Meet American Whiskey Pioneer Lance Winters
Things were not going well for Lance Winters.
It was in the early 2000s, and the distiller at St. George Spirits in Alameda, California, was traveling the country offering up free samples of his single malt whiskey at festivals and trade shows—or at least he was trying to.
“People would walk up to the table and ask what it was and how old it was,” he recalls. “And I’d tell them. Then they’d walk away from the table without even tasting it. At an event like that you can taste absolutely everything—it costs you nothing extra. And nobody wanted it. I got really depressed about that.”