John Wayne’s son Ethan remembers packing up the family car as a kid, getting it stuffed full of anything they’d want during months-long film shoots in Mexico. Among the necessities his father would take with them was his favorite brand of bourbon.
“All the people who worked behind the scenes, the crew, they were his friends, and at the end of the day, they would come together and have a glass of bourbon. Maybe grill some steaks,” Ethan Wayne says. “That was when his life really happened. Because when you’re working, you’re working, but then you sit down, you share a drink with friends, you have some laughs and you talk about the day.”
When he took over the family business from his older brother, Ethan, now 53, stumbled across a crate of all those old bourbons he used to carry to the car, along with extensive tasting notes that suggested John Wayne had wanted to create his own bourbon someday. That’s when he got the idea to recreate the bourbon his father had always wanted to make.
Echoes of John Wayne’s beloved whiskeys exist now in the Duke Kentucky Straight Bourbon, the whiskey that Ethan and the Monument Valley Distillers have produced in honor of his father’s memory.
“This product takes me back to when I was 8 years old,” Ethan says. “It connects me to the recipe he left behind, the wish he had. When I think about how he lived his life, sitting around after work with his buddies sharing a laugh and having a glass of bourbon, it really was an appropriate product.”
True Grit
2 oz. Duke Kentucky Straight Bourbon
1 oz. Amaro Nonino
2 dashes of Bitter Truth JT Decanter Bitters (or Angostura)
Twist of orange
Combine all ingredients, except for the orange, into a mixing glass and shake. Pour into an old-fashioned glass. Garnish with a twist of orange.
— Duke Spirits
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