy Van Winkle shipments of 5, 10 and 23-year-old bourbons for $1,000 to $5,000 a bottle or more, because that’s what the market will bear for this rare sip.

Except in Utah.

Have you ever wondered why your Tanqueray Gin is $18 at TotalWine.com or BevMo but you shell out $27 plus tax in our liquors stores? That’s because the Utah State Legislature has decided that booze sold in Utah is marked up 88%. Period. (There are exceptions to this but that’s for another article.) While usually giving us some of the highest prices in the country, in this case, locked in at 88% by a market-muddling Legislature, Utah ends up with the cheapest Pappy Van Winkle in the world.

Those bottles used to get snapped up the second they hit the shipping dock so in 2019, in an attempt to democratize a socialized process, Pappy is now offered at regular retail via a drawing (not lottery, as profiting off your Pappy is not the only thing that’s not allowed in Utah). Every year, thirsty connoisseurs are directed to register for the lotte…I mean, drawing, for a chance to buy one bottle at retail.

To drink, not resell, because that would be illegal.

Pappy is not the only booze in the rare bottle category but is the most famous. I’m crossing my fingers for this month’s drawing of Blanton’s. Because that how we roll in Utah: efforts to control consumption of booze, means we inexplicably have some of the highest, and lowest, prices.

And that sums up nearly every aspect of Utah’s liquor laws: control the drinker, even at the expense of profit.

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