Heaven Hill Is Dropping a New Old Fitzgerald VVS Bourbon
Heaven Hill’s Old Fitzgerald Bottled-in-Bond Decanter Series is one of its most coveted releases, an age-stated wheated bourbon that comes out every fall and spring. But the distillery occasionally also releases Old Fitzgerald VVS, a much more limited—and much more special, according to master distiller Conor O’Driscoll—version of this already collectible whiskey. We talked to O’Driscoll about the new VVS earlier this week and got to taste it ahead of its release this weekend.
VVS stands for “very, very special,” because according to the distillery that’s makes it stand out from the Old Fitz that goes into the Decanter Series, and makes it worth an additional release. “We’re very picky about what’s good enough to be an Old Fitz Bonded,” O’Driscoll told Robb Report. “We taste them years in advance. Occasionally, we’ll come across one that’s like . . . wow. We let the whiskey tell us when it’s ready. If we’ve got two whispering in our ear, ‘Hey, it’s about time I was put in the bottle and sold,’ that’s when we bring out a VVS.”
The mashbill is the same for both regular Old Fitz and VVS—68 percent corn, 20 percent wheat, 12 percent malt barley—and the whiskey meets all the requirements of the Bottled-in-Bond Act (exactly 100 proof, the product of one distillery and one distillation season, at least 4 years old). The latest VVS is the fourth in the series, and it is also the youngest at 11 years old (distilled in March and April of 2014 and bottled in May of 2025). The age statements for Old Fitz have been as low as eight years and as high as 19, but O’Driscoll says it’s more about the quality of the whiskey than how old the liquid is. He describes how every barrel goes through sort of a bell curve of maturation—from not being ready to reaching peak form to the quality decreasing as it starts to get over-oaked. “That peak might be two years wide, it might be four years wide, it might be six months wide for any individual barrel,” he says, adding that tasting the barrels as they age is key. “Rather than be constrained by a calendar and miss that peak, we want to get the whiskey out there right at that peak.”
We got to try the new VVS and it’s another very good Old Fitzgerald expression (although opinions are sure to vary), with notes of toasted nuts, popcorn, vanilla ice cream with caramel drizzle, honey, cinnamon, oak, and a sprinkle of soft baking spices, followed by a gentle warmth on the finish. The SRP for this bottle is $170, and maybe you can actually find it at that price at the Heaven Hill Bourbon Experience in Bardstown, Kentucky. But a quick Google search shows past releases selling for close to $2,000, so good luck with that if you’re not in the neighborhood.
If you’re looking for another version of Old Fitzgerald that is much more readily available, there’s always the new 7-Year-Old Bottled-in-Bond which launched in early June (SRP $60). O’Driscoll says this was intentionally created for people who don’t have the time or the money to chase unicorn whiskeys to see what Old FItzgerald bourbon tastes like—and you can actually find it being sold without a huge markup.
