Preservation Distillery

While operating a successful business selling bulk wine to Asia in the 1980s, L.A. native Marci Palatella became aware of Japan’s thirst for Kentucky bourbon. With an eagle eye fixed on the whiskey opportunities abroad, Marci developed relationships with some of the most prominent distillers in the bourbon community to procure the whiskey that sat dormant in Kentucky’s rickhouses while Louisville was experiencing a thirty-year low in sales. She began with distillate from none other than the now-cult-status producer Stitzel-Weller and utilizing evocative labels from some of bourbon’s bygone brands, Marci forged a successful lifeline from Kentucky’s historic distilling houses to the export market, securing her place as one of the most respected frontierswomen of the modern whiskey boom.

Leveraging the success of her independent bottling venture, Marci acquired a forty-acre farm in Bardstown, Kentucky, where she could not only continue to age and blend the vintage stocks garnered from her close partnerships with bourbon’s most iconic producers, but also build a distillery focused on crafting whiskey in the historical styles she had come to seek out. Preservation Distillery opened in 2015, becoming the first producer in Nelson County to distill only pot still whiskey.

Preservation uses locally grown corn, wheat, and rye and ferments utilizing a combination of yeasts—both proprietary, propagated strains and ambient yeast found on its dynamic farm estate (which raises Longhorn cattle). The stainless steel fermenter lids are left open for the first twelve to twenty-four hours to take advantage of the farm’s fresh air, and fermentation lasts for three or five days before the wash makes its way to the distillery’s custom copper pot stills. Preservation employs a handful of cooperages and proprietary chars and toasts for its aging regimen—which takes place in one of the oldest standing structures in Bardstown—and proofs with water from an on-site, limestone-fed aquifer. Blends are done in meticulous micro-batches of one to three barrels to best achieve the desired character.

Preservation Distillery continues to independently age, blend, and bottle distillate from both known and undisclosed distilleries, and such releases are nothing less than coveted. Equally exciting, however, is the ongoing calibration of Preservation’s own production facility, where Marci Palatella and her team continue to expand her vision for American whiskey.