Preservation Distillery LLC

Preservation Distillery is the small, hand-bottled bourbon operation in Bardstown founded by Marci Palatella, a longtime spirits-industry executive who spent decades importing and distributing Japanese whiskey before deciding to build her own Kentucky bourbon house. Opened in 2017 on a 35-acre property at 426 Sutherland Road in Bardstown, Preservation occupies a converted 19th-century horse barn and runs at deliberately small scale — every bottle of Preservation bourbon is hand-bottled, hand-corked, and hand-labeled on-site, with no automated bottling line and no production targets that would force scaling beyond what the team can personally oversee.

The brand portfolio is built around heritage labels Palatella acquired or developed: Very Olde St. Nick (a Japanese-market favorite that originated as an import-only brand and now ships to U.S. shelves through Preservation), Bardstown Estate (the Preservation core brand, available in small-batch and single-barrel formats), and the Preservation Distillery flagship line. Production at the on-site stillhouse uses both column-still distillation and a small pot still for specialty runs, with mash bills that cover standard bourbon, wheated bourbon, and rye.

The visitor experience is one of the most intimate in Kentucky — by appointment only, often led by Palatella herself, with tours that move through the hand-bottling room, the on-site rickhouse, and a tasting library that includes both Preservation-distilled releases and sourced heritage bottles from her import-era inventory. The Sutherland Road property is rural even by Bardstown standards, set back from the main bourbon-trail traffic on a horse farm with full rolling-grassland atmosphere.

The Preservation product range has earned significant secondary-market attention — particularly the Very Olde St. Nick bottlings, which trade well above MSRP among Japanese-whiskey collectors who remember the brand's pre-Preservation history and US bourbon collectors who chase the small-batch hand-bottled releases. The brand's stated mission — preserving traditional small-scale bourbon production methods in an era when most Kentucky distilleries are scaling toward industrial throughput — is the editorial frame that runs through everything Preservation publishes about itself, and the production reality on the ground matches the message. For visitors who want to see what Kentucky bourbon looked like before column stills and 6-million-proof-gallon capacities dominated, Preservation is one of the most direct answers in the state.