Climb mountains, drink whiskey, live in a van.
It doesn’t sound like much of a game plan, but for Pinedale’s Nate Woodruff, it’s turned out to be a pretty good one.
Woodruff is launching Wilder Heart, his own brand of whiskey with a national footprint.
He owes it all to first losing his way.
Woodruff wanted a career in film. When that didn’t work out, he found himself tending bar with no idea where his life was headed.
When he turned 23, his boss handed him a bottle of Maker’s Mark to celebrate.
Woodruff balked.
He’d had a bad experience with whiskey as an underage teenager and vowed never to drink it again.
Ever.
“This is bourbon,” Woodruff recalls his boss saying confidently. “You’re going to drink a glass of this on the rocks. One glass a night. And within a week, you’re going to love it.”
The prediction turned out to be right.
“Within five days, I was fascinated by it,” he said. “I immediately became enamored with the spirit. And I felt more, if I’m being honest, more manly drinking a glass of whiskey on the rocks than a shot of Jägermeister. So I just went down the rabbit hole.”
He wanted to know everything about what made whiskey taste the way it did. The grains, the different styles, the distilling process — all of it.
“I took that passion that I had bottled up for years with film and just completely transformed it into a new thing to be passionate about, which was whiskey,” he said. “And then, ironically enough, that combined with my eye for film and photography. So at the end of the day, the two passions actually came together.”
Whiskey With A View
The route from a birthday bottle of whiskey to his own national brand wasn’t a straight-arrow path.
He started an Instagram page where he reviewed different whiskeys. It was doing all right, but it wasn’t anything viral. Nor did Woodruff ever expect it to be.
After a breakup, he started thinking about the things he loved.
Hiking was one. Whiskey was another.
That prompted him to take a hike with whiskey in his pack.
This time, for the Instagram post, he wasn’t photographing a bottle of whiskey on a porch rail. Instead, he placed it on a rock in the middle of a New Jersey river and took a nice photo of it.
The post drew four times the response his reviews usually brought.
“That was the beginning of it,” he said. “I just kind of figured, ‘Oh, I’m onto something.’ So I started hiking with a bottle of whiskey, and that’s how I’d review it.”
That approach has taken him all over the world.
“I’ve hiked up in Taiwan, I’ve hiked up in Scotland,” he said. “I’ve been to Germany and France. It’s been quite the adventure.”
A Place To Stay
In 2020, Woodruff took to living out of a van by choice, backpacking and exploring the Mountain West while looking for somewhere to settle.
“I was kind of enamored with Montana, Idaho and Wyoming,” he said. “Those were like my three states that I knew I wanted to settle down somewhere.”
He rented a barn on 110 acres in Pinedale and never left Wyoming.
“I live closer to town now,” he said. “But I helped open up the Stockman’s Bar here when that opened in 2021, so that’s how I met everybody in town.”
He and his girlfriend at the time split up not long after he moved to Pinedale.
She went back home. Woodruff stayed.
“I’m never leaving here,” he said. “I love this place. The people are down-to-earth. They might be a little rough around the edges, but I am, too. So that’s what I love. You don’t get a lot of fake people here.”
A 10-Minute Decision
Eventually, his whiskey photographs caught the attention of VCL North America, which called him up out of the blue with a question.
Did he want to start his own brand?
Woodruff asked for 48 hours to think about it.
Then he took his dogs for a walk. Within 10 minutes, he realized the question wasn’t whether he wanted to do it, it was how.
“So I called them right back and I said, ‘Yeah, man, let’s figure this out.’”
It’s been four years since that phone call, years full of designing the right bottle, crafting the right launch strategy, and then blending the right American whiskey.
Woodruff’s company isn’t distilling its own whiskey. It’s sourcing whiskey from other distilleries and blending it, bringing together bourbon, rye whiskey and wheated bourbon.
Woodruff chose to make an American whiskey blend because it has room to experiment.
“There’s been a stigma attached to it,” he said.
But Woodruff sees that reputation as an opportunity rather than a reason to stay away.
“You can blend together any whiskey you want, as long as it’s from America,” he said. “You can create completely different and unique taste profiles, which is a thing that I haven’t really seen championed yet. So that’s kind of the target we have now is to take a category that hasn’t really been explored and just blow it wide open.”
A Beautiful Moment
Tasting the whiskey after four years of work was one of the most nerve-wracking moments of Woodruff’s life.
He flew to Tennessee, where the bottles were laid out in a boardroom and his team waited for his reaction.
“Everybody at the table is kind of looking at me as I taste it,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Oh man, this is good. This is what I was looking for.’”
But an even more nerve-wracking taste test was waiting at his parents’ home outside of Nashville.
“My dad walked in and he was white as a sheet,” Woodruff recalled. “His hands were even shaking a little bit as he poured a glass because he was so nervous he wasn’t going to like the product that I’d been working so hard to put together.”
The look of relief on his dad’s face after the first sip told Woodruff everything he needed to know.
“I will never forget that,” he said. “It was a beautiful moment.”
A Campfire In A Glass
What Woodruff was looking for wasn’t just a whiskey he liked.
He wanted something that reminded him of sitting around a campfire with friends.
For his core release, that meant peaches, vanilla and a little apple peel, followed by a finish that brought him right back to a warm and cozy fire.
“The finish just reminds me of a toasted marshmallow,” he said.
That will retail for $45 as the brand’s core product.
“We wanted something that isn’t super heavy,” he said. “Something easy to drink.”
But it also needed enough body to stand up to the other ingredients in a mixed drink. That meant putting the blend through its paces in classic cocktails.
The national footprint will come through online sales, with shipping available to more than 40 states. The initial brick-and-mortar rollout is planned for Wyoming, Colorado and Missouri.
There’s also going to be a $70 cask-strength release where Woodruff plans to take more chances.
“That will be different each year,” he said. “We want that to be something people will look forward to.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
