The Bottle That Started It All

Believe it or not, my bourbon collection started with one bottle of Mellow Corn.

I got into bourbon around 2020 while living in California. I was drinking the usual stuff—Woodford Reserve, Bulleit and whatever else I could actually find during COVID.

Then I got the opportunity to move to Dallas for work.

I treated the move as a fresh start. I got rid of a lot of furniture and possessions and didn’t bring much with me. The moving company couldn’t transport alcohol either, so when I left California, I brought one bottle.

Mellow Corn.

There wasn’t anything rare or expensive about it. I kept it because a friend and I had opened it together at my house in California, and for whatever reason, that was the bottle I wanted to bring with me.

I still have it today.

More than five years later, my collection has grown to over 600 bottles, many of them opened. When someone sees the collection for the first time, I always point to that half-full bottle of Mellow Corn and tell them:

“That’s the bottle that started all of this.”

Usually they don’t believe me.

Every once in a while somebody even wants to try it, so we’ll pour a little.

That bottle will probably never be the most valuable bottle I own, but it might always be one of the most important.

It reminds me where this started-a move to Texas, a fresh start, and one bottle of bourbon I decided to bring along for the ride