Hey, welcome back to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm Pat from the Whiskey Hotline. Got Brett in the room. Brett from the Whiskey Hotline. Pat and Brett's Excellent Adventure, back again for another episode. We have a very special guest joining us via a Zoom call today. Bill Foley, welcome to Barrel to Bottle. Thanks, guys. It's great to be here. Great to see you. Owner of Foley Family Wines, Spirits, small sports teams like the Las Vegas Golden Knights, and apparently half a dozen soccer teams or something now. I think Brett, I'm sure Brett will get to that later. I mean, I think a lot of people know your history and sort of how you built what you now have on the wine side. And with Charles Goodnight investing in some brands and now investing in a distillery, you're doing the same thing on the spirit side. Bentley Heritage was a very interesting investment because to me on the surface, I'm friends with Johnny Jeffery, so I kind of have some insights and background into the buildup. You know, how it was built, mostly the way it was built, which was a pretty big construction, probably more was done than needed to be done in that facility, but it ended up being state-of-the-art, but it also made it very expensive. What attracted you to that facility? I'm kind of a bottom fisherman a lot of times, and I try and look for value, and sometimes I get in trouble doing that because I buy something that's really distressed, and then I've just got to work so hard to turn it around and make it better. But in this case, the facility was not distressed, but the brand itself was distressed because the Bentleys really irritated a lot of the local patrons. They spent about $130 million on this facility, if you can believe it. Oh, yeah. No, I heard about all that. They wanted it to look good, and Johnny said, so we're looking at diagrams and it's like, here's a fermenter, here's a tank. It's like that pipe should have three bends, one up, one over, one down. It's like, oh, no, we don't want to see the pipe. You need to have 20 bends, and it has to be behind a wall. And all kinds of things like that, that just escalated the cost of building the facility. And so we paid about 25% of what they had spent. They wanted to move on, but we did end up with about 23,000 cases of aged whiskey. It's now six years old. We're just about to launch high ground vodka. So that's going to be kind of our cash machine while we're getting things, while we're aging the whiskey and so on. We'll launch that late March or early April, and we've got it pretty well committed already. It's going to be really good vodka. It's a rye based vodka as opposed to a wheat based. Sure. I got interested in the rye side. I don't know if you know Potaczki vodka from Poland, which is a, which I really like that vodka and it's a rye based vodka. Anyway, we're launching that to really create cash flow on the distillery side while we keep on aging whiskey. We'll launch the whiskey brands this year, six years old, and then we'll keep on aging and keep on laying down more product. Well, hopefully, I mean, it would be interesting to see. You would hope that they would be very good. Johnny's pretty talented and amongst other things, very talented in terms of wood management, has a pretty deep academic background in wood management. And a lot of land came with the facility, correct? No, we didn't buy the ranch. You didn't buy the ranch, okay. No, we didn't. It's about 11 or 1200 acres, I think, and we did not buy that. But we are buying grain from the ranch. So we can be a state with all of our liquid as a state, because it's all from that same area. And they actually passed a law in Nevada that allowed us to have this tasting room and call it a state whiskey, a state vodka, and so on, which is fortunate. I mean, that's kind of a big deal to get through the legislature. It's going to look real good in the suites in Vegas, I'm sure, for the Knights. Well, we have Goodnight in all the suites now. Right. The Goodnight name is interesting and it's something I hadn't really heard about before. And shortly after we met with the Illinois representation and talking about the Charles Goodnight Bourbon, that Ken Burns American Buffalo special aired on PBS. Did you have a chance to see that? I didn't see it. I'd better watch it. So it's Charles Goodnight plays a huge role in that. And they talk about his legacy in, we only have the American bison today essentially because of Charles Goodnight's wife and keeping a private herd there. And all of the breeding stock that then got sent to, I think it was the Bronx Zoo. And there was essentially two herds left in all of America. And one was the Goodnight Ranch and the other was a private herd in Western Montana. And all modern bison stock is some descendant from bisons that were loaned out by the Goodnight family. Yep, Molly Anne Goodnight, my great great aunt. That's amazing. It blew my mind when I heard that. And you see that now with other species where you see it with grains with whiskey. We have a South Carolina distillery that brought back a corn varietal from two single ears that they found in a museum and were able to culture back up. But it's kind of cool how you see the distilling world saving multiple different things then. Sure. Yeah, it's interesting. On the estate side, any thoughts to experimenting with that? We have a farm to table distillery in DeKalb, Illinois called Whiskey Acres. After finding a malt strain that would actually grow vigorously in the upper Midwest, which is there in the Midwest, it isn't so easy to do. They are doing 100% of everything that goes into their whiskey. They're actually growing on site. And one of the things they've done is, as Pat said, resurrect all these heirloom corn strains. Yeah, we should be working on that really. We should be, because I'm really a farmer at heart anyway, with the vineyards and so on. And so I love creating from ground zero. So that's an interesting, very interesting idea. And I think there are a number of, especially that were incredibly important in growing grain in the West. Because as people, as we populated parts of the West and went across part of the agronomy, certain things that were grown on the East Coast and in the Midwest didn't grow well in the West. And you end up with things like triticale, for instance, as a wheat strain and different indigenous rye strains, which are now becoming a bigger part of the rye business, especially in the United States. Yeah, the crab distilling business. Yeah, interesting, interesting. This is really our first real experiment in the spirits with the Minden Mill Distillery. And I just feel like we stumbled on a really good asset that we looked at over the previous 12 months before we bought it and just kept on kind of negotiating, negotiating, hanging around the hoop. And I think the Bentleys just got sick and tired and said, okay, here you go. We moved to Scotland. We're out of here. Yeah. Now, I remember that was the impetus. They decided instead of investing in property in the American West, they were going to buy castles in Scotland. Exactly. So another interesting thing and how much of a role in the distillery as well as everywhere else. So where did you meet Chip Tate? You know, he was introduced to me by Sean Schiffer, who's our president of our company. He's really going to be our innovator, our spirits innovator. He's got such a great background and such a great, great palette. So he is going to be working on developing new spirit products for us, particularly out of, from Texas, because we're kind of intrigued by that. He's a full-time consultant now. And I know he's going to add a lot to a lot of value to us. He brings a great reputation with him. He does. He's also, he's a very passionate man. Have you gotten into an argument with him yet? It's only a matter of time. Yeah, I haven't got an argument. We spent about three hours when I first met him, the first time I met him and he sort of gave me his whole story of what he was doing. And now he had partners and the partners kind of forced him out. Then he got some more partners and he, you know, he didn't, it didn't work out. So I'm just happy he's with us. Yeah, no, he is, Chip's a good friend. Chip's a good friend of ours and I've known him since the Balconies days. And he is definitely a, he's an innovator is a great word for what he does, the way he thinks about things, certainly on the production side. You know, so we're, we're actually, he's involved with us now. He's on, he's on board. So he's already, already, already thinking about product and how we can, how we can improve and get better. And we're going to use, we're going to use his name, of course, to help us, to help us develop our brands. So we've got Nevada, you have a distillery and we've got Texas, which you're exploring, you have Charles Goodnight and exploring. So how about New Zealand? Well, that's another, you know, that's another interesting story because it really started in the wine business. And I went down there and I, I bought a lodge years ago during the great, the great recession, which was in real trouble, zoned by some Americans. And it was kind of a, again, a distressed asset. And it's actually a sheep station on Palliser Bay called Fari Khoho, and which means place of knowledge in Maori. On the gin side, we ran across this guy who owned Lighthouse Gin, and he was making about 2,000 bottles a year, maybe something like that. And we said, well, that's an interesting brand, Lighthouse, you know, that we have the Lighthouse that were off Palliser Bay. And so we bought the brand and we moved it into Martin Burl Winery. Rachel, our distiller, kind of came with the deal. And you can't believe the equipment we had when we started out. It was pathetic. It was really a joke. She was hand labeling everything. So anyway, we started developing it, and she changed the botanicals, the mixture of the botanicals from New Zealand. She was using it to make the gin. It's really a citrus forward gin. Juniper takes a back seat. I really liked the gin. And now she's making vodka too, and she's making a great vodka. I'm kind of a vodka. I like vodka. Now she's making a great vodka. But we were the hit on this gin society in London. And they picked a Lighthouse gin as their special gin that they were importing. And we went from like 2,000 bottles to 15,000 cases. Holy cow. Of Lighthouse gin, primarily going to... She wasn't hand labeling all of those anymore, I would hope. No, we finally got our labor. And now she has a... We built a restaurant and put the distillery in a place called The Run Holder, which is at Ticarangas. We built a brand new restaurant, built a distillery, tasting facility and so on. So she has her own distillery. And, I mean, she's going to do great. It's just really just opened up. So, no, she's got everything else. It's like a Bentley facility almost. It's a good facility. This model is kind of how you built Foley Wine Estates, right? I mean, you're taking... Not necessarily to stress, but it appears that if you find somebody that's worth the risk, you take the risk and allow them, in this case, go from somebody who's making really good product that you respect to being lauded in basically the motherland of gin by a nice appointment from an important society. Is it a plan that's developed or is it kind of as things strike you or as you see an interesting deal or an interesting opportunity? I mean, what is sort of the thought process in terms of expanding into spirits? Well, I mean, I always want quality. I'll sacrifice anything for high quality and to have a facilities that are the best they can be. And we go in and we spend money and we improve the facilities. We've done that with our wineries just starting down from Santa Barbara County all the way up through Sonoma and Napa counties and all the places we've acquired. Ferrari, Corano, we've poured money into that, Chalk Hill, just poured millions into Chalk Hill to improve the facilities. I'm doing the same thing with Spirits. We're going to make sure that we have, that we're high quality, that we have really good people working with us. And I now have a great Chief Marketing Officer finally for the first time in many, many years. And he was with Campari for years and years. So he's really helping our brand innovation and brand development. He's got a guy named Jason Daniels. So he's given us the way to attack the Spirits business or the Spirits industry because he has such great, such good experience. And he's such a thinker, an innovator in terms of the way he thinks about product and labels and tastings and so on. And now with Chip Tate, that's another great asset that we have. So I guess you'd have to say I'm more opportunistic than anything. I kind of just look for opportunities that I think are interesting. They're going to be fun. At this stage of my life, I want to do fun things. I don't want to, I'm just trying to get out of every public company that I'm involved with right now. I'm just trying to move on, you know, and worry about sports, worry about spirits, worry about wine, hotels and hospitality. Have fun. I'm not measuring in years anymore. I'm measuring in days. Have you considered just buying a muscle car and getting this whole late lifestyle out of the way then, entirely? I'm not a big car guy, believe it or not. My cars are usually, the car I have here at Chalk Hill is, what is it, eight years old? It's a Bentley, it's a nice car, but I bought it eight or nine years ago. It's fine, it'll do for another eight or nine years. I believe in fixing things and keeping them as well, that's a good play. On a day to day basis, how much involvement do you have with everything on it? And I'm sure it changes and evolves as you get, especially now that you're at a point where you're really pursuing things based on passion, rather than just hard, cut and dry business opportunities. How much do you get involved at each different step of the way from the discovery to the research behind what's going on to the potential investment and so on? I describe myself as a multi-tasker. I went to Army for undergraduate school. You go there and they take everything away from you and they teach you how to multi-task, to think really a bit outside the box. And so I've become a really good multi-tasker. So I call myself a macro-micro manager. So I do the macro stuff. So I'm involved in every acquisition, I'm structuring it, I'm thinking about it. But then I defer because I have some really great people working with me that I can trust and rely upon. But then if something's not going right, then I'm micro. I really dig in and I fix things because I'm probably like you guys. I want things to be perfect. I want to be just right. And if it's not just right, then I have to jump in. And I do that. And it's frustrating. My wife gets very frustrated at me because I'm worried about these minutiae, frankly. If I don't worry about it, then it may not happen. Well, and it's easy. At what point in time does minutia become something important? How long does it take for a lot of little problems can become a big problem? And the best way to not have big problems is don't allow little problems. That's me. I believe it's a great skill. It's a great asset. But I can be very, very tedious for people that work with me because I'm kind of really on it trying to fix things. And you've summed up my philosophy and my business philosophy and how I approach things. However, if you get too much going on, then it's a little distracting. Yes. Yes. Well, but I think that you instinctively, you know, you've been doing this for a while. I think instinctively, right? You just, you figure it out. I mean, that's part of growing and evolution, is you figure out when you're doing too much, just as much as when you're not doing enough. And right now, I think I'm doing too much. So I've come to Chalk Hill for eight days, and I'm doing this podcast. I have one meeting tomorrow at the wine company. And then I've got a light week. I'm just not doing much. I'm just saying, you know, it's enough. Trying to work out, trying to walk, trying to... I actually went down, I was proud of myself this morning. I actually got up out of bed and went down and did the elliptical and did a bunch of exercises, which is usually too lazy to do that. Right, right. If you're too lazy or just you feel it's nice to not have the panic that there's something else you could be doing. Or just use yourself as a notion that there's something else that you could be doing that's almost more important. And we very much appreciate your time for the ability to do this because that, you know, it's always been fascinating to me knowing the biography and reading it how, you know, you can go into such disparate worlds and use a formula and have that Yeah, I've always felt if you can measure it, you can improve it. And so we try and, we're a metric driven group, you know, we try and measure and try and keep on improving and getting better. Full disclosure, I'm a long time blackhawk season ticket holder. Sure, I bet. Well, of course. Back in 16, when I was getting the Golden Knights Hockey Club, I was getting harassed by a bunch of Canadian, you know, Canadian sports writers. They would say like, well, what are you going to do with the hockey team? You're just going to sell it. You're not going to actually be any good. You're an expansion team. You'll never win anything. And I finally got, we were doing our name announcement in November of 16, I was being interviewed and I said, let me tell you, we're going to make the playoffs in three and we're going to win the Stanley Cup in six years. And they just, and they all were just like, oh. Well, then they read the expansion draft rules and realized, oh, wait a second, these guys might actually be able to do this. They still didn't give us credit really. And I remember watching that draft for exactly, and I kept all the names who were coming off the board. I'm like, you're kidding me. They got him, they got him, they got him. It was actually really impressive work. What we really did on the expansion draft was with George McPhee and Kelly McCrimmon and our scouting staff, we just outsmarted the other teams. Because we went in, for example, like with Fleury, they can only keep one goalie, Pittsburgh. And so they gave up Fleury, but they also gives a second round pick to take him. And that's the kind of thing that was happening in the expansion. And Dale Tallon down in Florida, we caught him on the golf course and he was desperate to get rid of Marshy, Marciusot. Yeah. And we said, well, we'll take him, but he's got an expensive contract, you got to throw in Riley Smith. And he said, well, I don't want to do that, but okay. So we got Marciusot and Riley Smith. And these guys were, they just didn't, they didn't pay attention, honestly. And also knowing Dale Tallon, Dale's frequently in a position where he's got to get rid of money. Yeah. He's got to get rid of money and he's usually on the golf course. Another good one was Minnesota because they were in a jam, they were worried about losing Dumbo. Right. And we said, okay, well, we'll lay off Dumbo and we'll take Hall of it, you got to throw in Alex Tuck. They said, well, he's a really good prospect. He said, well, no, we got to have Tucky. Right. So we ended up with, and some teams were like much brighter. The Red Wings were really pretty smart. They just said, look, you got your choice, just take your pick, go ahead, have at it. Here's who we're protecting. But about half the teams were just not on top of what they needed to be. We ended up with three first-round picks besides the one we got just as part of the expansion draft. We had four or five second-round picks out of the deal, and then we got these extra players. Shea Theodore from Anaheim. Right. They're worried about Montour. We took a contract, I forget the guy's name now, and they threw in Theodore and I think a second-round pick. It was amazing. Was there any brushback or blowback? Because they changed the rules and the ability to navigate that a little bit when the Kraken expanded? No, they didn't change them. It's exactly the same rules. The Kraken just, they had a year plus to prepare, and they didn't really prepare. We started going in the fall of 17. We started doing mock drafts with all the pro scouts, sitting around the big room, going through every team, trying to figure out who they'd protect, who they wouldn't protect. In the first couple of mock drafts, we were completely incompetent. I mean, if we hadn't, but we must have done 12 mock drafts by the time we got to the real draft. And by the time we got to the actual expansion draft, we really knew what was going on. It was amazing. It was just repetition. We just kept on doing it. And so it's interesting because that's one of the, that seems to be the MO for everything you've done. At least, we can glean from biography all the way from Army Procurement to buying a title company and turning it into, with other business ventures, turning it into a multi-billion dollar empire to the wine business, to the Golden Knights. Another thing, as an EPL fan, curious, what was the decision and what led you to making the decision that Bournemouth was going to be a good investment for you? Because I kind of follow in there, you know, the second, now that Luton Town is in the league, the second smallest grounds, and if Luton Town gets demoted, there'll be the smallest grounds in the EPL, kind of, you know, hung in there for a while in the EPL, but have now been bouncing around in relegation. What was the decision and the vision behind the investing in Bournemouth? Well, I've been interested in football for years and years, and I got offered opportunities to be a minority investor in several different teams. And, you know, if I'm not in the front seat, I'm not very good. I'm not a good co-pilot or a good navigator. And so I just had been looking and looking and looking, and I came close to investing in Crystal Palace with Blitzer and Josh Harrison, but I knew I'd be like a 20% owner. And the Bournemouth was owned by a Russian, and he had not been sanctioned, but he was under a lot of pressure to sell the team. And he moved to, he left the UK, moved to Switzerland, which is where he lives today. And he had been trying to sell the team, and they got relegated in, I guess, after the 21 season, I think. And so they got sent down for two years, and then they got promoted that summer that before I bought it, when I started looking at the team again. And it was just a fairly inexpensive, I mean, it's expensive, but it's not, we paid £120 million all in for the team, which is, you know, Premier League team. That's buttons. Yeah. It's nothing, honestly. My expansion draft fee in the NHL was $500 million, and that was for an expansion team. So we were able to buy this team, but when we got there, the last January transfer window, the cupboard was really bare. We just didn't have the players. And so we got aggressive when we went out and we really acquired a number of, you know, upgraded our talent level and stayed up. I knew it would stay up, honestly. Everyone was saying we're going to be relegated, and that was irritating to me. I actually made another prediction. I was being interviewed and they said, well, you're going to be relegated. So what are you going to do then? I said, we won't be relegated. I guarantee it. And boy, that got everyone, all the UK press, I got them all excited. Mr. Foley, you can't say that. Sure, I can. And you were middle of the table. I mean, the year ended up, and I believe the finish was strong last year. Yeah, we ended up in 15th, I think. And right now we're 14th, but we have a game in hand. It typically doesn't work the same way in terms of funding and building stadiums as it does in the United States. Have you had any look towards investing in new grounds for them and try to expand the seating a bit? Absolutely. Right now we're in the middle of finishing our new training facility. We had 42 acres of ground, and we're going to build actually six pitches. We finished the indoor pitch, and now we're building the first team facility, the academy, and the women's team facility. So that should be finished next October. That allows us then to start looking at a new stadium, because right now our training facility is behind Vitality Stadium, and it's where the new stadium would be built. So I've got to get our training facility out of where it is, over into the new facility. We're not going to be that ambitious. It's going to be about 18,500 seats, so it'll be bigger than what we have. But it'll be about 20% hospitality, which is a big difference. As opposed to just 30 pounds a ticket. At least we get good hospitality, good restaurants. And we have the opportunity to maybe build some apartments or condos around the new stadium. And it's a big piece of ground that we're getting from the city. So it's all in the works. It's not cheap, but it's not as expensive as you might think. Sure, that's interesting. And you're right, it'll be a wonderful place for, you know, continue to develop the fan base, which is there already. And that is going to be small and it's going to be loud. It's only 18,000 people, but you can keep the crowd pretty compact there as well. Yeah, we can. And we're bringing some of the Golden Knights fan experience ideas to Bournemouth. And we get some pushback from some of the older guys that are more traditional. But we're trying to really, we want to go younger. We want to get the younger, young adults, young men and women into that stadium. And the way they have their ticketing set up now is once you have season tickets, no one else can get in. So we've got to expand the seating and we want more exposure. We get lots of it on the road. We sell out. Our people travel. And those are generally younger fans that are doing that. And now we're about to be approved by 25% of Iberian FC up in the Scottish Premier League. The Hibs? The Hibs, because I'm Irish Catholic. What city do they play out of? They're Edinburgh. Edinburgh. Yeah, beautiful city. Hearts are up there also. So that's the Protestant team and Hibs are the Catholic. Interest, I also follow the Scottish Premier League a little bit. And kind of just by default because of my friends from Glasgow ended up being a Rangers fan. I mean, they play a tough brand of football. That's why I got attracted to them. We have an A-League expansion franchise in Auckland that we're going to start playing next fall. So if you think about the feeder system, the multi-club model, we develop players in the A-League. They move on to the Scottish Premier League. If they develop there, then maybe they moved to Bournemouth. Maybe they go to Lorient, our League One team in France. And we're working on a League One team, a Belgian League One team, that's really a good team. If we can buy a piece of the club, we pronounce it Bruges, but they pronounce it Brugge. Right. So if we could buy, we're trying to buy 40% of that team. If we can get that team, we've got our multi-club model. That's a big squad too. Talking about a beautiful city. Red Bull, I mean, that's basically the Red Bull model between Salzburg and Leipzig. And they're in Italy too. Doesn't Red Bull have a piece in somebody in Italy or is it another minor country? I think they have a second division team in Italy. I don't know if they have a first division team. Then of course, the true model is Man City. It has 13 teams, you know. And that's why we were really proud of what we did last weekend in terms of how we played them. I mean, honestly, they're one of the one, two or three best teams in the world. I'm a Liverpool supporter, so I was really, that gave me double the incentive to be cheering for you guys to at least draw in that game. I wish we had. Hey Bill, back to the spirits thing, one question. Hypothetically, say we're talking again in six years, how do you feel the spirits portfolio? What does that look like then? Well, we're going to keep on developing brands and product out of the Minda Mill facility. And we have three or four different ideas. I'm obviously a VOD, because the first one, that's going to be really a cash flow idea. But we're prepared to try and grow our, basically our whiskey business into about 75,000 cases. That's our goal over the next five or six years, is to really build it up and have a serious business, as opposed to, you know, Charles Goodnight is, I think, 3,000 cases or something like that. It's not, we are doing another bottle in those, because we sold through our first go-around. Is that something that's going to be, there's adequate stock of the Texas Distillate, that this is going to be a thing going forward though with Charles Goodnight or are you going to run into a supply constraint at some point? No, we're going to be okay and Chip Tate is going to really help us, you know, in terms of what he has access to product and what he and the people he works with. So, we're really not concerned about it. And then, of course, we have our whiskey from Minden Mill that we've got a good baseline. 23,000 cases are now in Barrel and are 6 years old. And then I've got my Sean Schiffer, who's our president of our company. He was back at Wild Turkey meeting on something. And they said, well, do you want to see Foley's bourbon? He said, yeah, what do you mean? He said, well, we have this X number of barrels of bourbon that he bought nine years ago. I had forgotten I owned. Yeah, a common problem for the every man, just forgetting they own several thousand barrels of Wild Turkey. So anyway, anyway, so we got we now we have, I mean, that was our first bottling. So we did about 600 cases for Predictum, which was in Sean knows he can tell you exactly. And I just understand it's a really good. It's a really good. It's a really good Rick House. Well, we're going to we're going to take some of that off your head. Yeah. When is that going to make its way out here? We're with we I just have to give them the final order. And I think we're talking about a month. We'll have it the whiskey in Mendenmilk. What is the composition? Is that mostly malt? Is that right? What's the 36 percent? 60 percent corn. So they're all basically high rib urban, essentially. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Would you ever consider I mean, I'm sure you would. Would you ever consider for for Goodnight buying a home distillery in Texas? Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the history of Charles Goodnight and his partner in the in the JA the John Adair Ranch, the largest ranch in the Panhandle, basically covered the entire Palo Duro Canyon. Charles Goodnight was one of the first captains in the Texas Rangers, and my great granddad was basically the second captain in the Texas Rangers. And so they were they were rangers together, you know, fighting command chiefs and tracking him. And they settled in the Palo Duro Canyon, the entire Palo Duro Canyon. And that became the John Adair, JA. Ranch. And then my granddad, my great granddad broke off and formed the T. Anchor Ranch, also in the in the Palo Duro. And so they were, if you think about it, these were tough guys. You know, they were rangers, they were cattlemen. Charles Goodnight made and lost three fortunes in his time. You know, he was a real cattleman, created the Chuck Wagon named after Charles Chuck. Yep, he was the first guy to lay down barbed wire as fencing to keep the cattle in and keep the turr rustlers. You know, they down at the home ranch, if someone stole a horse, goodbye. They hung him. It was the law of the West. I don't know if you knew this, but the Lonesome Dub actually is Charles Goodnight. He was Tommy Lee Jones. And Robert Duvall was a compilation of Oliver Loving and Lee Dyer, my great grandfather. Wow. And the stories are all true. My grandmother, she told me all the stories. And I remember I first read Lonesome Dub, I said, well, damn it, this guy stole my family story. And he did. And McMurtry did. That's our family story, including the story of Lonesome Dub of Jake Spoon. And he crossed the line. And my great granddad, they caught him. They were just terrorizing people. And they were going to hang him. And he looked down at my granddad and said, well, Lee, can I get out of this one? And my great granddad said, nope, you crossed the line. He took his hat, hit his horse, and hung him. They could be magnanimous, too, though. There's a story in the Buffalo thing about how Quanah Parker had left a reservation with a band of Comanche hunters and got to the Paladero Canyon there. And Charles Goodnight told him, he said, listen, the Buffalo are gone here. But in a show of good, you know, just being a good neighbor, he said, I'll let you hunt the land, though, for a couple of weeks. And every three days, if you don't have a Buffalo, you're welcome to take one of my cattle to feed your men during this hunting party. And it's pretty impressive, you know, to go from a guy who was fighting, you know, natives to then, you know, allowing them free reign over his land for, you know, their own good. Exactly. And actually, on the Goodnight Ranch in Goodnight, Texas, he started hosting Quanah Parker. They became friends as they got in later in later years. That was the other interesting story, but it's also true in Loaves and Dove that Cynthia Ann Parker was stolen as a young girl, you know, just a few years old. And she married a Comanche and ended up marrying a Comanche chief. And Quanah Parker was the offspring. So, yeah, yeah, those are all true. Those are all true stories. And Lee Dyer and Charles Goodnight are the one that they saved Cynthia Ann Parker. She didn't want to be saved. She didn't want any part of she like she like being a Comanche. She'd become a Comanche. She didn't she she didn't feel like she was a white woman. And she was miserable when she got saved and brought back to our civilization. Interesting, interesting stories. You know, I'm pretty proud of my my Texas heritage. It's it's it's interesting. It's very cool. Speaking of something to be proud of, we just poured a bit of this Charles Goodnight Bourbon here. This is really fantastic. And I tend to think of personally Texas, a lot of Texas whiskeys is a bit one dimensional and then being just very over extracted with wood. It's it's hard. It's hard to age whisky gracefully in that climate. But this is really soft and vanilla forward. A lot of the early releases that came out, Balcony's notwithstanding, a lot of the early releases from Texas that hit Illinois were in smaller barrels and were purposely exposed to a tremendous amount of heat, which means that they were just all, you know, Texas bourbon, at least early on, were wood bombs, absolute wood bombs. And this actually still has some. This has this has wonderful balance and it's really drinkable at 115 proof. That's a it's pretty heavy, isn't it? This will sneak up on you. Well, that's always that's willing to say Charles Goodnight. You know, he wouldn't he wouldn't drink 80 proof, 80 proof bourbon in no way. I like the detail of the barbed wire on the bottom there, too. Barbed wire invented right here in DeKalb, Illinois, Brett. Was it? Yeah. The Glidden family in DeKalb, Illinois invented barbed wire. Wow. Made a fortune out there. And they have if you go to this day, if you go to out to that area and it's where Northern Illinois University is and there's all this stuff named after the Glidden's buildings and streets and parks and things like that. I didn't I didn't know that. Interesting. Interesting. See, so there's an even deeper, an even deeper connection between Charles Goodnight and the other northern because it was all open range, you know, originally. And so even when he started fencing off his land, they had a gigantic ranch. The J Ranch was a couple million acres. But people say that people say, well, how do you get all that land? Well, actually, he didn't own the land. What they did was they bought all those sections that had water and then they just ended up having everything else because they had the water. And so no one could no one could compete with them. Smart. This is good bourbon. I'm this is really impressive. Great. Thank you. I appreciate the comment. Curious to see what what what happens going forward here. I mean, Brett mentioned earlier, chips kind of an outside the box thinker with a lot of whiskey. A lot of new distillers have come online in the past 10 years, and they've taken a very formulaic approach where we're going to have this one type of still and we're going to do we're going to make bourbon in one particular way because that's how it was made forever. And not enough people are thinking about. There's just a lot of strictures to looking at it that way. Sure, you can make a great product, but there's such a wide variety of flavor that you can explore when you're working with different grains and different processes. And I think it's cool that you have an asset in chip like that who's really going to, you know, can do has proven that he can do some interesting and innovative things on the whiskey side. I think it's going to be great. And we're at the front end, you know, we're just starting. Yeah, we're just we're just getting started. Well, Bill, very much appreciate your time this afternoon, especially on a vacation week, which is nice if we'd like to talk to you in person if you ever come to Chicago. Yeah, I'd be happy to do it. That'd be fun. That'd be great. Yeah, maybe for maybe for a big launch of Predictum. Yeah, maybe big launch of Predictum or maybe a Blackhawks game and the Golden Knights play Blackhawks. You probably have access to better tickets than me. I do have season tickets in the 300 level. We were there yesterday for the Chelyos retirement, which was a beautiful ceremony. It was very cool. Was it? All the stars came out. Gretzky was there. Messier was there. Half of the 94 Rangers were there. It was crazy. Well, that's terrific. That's terrific. The Golden Knights are struggling a little bit right now. You know, some of our key guys are out and they're gonna be out, unfortunately. And that's a tough division, too. I mean, that's a tough division. I know it. We did it last year. We thought we could do it again this year. But then Eichel hurt his knee. So he should be back for Boston. That's in a couple of games. But now Stoney's out, which is really bad. Because he's probably the smartest guy on our team in terms of hockey sense. He's not the greatest skater, but his hockey sense is unbelievable and his leadership skills. Yeah, he's a heart and soul guy. He's a heart and soul guy. He's just such a good guy. I spend a lot of time with the guys. I try and have lunch with them every day and go down and hang out with them a little bit. Not being trucey, but I've gotten to know them all. I know them all really well. It kills me when we trade somebody. It's really depressing. Yeah, I'm sure that's never easy. Yeah, that's got to be tough. How hard is it to get news of that and let your GM be your GM, right? It's like, no, you can't do that. Yeah, I kind of get involved. But frankly, I saved Fleury for two years. They were trying to trade him. I wouldn't let them trade him. And finally, we let Fleury go. I think that that approach is an owner because I think the Blackhawks have had some success in that way through the last Stanley Cup run and the way Rocky Wurtz and the Wurtz family interacted with the team. You're in a very, very hard cap league. No fudging, no luxury tax. If you go over, you forfeit every game until you get under the cap, right? That's exactly right. You sit people. You can't play them. So what's the soft compensation, right? And that's part of that thinking is what's in the NHL, that sort of soft compensation is incredibly important to keep a team together. Yeah, you just can't have bad contracts. You look at what Minnesota's done and they buy out these guys and they're just stuck. They're just really behind the power curve. And we spend to the cap every year. We're aggressive. And we'll keep on spending to the cap. If you want to win, you have to. But you do, but you also make the investments in everything else that makes it an attractive place. I mean, that's one thing. They think the Wurtzes were very good, and they spent certainly spent to the cap, but they did a good job with players of, you know, providing daycare for kids. Absolutely. And one of the things Rocky did during the, especially during the cup run was wherever they were in Thanksgiving, he would buy out that hotel's restaurant for Thanksgiving or at least a big room, and he would have either parents or spouses and Yeah, that's right. He's a great guy. He really, I didn't know he was sick. He was pretty quick. He didn't, he was pretty, it was pretty quick. It was a shock to everybody because it was... Yeah, I was shocked. He was a good supporter of mine in terms of the, on the NHL side. He was always very supportive. I enjoyed being around him. He was easy, a really good guy. Well, Danny's doing a good job stepping into the role, so. He is. I agree. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, Bill, thanks again for joining us today. Really appreciate your time. I know you got a busy schedule, and we're interrupting some vacation time at a vineyard, I'm sure. Really great talking to you and the insight into all the sports world. And I mean, this could go on for hours, obviously. And so hopefully we'll catch you in person sometime in Chicago. I look forward to it. It'd be great to see you guys, meet you guys in person. I enjoyed our time together. Thank you. Listeners, check out this Charles Goodnight Bourbon 115 proof Smooth as Silk. This stuff is really great. And we should hopefully have some of that Predictum on the shelves soon. Predictum and Lighthouse Gin both on the way very quickly. Alright, cool. Listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next week with something else. Till then, I'm Pat. I'm Brett. Bill's signing off and going to head down and get some lunch. Keep tasting.