You're scrolling a whiskey shop's website, and there it is: a bottle called Fortuna, dressed in vintage-looking type, with a story on the back about a German immigrant and a distillery called Glencoe. You've never heard of either. Neither had we, until we went looking. Turns out Fortuna isn't a new brand playing dress-up in old-timey branding — it's a genuinely dead brand that spent sixty years in the ground before somebody dug it back up.
The Immigrant Who Built It
Phil Hollenbach came to the United States from Germany in 1869 and got into the wine trade before finding his real footing in Louisville's bourbon business. By the late 1870s he was running a successful blending and bottling operation — and like a lot of ambitious whiskey men of the era, he eventually decided he needed his own supply instead of depending on someone else's barrels.
That decision led him to buy the Stitzel Bros. Distillery, built in 1872, which he renamed Glencoe. He kept Jacob and Frederick Stitzel on as master distillers — the same Stitzel family whose name would later end up on Stitzel-Weller, one of the most storied distilleries in bourbon history. Hollenbach built out a real distribution network, including his brother Louis running things from a Chicago outpost, and Fortuna became one of the labels carrying his name across the region. The pitch was simple and a little charming: a "Taste of Good Fortune."
How It Died
Prohibition did what Prohibition did. Phil Hollenbach & Company shut down in 1920, and the Glencoe distillery sat dismantled for fifteen years. Hollenbach's son Louis eventually rebuilt it near the original site, but by 1942 the family sold it to National Distillers for $3 million — largely so ND could use it to produce industrial alcohol for the war effort. After the war, National Distillers moved production to its Bardstown facility and renamed that one Glencoe, which tells you something about how little sentiment corporate ownership carries for a name once it's just an asset on a balance sheet.
Fortuna was last bottled sometime in the late 1950s. The Glencoe name eventually went dark for good, and the property was sold off — mostly valued for its warehouses at that point, not its whiskey.
The Revival
Fast forward to 2021. Pablo Moix and Peter Nevenglosky founded Rare Character, a non-distilling producer built around sourcing exceptional barrels rather than running stills of their own — the same model that's given us plenty of great whiskey over the decades, for better and occasionally for worse depending on who's doing the sourcing. In 2022 they brought on Andy Shapira, who grew up inside his family's three-generation stake in Heaven Hill, and together they resurrected Fortuna for the first time in over fifty years.
The new Fortuna is a Kentucky Straight Bourbon, blended from six barrels, aged a minimum of six years, and bottled at 102 proof. Moix — who blends by feel, drawing on a bar background rather than a lab notebook — has been open that he can't disclose who's actually distilling it, though he's been willing to say who isn't. Shapira's Heaven Hill pedigree has led plenty of bourbon writers to connect those dots themselves, though Rare Character hasn't confirmed it outright. In late 2023 they followed the original release with Fortuna Barrel Proof, a cask-strength expression aged a minimum of seven years and blended by Chad Watson into five distinct batches — a step further into the "let the barrel do the talking" end of the pool.
What's notable isn't just that Fortuna came back. It's that Rare Character has made a habit of this — Fortuna was an early proof of concept for a company that's since gone on to revive other dormant labels, including the historically KBD-owned Brook Hill. Reviving a name is easy. Reviving one responsibly, without turning it into a marketing gimmick stapled onto forgettable juice, is the harder trick — and it's the one that determines whether a brand like this earns a second life or just a second death.
If you're curious about how old brands come back from the dead more generally, we dug into a similar comeback story in Pikesville Rye: Comeback Kid or Collector's Trophy? — worth a read if Fortuna scratched that itch.
Final Pour
There's something very "scenic route" about a whiskey that took the long way to your glass — sixty years dormant, passed through three owners, rebuilt from nothing but old bottles and a name worth saving. The fast lane would've been inventing a brand-new label with a fake backstory. Somebody chose the slower, harder path instead: finding Hollenbach's actual descendants of flavor and doing the work to bring them back. That's a taste of good fortune worth raising a glass to — or at least a shirt worth wearing while you do.
Perfect Pairing
If old-brand revivals and barrel-proof stories are your kind of bourbon nerdery, the Barrel Proof Bourbon T-shirt ($22.84) is the obvious pull — same spirit of "no dilution, no shortcuts" that made Fortuna's second act worth telling.
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