John Crow owns a liquor store -- 107 Liquor on Kiehl Avenue in Sherwood -- which puts him in a perfect position to donate drinkables to the nonprofits he supports.
Crow, a resident of North Little Rock's Argenta District, is a member and past chairman of the Argenta Downtown Council. And he's a member of the Arkansas Arts Center's Contemporaries, an affiliate-membership group of mostly young professionals who are enthusiastic about art and about supporting it.
The group's members constitute a "wide swath" of area art fans, says Spencer Jansen, the Arts Center's manager of member experience, "business owners, moms, doctors, all unified by a love of art."
"Art is for everyone," Crow adds.
He's giving something extraordinary for the Contemporaries' fifth annual Fountain Fest, Oct. 19 at the Carrie Remmel Dickinson Fountain in front of the main Commerce Street entrance to the Arts Center in Little Rock's MacArthur Park.
It's a bottle of 23-year-reserve Pappy van Winkle Family Reserve, which Crow describes as "the oldest expression of the most sought-after bourbon in the world." They'll raffle it off, along with a Louis Vuitton purse worth more than $1,000, that evening. Raffle tickets are $10.
The bottle cost to a liquor store is about $250, but assuming you could find a bottle in a store, neither Crow nor Jansen would put a retail price on it.
"I'd never put it on the shelf," Crow says. "I'd only use it to donate it to the Arts Center."
"Whatever someone's willing to pay," says Jansen, a former bartender, noting he has seen bottles go for more than $3,000 online.
What makes it so rare and expensive? Like all bourbons, it's at least 51 percent corn and aged in new, charred, white-oak barrels. The distillers at the Sazerac Co.'s Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort, Ky., age it for 10, 12, 15, 20 or 23 years, longer than most bourbons, and bottle it at a high percentage of alcohol. (The 23-year-old bourbon is 95.6 proof.)
"It's very unusual and very hard to get it to that age," Crow explains. "You've heard of the angels' share?" (That's the amount of a distilled liquid lost to evaporation while it's being aged in porous oak barrels or transferred from one barrel to another.) "Well, after 23 years, the angels have gotten a lot."
Crow and Jansen are hoping to raise $6,000-$8,000 from this year's raffle. A 20-year-reserve bottle of the bourbon Crow donated helped bring in more than $4,500 last year.
He says his family owns two stores -- he took over 107 Liquor in 2005, while his father and brother run Sherwood Beverage. So, he says, he has been in the liquor business since he was at least 4 years old. "Some of my earliest memories are of cleaning shelves and breaking down boxes," he adds.
He joined the Contemporaries in 2007, and "events are kind of my specialty," he says. Starting in high school, he was always the guy who gathered people, set up parties and directed folks where to go.
He's also working on two events for the Argenta Downtown Council -- an Oct. 23 hog roast ("They're going to be roasting 12 whole hogs," Crow says proudly) and an Oct. 28 craft beer festival, both on the lot at North Little Rock's Sixth and Main streets.
Crow says he handles innumerable requests from nonprofits, and usually he'll make first-time, one-time donations, then supply alcoholic beverages for events at his cost. He notes he is, in a way, taking up some of the slack from distributors he says have been pulling back from the levels of donations they've made in years past.
The focal point of this year's Fountain Fest will be a "surprise installation" in the fountain. Jansen was willing to reveal that the winner of this year's design competition is the architecture firm of Polk Stanley Wilcox, that the competition winner receives a $1,500 cash prize from the Dickinson family, that it would be in the fountain temporarily (two months max) and that "it's something we've never seen before."
Previous installations have included wrapping the fountain in yarn, a cluster of Mylar balloons that created a sort of giant cloud over the fountain, a 15-foot "diamond," and last year, Ed Pennebaker's large glass-and-metal installation.
The festival is the Contemporaries' largest fundraiser, with money going toward new works for the Arts Center Foundation Collection and Arts Center programming.
The event, which begins at 5:30 p.m., will feature heavy hors d'oeuvres by the Arts Center's Canvas restaurant, craft beer from Lost Forty and Stone's Throw Brewing and cocktails by Roxor Gin.
Guitar-vocal duo Luke Johnson and Brian Nahlen will perform. Instructors and students at the Arts Center Museum School will assist with a variety of art-making activities, and company members of the Arts Center Children's Theatre will staff a shadow-puppet photo booth.
Tickets are $25. Call (501) 396-0337 or visit arkansasartscenter.org/tickets. Raffle tickets are available at arkansasartscenter.org/fountain-fest.
High Profile on 10/01/2017