Seagram's VO was created in 1914 when Joseph Seagram's son Thomas asked distiller William Hortop for a special cask for his upcoming wedding.  Hortop created a custom blend.  The whisky was so good that Seagram decided to launch it as a new expression, according to Davin DeKergommeaux in "Canadian Whisky, a portable expert".  (the link there takes you to the Amazon page for the book.  My review of that book is here:
http://www.cooperedtot.com/2012/06/canadian-whisky-portable-expert-by.html

Seagram's V.O.hit the market in 1917 and has been huge, pretty much, ever since.  In the book, Davin doesn't speculate on what "V.O." means.  There are two conventional speculations - with no evidence at all to choose between them:
1) V.O. stands for "Very Own" - because it was a special blend crafted for Thomas'"Very Own".
2) V.O. stands for "Very Old" and was an attempt to reference Cognac's V.S. designation.
I won't bother to speculate either except to note that V.O. is always given with periods on bottle shots and ads from Repeal through the 1980s.  Yet the current bottling and recent ads omit the periods.  When, exactly this happened, and why, I have no idea.  I use periods or not depending on which era's bottling I'm discussing.

Originally V.O. was made at Seagram's Waterloo distillery and was 10 years old, according to DeKergommeaux (whose authority on that question I will accept).  In my poking around I haven't encountered a label or an ad ever with a 10 year age statement.  Please let me know if you see one!  The earliest labels I can find date to the late 1920s and already show the 6 year age statement that is standard for the whole sweep of VO's history, with the exception of the final year or two of World War II when it was 7 years old.  Well... the probable earliest label I can find is all messed up, actually, with no proof statement, no age statement, and an apparently incorrect designation of V.O. not as a blend at all, but as a "Pure Rye":

Early (probably 1920s) 2oz. mini bottle lacks age statement but does specify "pure rye". Photo from http://www.pre-pro.com/

Is this mini bottle real evidence that V.O. once was a "Pure Rye" instead of a blend?  Probably not.  In any case, the provenance is unknown.  It may be a fake.  It may be an error.  Or it may truly be a significant varient.  It poses more questions than it answers.

This 1928 full bottle shows the 6 year age statement, and specifies "Blended" Photo from whiskyvault.com

This 1936 ad shows the 20s-30s bottle style and specifies 86.8 proof.

There appears to have been a 7 year age statement version.  I'm not saying the following 1944 year is the only one but I can definitely show the 7 year for 1944.  Let me know if you know of other years.  Here's how I can show it:  Here are a trio of ads that bracket a period when Seagram's V.O. advertised the  7 year old age statement:  Ads from 1943 and 1946 which show the 6 year age statement flank a 1944 one that trumpets 7 years old:

By 1943 we see the new label, still current today, with the 6 year age statement and the 86.8 proof strength statement.

In this 1944 ad we see a 7 year age statement, both in the ad's text and on the bottle.

But by 1946, a scant two years later it's back to 6 years again.  Apparently for good.

That 1946 ad is a wonderful bit of nostalgia today.  The Sci-Fi "New wonders of speech and writing devices by Men who Plan beyond Tomorrow" include two refinements to telegram technology: a phone that spits out telegrams (at bottom) and a curbside telegram machines (at right).  At left there are some very forward looking radio phones that presaged cell phones.  At top we have a typing dictation machine.  While the likes of Dragon Naturally Speaking and Siri have made this a reality, it's still in its infancy, so this particular item was quite forward thinking indeed.

One thing is for sure, Seagram's V.O. was very popular through Repeal and WWII and on through the Mad Men era.  Why was it so popular?  Probably for many of the same reasons rye whisky in general had been popular from Colonial days on: the herbal spicy flavor tastes like whisky to a ton of people.  V.O. brought the Canadian refinements of smoothness, sweetness, and consistency through the particularly advanced Canadian art of blending and extensive use of refill casks.  But V.O. is the jewel in the crown for Seagram's Corporation on through this whole long period.  A titan.

Seagrams, under Sam Bronfman, moved production of V.O. from Waterloo to Amherstberg, Ontario in the mid 1940s.  In the late 1960s a more modern distillery was built at Gimli and production was moved there.  When Diageo took over in 2001 they shifted the bulk of VO's production to Valleyfield.  But, as VO is a blend of multiple whiskies, exact distillery provenance is difficult to pin down.  Parts of VO still come from Gimli.  And in the 60s, parts of V.O. may have still came from Waterloo.


For this tasting I have sourced a 200ml flask of current production Seagrams VO from a train station liquor store nearby.  To give insight into the pre-Gimli flavors, a 1971 tax stamped airline bottle was sourced from a German auction house.

Seagram's VO 40% abv.  Current production 

Seagram's V.O. 43.4% abv. 1965-1971

6 years old.  Amherstberg, with some components perhaps coming from Waterloo, Ontario.   No proof statement on the bottle.  Also, interestingly, no volume statement either.

Color: pale gold

Nose: Sharper, with a clear sweet vanilla floral opening.  Deeper there are notes of fruity bitter hops and classic herbal rye sweet and spice notes.  The extra proof is readily apparent in the nose too: spirit burn.

Palate:  The entry is sweet, with cream and cereal sugars, but is much drier than the vanilla fudge opening in the current version.  Rye shows up as floral herbal flavors of rye grain and, cilantro and cut ivy.  Herbal rye with some real intensity and chili scented spicy kick are all over the mid-palate too, which carries some of the effervescent mouth feel you get with pure rye whiskies.  There is the hops-like bitterness of rye's turn melding into the fruity bitter grapefruit pith flavor note.  The bitterness hangs on with sharpness and vividness through the rather long finish.

This is a different animal; one much closer to a high end rye whisky.  The flavors are vivid.  Well delineated and embedded in a matrix of rye and corn that balance sweetness and dryness.  The main rap is that it's hot - but that's tot unusual for good rye whiskies..  But this is clearly a sipper and pretty nice one.

*****

If there's no proof statement, how do I know the 1971 example is 86.8 proof?  Ads for V.O. show 86.8 proof at least through 1985.  The lowering of the proof happened after that - probably in the 90s.  As evidence I'll leave you with this lovely 1973 ad which displays 86.8 proof and helps put this bottling in a cultural context:

Seagram's V.O. 1973 ad. - an elegant bit of 70s design. A tinge of feminism? The woman takes the lead on the slope and is the clear sexual aggressor in the apres-ski which is all about highballs. Notice that she also has a much larger drink than he does too.

So what can we conclude?  The older version is better.  Why?  There are several obvious factors: the age statement is gone, the proof has been lowered from 86.8 to 80 (pretty close to 10%).  Bottle maturation may be making an appearance improving the sweetness and intensity of flavors in the 1971 bottling (which has 42 years in the glass).  And, of course, the distillery was changed not once but twice between the two samples.  There are too many factors changing and not enough data points here to draw any conclusions.  Except this one:  Seagram's V.O. was a popular whisky for years because it was a pleasurable flavor signature that people drank neat, with water, ice, and in cocktails.  With the reduction in quality VO mainly plays in mixer-land, but it still retains a big chunk of what once made it a titan.  It's one of those whiskies you can enjoy neat that you can acquire at an attractive price point.  The kind you're likely to find at selection-challenged lesser bars where you want to get a whisky.  I recommend having a taste and you may find it joins your arsenal of "basic options".  I was certainly pleasantly surprised with both the interesting dusty mini but also the "plain Jane" new stuff too. .

Sorel & Brenne together. Photo: courtesy of Jackie Summers

I'm not really a cocktail guy.  The concoctions I spend time and energy optimizing are pure whisky plays:  the Old Fashioned and the Manhattan.  I want to taste the whisky.  Indeed, the only cocktail I've ever blogged here was a banana infused bourbon Old Fashioned.  But there are plenty of other things to do with whisky. For me, it's often about pairing.  Sorel and Brenne is far simpler a drink than even the basic Old Fashioned.  It isn't really a cocktail at all.  It's a pairing.  2/3 Brenne to 1/3 Sorel.  And it's genius.  I first had it at a party celebrating Brenne's first anniversary as a brand last autumn at the West Village bar "Bell Book And Candle".  Allison Patel, Brenne's creator, had invited friends and people who helped get Brenne off the ground to have a birthday cake and some drinks.  I was honored to be on her list.  It was a stellar party.  There I met Jackie Summers, the creator of Sorel. I already had a bottle of Sorel and had been following @jackfrombkln on Twitter.  I was excited to meet him because I knew how much Allison liked him, but I wasn't prepared for how heartfelt, genuine, warm and sweet he is.   He's not just a nice guy, as it turns out, but someone aggresively on the path of wisdom about life (read on).  Someone mentioned the pairing of Brenne and Sorel and I tried it and played with it a bit and I really enjoyed it.  I had been looking for an application for that bottle of Sorel.

From Right: Sorel, Brenne, and the red pairing.

Brenne: (I'm drinking the ethereal and apricot-banana floral cask 257 today - and it makes sense to pay attention to cask number as the variations are fascinating) is delicate, estery fruity floral pretty thing - soft and easy with silky mouth filling lignans from new French oak.  It comes off as sweet, but not from actual sugars, but solely the cues of esters and lignans.  It's so creamy.   Sorel (which Jackie Summers, it's creator, pronounces "sew-REHL" like it was a girl's name; instead of like the tart herb "sorrel" which most people tend to do while reading it) is a lightly alcoholic tincture of hibiscus flowers and a mess of baking spices (clove, nutmeg, and cinnamon).  I say "tincture" because it doesn't drink like a liqueur: it isn't too sweet and there's no syrupy sugar texture here.  Sorel is low proof (15%) but high flavor: bringing its fascinatingly intense, almost medicinal mix of lushly perfumed dark red fruit with aspects of tart sweet rubarb and red currants with those spices nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves to a light and smooth texture with a bit of ginger heat.   Over a few sips that hibiscus floral intensity spice combo builds up and become intense.  This is made to mix.

"Barrel No. 257" today.

But when these two mix at the magic proportion of 2 parts Brenne to 1 part Sorel and allowed to rest and integrate for 15 minutes or so something magic happens.  The color is a russet scarlet mauve.  The nose becomes malt whisky loaded with cinnamon red hots, baskets of roses, and jammy red vinous scents, like a sherry bomb Scotch but with a fruity floral roobios zing while smoking a clove bidi.

The palate of the combo emphasizes the odd and unexpected planes of their union: floral and sweet without being sugared.  The sweetness is a mass of heavy massed tropical floral notes and tons of zing (stealth ginger).  The spices - the cloves, mace, and cinnamon - ride around in a big car made of malt whisky stone fruits made zingy - like raspberry.  Tasting it you'd never guess there were only two ingredients.  It likes some water - or even better - some ice.  This has joined my regular rotation.  It puts a vinous overlay over the whisky in a way that reminds me of a Manhattan, but with a totally new and very Caribbean flavor set.

By the way, visually, something cloudy happens to the spirits in combination.  Although both are totally clear on their own, mottled flavor elements become visibly flocked out.  But adding water disperses them again.

The combination develops ephemeral clouds of flocculating flavor compounds until water is added.

The synergy here is pretty cool - but it's actually a much bigger coincidence than it appears.   These are both spirits whose story is hard to tell without telling the stories of their compelling creators.

Jackie Summers

Jackie Summers (Sorel) and Allison Patel (Brenne) are good friends.  They live in the same town and have become stars at the same time for being independent entrepreneurs introducing their own liquor brands.  Both are beautiful and charismatic people who light up a room.  Both are thinkers and independent bloggers before introducing their brands.  The fact that they are on this parallel course and are buddies is cool.  But it's no reason for their drinks to mix well together.  I mean, what are the odds?  Jackie was adapting a traditional Caribbean herbal cure into a liqueur.  Allison had discovered an indigenous French malt whisky in search of bottling strategy, a brand, market, and leader.  Nothing in these two histories suggests they should work (except the fact that they both seem to mix pretty well generally).

Allison Patel

Apparently the pairing came about organically the first time Allison Patel and Jackie Summers met - at a restaurant called Krescendo in Brooklyn.  The two spirits clicked together with such a clear and harmonious lock that it must have felt like fate. The spirits worked together and the creators became instant fast friends.  They are on parallel courses in life in a number of ways.  Allison has been a ballet and modern dancer professionally, a fitness consultant, a marketer of jewelry, a brand ambassador for whisky, a whisky blogger, an importer / exporter of American craft whisky, and now, finally, the creator of the Brenne brand.  Allison's whisky blog:
http://thewhiskywoman.wordpress.com/
Allison's whisky:
http://drinkbrenne.com/

Pic courtesy of Allison Patel

Jackie has been on a voyage of personal self examination and growth and civic philosophy.  He blogs with brutal and affecting honesty about becoming a man on the Tumblr F*CKING IN BROOKLYN He posts about race and philosophy on the fascinating and important web site The Good Men Project.  His body of work there is challenging, intelligent, bravely self reckoning, and generally really excellent.  I highly recommend you read it:  http://goodmenproject.com/author/jackiesummers/
As a great example, this recent piece is a searing memoir of social injustice, institutionalized racism in the judicial and penal system, and the feeling of gut check immediate danger at Riker's.  Just fantastic writing on every level:
http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/slow-motion-skylarks-prison-and-social-progress/
And, of course, he does this little Sorel thing in his spare time - actually making the stuff and also making it rain.
Today, I asked Jackie if he had a picture of he and Allison for this post.  He produced the one below and then added:  "Allison is my sister in alcohol".  Try a Brenne and Sorel.  It's like having everything hip about New York in a glass.  While you're at it, think up a name for this simple pairing.

FYI - there is a similar, but more involved Manhattan version of Sorel with Brenne.  It's called The Brooklyn Blossom:

• 2.5oz Brenne French Single Malt Whisky
• 1.5oz Sorel
• 1oz Dolin Dry Vermouth
• 1 dash Angostura Bitters
• 1 Hibuscus blossom

http://jackfrombrooklyn.com/recipe/brooklyn-blossom/

High end Suntory whiskies glitter like the jewels they are.  Yamazaki 25 is the second from left. Look at the color  of it:  all natural - and yet supernatural

The news that Suntory purchased Beam International for $13.6 billion has provoked a host of reactions - some of them racist and negative.  It's not surprising in a way.  There are few products more iconically American than Bourbon and the number one rye mash Bourbon is Jim Beam and the number one wheater is Maker's Mark.  And Japan bombed Pearl Harbor... as I remember every December 7th.  Here are a few of the thousands of comments floating around social media and the comments sections of the news articles all over the Internet to illustrate what I'm talking about:



Do all of these people understand that Bourbon, by law, must be made in the USA and thus every single drop of Bourbon is American?  Do they understand that Beam's management team, not to mention all the distillery jobs, aren't going anywhere?  That no one is changing the mash bills or recipes or the flavors of the iconic Beam Bourbon brands?  That other major Bourbon distilleries are already foreign owned?  Who knows?  It's an emotional "gut" sort of thing with some people.

But there is an irony here.  Japan is a major savior of Bourbon.  When Americans had forgotten it in the 1980s and Bourbon distilleries were going bust, Japan fell in love with mature Bourbons and began sucking out the aging glut stocks.  And that helped teach the world that Bourbon wasn't just an old American's uncreative fallback drink but was a legitimate epicurean product worthy of notice and demand.  Japanese whisky epicures became obsessed with Bourbon and it's a true love that helped resurrect a dying Bourbon industry.  To support that I'll quote Michael Veach, Bourbon historian for the Filson Historical Society who wrote, in his 2013 book "Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey: An American Heritage":

"The Japanese economy, which had grown at an outstanding rate in the 1960s and 1970s and continued to do so in the 1980s, also paved the way for bourbon’s comeback. Along with such best-selling brands as Early Times, Four Roses, Maker’s Mark , and Jim Beam, Blanton’s caught on in the Japanese market, selling for a very high price, and making Age International a nice profit. But the favorite was I. W. Harper. It sold so well that Schenley pulled it from the American market in order to circumvent its profits being funneled off by the gray market—"

Why?  Veach gives a very revealing and coherent explanation for that as well:

"Just as Scotch whiskey went global by following the armed forces of Britain to every corner of its empire, so too bourbon whiskey followed the U.S. military to its bases in South Korea , Japan, Germany, and Italy. Initially available only through base exchanges, bourbon was soon among the standard offerings of local bars catering to servicemen, giving the locals a chance to develop a taste for it as well."

Veach, Michael R. (2013-03-01). Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey: An American Heritage (Kindle Locations 1185-1188). The University Press of Kentucky. Kindle Edition.

To return to the irony of the "patriotic reaction", there is also the fact that Japanese whisky companies are already deeply involved in the Bourbon business - from Kirin's ownership of Four Roses to Age International being owned by Takara Shuzo Ltd.  (That's the company that flipped what became Buffalo Trace at the turn of the current century, but kept ownership of the Buffalo Trace Mashbill #2 brands like Rock Hill Farms).  Japan's involvement with Bourbon is nothing new - but somehow, with Jim Beam and in the current cultural mania over Bourbon it's different this time.

Or is it?  Of course Beam International isn't just Jim Beam Bourbon, it's a multinational conglomerate with distilleries and products around the world - and that's true for Suntory as well.  Suntory owns Morrison Bowmore and their moves there, such as making Rachel Barrie master blender and giving her tremendous freedom to be creative have resulted in some stunning whiskies and a some major turnarounds.  As far as patriotism goes, generally speaking, major multinational corporations are multi-national.  If you buy a Ford made in Mexico is it a more patriotic act than buying a Toyota made in Tennessee?  The idea that "the dollars stay here" is simply out of touch with the reality of the global economy.  The real issues are functional:  will it serve the whisky?

That's why, on Chuck Cowdery's excellent blog post about this sale, there is a comment that got to the root of it for me:

"Soonami said...
Will acquisition by a private company ultimately be beneficial to the brand from an enthusiast perspective? Will it be good for us like Kirin ownership of 4 Roses? Or will it be more like Campari, literally watering down Wild Turkey?"

"Whiskey Women: The Untold Story of How Women Saved Bourbon, Scotch, and Irish Whiskey" is so important that
I own(ed) 3 copies of it.  I have carried it around with me for months, inhabiting it.  I have consumed a pre-release publisher's timed self destructing electronic edition (based on my Amazon reviewer status), a signed hard cover (destroyed in an accident), and finished with a kindle edition.  I consider it an important book - the kind that can change your view of the world.  Or at least of the whisky world - and, in my view, that counts for a lot.  The particular view that "Whiskey Women" undoes is the notion that whiskey is a man's drink and that, after that fact, it's OK for women to like it too.  The "it's OK, honey, I'll scoot over for you and make room for you on this bench on the whiskey express" notion that is embodied in such facts as whiskey marketing people developing extremely light whiskies to be marketed to women and developing flavored whiskies specifically to appeal to the women's market.  For example:

"Though industry officials don’t like to talk about it, it’s no secret that one initial aim of the [flavored whiskey] bottlings was to bring women into the whiskey fold. “I do think it’s a major effort to go after female drinkers in an aggressive way,” Mr. [Dave] Pickerell said."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/dining/flavored-whiskeys-expand-the-market.htm
This point of view is nothing new.  In fact it is very old and well nigh universal - but it doesn't square with a reality where women invented and were the ones to practice the art of brewing beer in the earliest eras of civilization and where women invented the art of distillation and where women were the first and traditional practitioners of the art.  Whiskey was born as a home made agricultural product as an outgrowth of the kitchen, and as a medicine that emerged as part of a woman-centered tradition of folk healing.  Fred Minnick documents all of this in Whiskey Women in a careful and authoritative way.  He does so in a way that isn't all that common in whiskey books.  Minnick takes us back to ancient source materials, Sumerian cuneiform tablets, medieval illuminated manuscripts, and a host of other source materials in a mature approach that melds scholarship with journalism.

But, as Minnick takes pains to show, this feminine locus of domestic whisky production was a duel edged sword in the culture wars that raged around whiskey in its initial rise from locally produced agricultural product to highly political source of tax revenue and then focus of industrial revolution mechanization and economies of scale.  In this era women distillers were demonized, hunted, exploited, and ultimately displaced.  Women making whiskey as part of traditional folk healing became connected with witchcraft and women distillers were burned at the stake as witches.  In the American culture that followed in the 19th century whiskey become intimately connected with prostitution and gambling and addiction.  It was a culture that produced strife and the women-led temperance movement which gave rise to Prohibition.  This movement portrayed whiskey as part of a complex of sinful anti-family activity on the part of men that included the image of whiskey bearing women as temptresses.  This created the great trope of women in bars as lures to a dissipated and destructive path.

Prohibition was a time of organized bootlegging and here women, once again, played a major role.  Minnick is on solid ground here with the fantastic stories of lady bootleggers, both high and low such as Gertrude, "Cleo" Lythgoe, "The Queen of the Bootleggers".   The next historical moment is the movement for Repeal which was also led by a woman, Pauline Sabin.  And then the rise of single malt Scotch, greatly influenced by the woman who owned and ran Laphroaig, Bessie Williamson.  Bourbon's resurgence is connected with a number of fascinating women, as is the current global explosion of whiskey popularity.  We meet women master blenders, executives, brand creators, taste makers, and owners.  This cast of characters will be familiar to many whiskey enthusiasts.  There's plenty of #WhiskyFabric here.

And so we end up in the current day and into the ironic situation where women are becoming leaders of the whiskey world and the bar and cocktail scene and it's presented and thought of somehow as a "new thing".  Fred Minnick shows us this couldn't be further from the truth.  We have it backwards.  Women gave whiskey to the world and men took it from them, soiled it with big money, bloodshed, vice and greed and painted it as the very juice of the "Y" chromosome.  This is a fictional recasting of whiskey actually is - something originally made in a kitchen that is part of the attributes of hospitality and care and social interaction and there is nothing inherently male about any of it.  Get inside this idea and you'll understand why the Women In Academia Report listed this book as on of the "Recent Books That May Be of Interest to Women Scholars"

You have to understand that Fred Minnick wears an ascot, loves his bourbon, and has been to war.

Fred Minnick isn't just a whiskey blogger, and he most definitely is one of those, and an important one - check out:
http://fredminnick.com/blog/
It's that Fred is also a professional journalist with a rapidly growing stature in the whiskey (and wider world).  He is a frequent contributor to Whiskey Advocate magazine:
http://whiskyadvocate.com/whisky/tag/fred-minnick/
He is the author of the Iraq war memoir Camera Boy.
http://www.amazon.com/Camera-Boy-Army-Journalists-Iraq/dp/1555716687
And, as a journalist, he writes regularly on a wide variety of topics for a wide variety of audiences.  But, significantly, he is commonly presenting aspect of the Bourbon world to the wider world, such as these articles in Scientific American:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/author/fred-minnick/
My point here is that Fred is more than just a guy who loves his bourbon, has been to war serving his country, and who wears an ascot.  He's also fast becoming one of the most important voices in America on the topic of America's whiskey.  I recommend you start keeping track of him, if you don't already.


FYI - if you want to read reviews of this book written by women whisky bloggers (and I recommend you do) check out the following:

Alwynn Gwilt's excellent review of this title:
http://misswhisky.com/2014/01/13/book-review-whiskey-women/

Johanne McInnis' interview with Fred - placing the book in a wider context:
http://whiskylassie.blogspot.com/2013/12/writer-circle-profile-fed-minnick-no.html

Susannah Skiver Barton's review:
http://whattastesgood.net/2013/10/29/a-whisky-woman-on-whiskey-women/

Old Fitz S-W BIBs. 1997 (left), 1959-1966 (right).

The story of Stitzel-Weller (S-W) is a story of something very beautiful that died.  It has become a symbol and a touchstone of something uniquely and particularly American which is seeming to pass away in a larger cultural sense too - which gives the story a lot of resonance.  What that thing is, exactly, is bigger than a single phrase and hard to pin down - but it's along the lines of  'a perfectionist vision of how Bourbon should be made', a Southern gentlemanly code, and a 19th century set of values that placed craftsmanship first and seemed to typify the United States of America in its period of expansion and glory.  This period, like the American obsession with craftsmanship itself, went through a nadir where it seemed to disappear, and is now being reborn.  Stitzel-Weller is a slice of a vanished America where we made the best cars, did business with a hand shake, and liked richly flavored Bourbon.

Stitzel-Weller, formed from the pre-Prohibition partnership of Pappy Julian Van Winkle's and Alex Farnsley's Weller (a wholesaler), and A. Ph.Stitzel's distillery, that was incorporated as "Stitzel-Weller in 1933.  In Prohibition, A. Ph. Stitzel was one of only six companies in the whole country with a license to distill medicinal whiskey.  It ended in 1972 when it was sold to Norton Simon Inc. in the midst of Bourbon's decline.  Norton Simon apparently purchased the great reputation of S-W for the expressed purpose of dumping a large quantity of inferior Bourbon that had been made at the Kentucky River Distillery in Jessamine County into a brand that had a market.  After the takeover they immediately began mixing this inferior whiskey with awesome S-W stocks in the base expression "Old Cabin Still" (a story with personal ramifications for me, dating back to the early 80s - but that's another post).  But even after Norton Simon's takover, the distillery continued to produce Old Fitz and the other brands at a high level of quality.   Then the distillery went though a parade of hands and ended up with United Distillers (which formed Diageo later) who finally closed it in 1992 and treated the facility as a semi abandoned asset of warehouses.  The whisky in those warehouses has continued to come out in the decades between then and now.  Older bottlings of Old Fitz (and other S-W brands) continued to be made with S-W juice for a number of years (until the late 1990s).

Postcard of a newly completed new post Repeal Stitzel-Weller distillery circa 1935.

But the story of Stitzel-Weller is far more than one of corporate takeovers.  It is the story of the personalities that built the business culture that ended up with a Bourbon that was reputed to be absolutely the best in the golden era of American whiskey distilling.  Chief among them is, of course, Julian P. "Pappy" Van Winkle. Pappy was the president, and while never the master distiller who actually made the whiskey, was the heart of the operation which he governed by an honest, forthright, and gentlemanly creed:



After Stitzel-Weller was born as a corporation in 1933 with Repeal, they immediately began construction of a new much larger distillery in Shively, KY and it was completed in 1935.
They put Pappy's motto on a sign and posted it at the distillery's gates.  It was a clear commitment to a perfectionist level of craftsmanship.  And, as it happened, the moment passed.  Pappy died in 1965 and his son, Julian P. Van Winkle Jr. took over.  But the market was already heading South and with his sister and 49% of the board voting stock wanting to sell, he did in 1972 for the sake of family unity.  Then S-W went down the Norton-Simon rabbit hole on its path to closure.  But Julian Jr. wasn't done.  He subsequently created the "Old Rip Van Winkle" brand and contracted to buy Stitzel-Weller whisky and bottle it himself as a NDP.   His son, Julian III went into the same business and expanded it, and created the signature expressions of Old Pappy (the Family Reserve 15, 20, and 23) that have become the vanguard of the tulip mania that is high-end Bourbon today.  Bottles of Pappy Family Reserve are effectively unobtainable these days and sell for many many multiples of the non-existent retail price.  Part of the mania for Pappy is its extremely high critical ratings - the buzz around which helped rekindle the Bourbon mania in the mid-1990s.  Part of it is the tireless efforts of Julian P. Van Winkle III as a brand ambassador for his family's legacy.  Certainly part of it must be credited to the beautiful family history his sister Sally Van Winkle Campbell  wrote titled "But Always Fine Bourbon - Pappy Van Winkle and the Story of Old Fitzgerald".  In a brief but satisfyingly detailed book, Campbell tells the story of the distillery, Pappy, and the culture that thrived around a traditional and home-spun notion of a gentleman's honor code of whiskey.  It has the love and family focus of a book written by a doting granddaughter - but it also packs a good amount of detail about the business operations of Stitzel-Weller including an impressive tour of the distillery, illustrated by photographs from the United Distiller's collection (the company that ended up

The Key to Hospitality - reverse label of the 1959-1966 BIB.

with Stitzel-Weller in the end).  Many of the details in this post come from that book.  I highly recommend it.  This book certainly contributed mightily to the mystique of Pappy's whiskey.  But, honestly, the whiskey speaks for itself.  People tend to fall in love with it.  Wheated (with wheat in the mash bill instead of rye) - it's very sweet - but the sweetness is balanced by a big load of very mature quality old growth American white oak.  The wheated mash bill is a legacy of A. Ph Stitzel who made this mash bill in his old distillery before Prohibition.  It was the quality of this whiskey which had originally attracted Pappy and led him to the partnership.  It was as if Stitzel used oak spice in the place of rye spice to balance the extra load of candy apple sweetness.  That was accomplished with barrel management.  Pappy's barrels didn't look like regular barrels.  The staves were much thicker and thus the coopers had to use an extra pair of hoops so the barrels look enormously beefy and armored.  The whisky tastes enormously beefy from the oak perspective as a result.  This is a high amplitude balance; the bass of oak and the treble of sweet are turned way up high.  But more than this is the dark and rich tonal palette and thick mouth feel.  It's nutty and musky like an Olorosso sherry or a dark Cognac rancio  This bigness, balance, and heavy richness has made this Bourbon legendary.

Stitzel Weller made 4 brands:  Old Fitzgerald, Weller, Old Cabin Still and Rebel Yell.  They each had a niche.  Rebel Yell was the smoothie, with a marketing angle that targeted the South with its residual patriotism for The Confederacy.  Cabin Still was lighter and sweeter - "for sportsmen" according to Pappy.  Apparently because it didn't need as much air time to open up.  Weller was lighter as well, but also stronger.  Old Fitz was the unapologetically old fashioned full body and full flavor oak bomb at the top.  It was sold exclusively bottled in bond at 100 proof until Pappy's death when his son Julian immediately introduced an 86 proof version: Old Fitzgerald Prime.  It's significant that Sally Van Winkle Campbell chose to subtitle her history of Stitzel-Weller "The Story of Old Fitzgerald".  Old Fitzgerald wasn't just another brand in a portfolio: it's was Pappy's statement product.  Pappy had loved the brand and pursued it for years during Prohibition from its original owner S. Charles Herbst.  It had been named for a bondsman (a security guard at a bonded warehouse who enforced federal tax policy) who had such a good palate for picking good barrels to pilfer from that his name became a byword for a good barrel.  Herbst sold the brand after Prohibition shut him down.  In Campbell's book Herbst asks for $25,000 but ends up selling for $10,000.  On the Bourbon Enthusiast's excellent S-W timeline, the sale is listed as being for $4,000 in two payments in 1922 and 1925.  


(a faded date stamp is revealed to be Spring 1959 - Fall 1966 using high contrast photo filtering)

Like a lot of Bourbon enthusiasts I've encountered Sitzel-Weller's Bourbons in a variety of independent bottlings since the distillery's closure.  It has ended up in certain bottles from Willett's, Black Maple Hill, Michter's, Jefferson's Presidential Select 17 and 18, and, of course, Old Rip Van Winkle and Van Winkle Family Reserve.  Some of these bottlings are really stunning.  But the whiskey that Pappy himself considered the statement of his art was S-W's flagship brand:  Old Fitzgerald.

I've been assembling samples and bottles of Old Fitzgerald from three eras:

1. 1950s and 60s - during the tenure of Pappy himself.  Represented here by a Very Old Fitz 1953-1961 (thanks, Mike Jasinski), and a 7 1/2 year old Old Fitz BIB 1959-1966 (full bottle found hunting)  
2. 1965-1972 - the tenure of Julian Van Winkle Jr., represented by a 1966-1972 Old Fitz BIB "Fighting Irish" decanter (thanks, Mike Jasinski) and 
3.  The time of closure represented by a 1997 dated Old Fitz BIB (courtesy of Joshua Scott).  

I'm also tasting a pair of Old Fitz Primes from the era of its introduction - the Julian Jr. period:  an Old Fitz Prime decanter from 1970 (Mike Jasinski) and a pair of Italian export market minis sourced from a German auction house.  Master dusty hunter Mike Jasinski was clearly a big part of this story, providing half the samples tasted.  Kudos to Mike for both being able to find these in the wild and for generously sharing them in the interest of science.



The idea is to get a sense of the flavor profile of this expression and how it evolved in the decades spanning the heyday to the final days.

Very Old Fitzgerald 8 year old 1953-1961 50% abv

Color:  Deep amber with reddish coppery tints.

Nose: Beautiful deep oak with tremendous fidelity.  Sticking your nose in a the drawer of a fine old oak desk.  Plummy round malted milk and dark chocolate, pecans, preserved cherry and dark bourbon vanilla beans.  Further back, earthy loam and char and mineral note that sometimes comes off as fresh cut grass.  This nose is heaven.  It smells of time,

Palate:  Sweet on entry with candy apple, musky malt, cherry, vanilla, and cognac rancio.  The  expansion is spicy and redolent of old dark oak.  Oak tannin bitterness rises to meet the rancio and malted milk chocolate cherry sweetness.  The turn to the finish is full of rich oak desk - fine polished furniture; herbal bitters, char and earth.  Delicious darkly oaked Bourbon.  With extra air it gets a little sour.

The extra age here takes the wood flavors to new heights, but the body isn't as malty-rich as the nearly equally aged 7 1/2 year old BIB.
(Thanks, Mike Jasinski for this sample)

Old Fitzgerald BIB, 7 year old age statement tax stamp dated Spring 1959-Fall 1966 50% abv

Color Deep amber with rich reddish coppery tints, almost like a glass of Cocoa Cola but more reddish and less brown.

Nose: Deep, plummy, round, and constantly evolving in the glass.  Malted milk balls made with dark chocolate, dark cooked toffee, well cooked citrus compote containing preserved cherry, ginger, and baking spice. Cinnamon red hots and candy apples and the dark nutty vinous quality you find in old sherry and Spanish brandy.  And, ultimately, oak: rich and deeply iterated oak.  But not the sawn oak note you get so often in Bourbon; a rich furniture oak with sandalwood perfume.  This whisky smells like time.   Over half a century in the glass, we can expect bottle maturation to have full play here.  Dark and tannic, this one took weeks to open up.  It was tight and astringent at first.  As it opens it becomes glorious.

Palate: Complex and evolving as well.  Sweet and candied and at turns honeyed, the classic wheater notes are present: candy apple, sweet corn, peach citrus, and charred oak.  But there is so much more - all in a dark pallet.  Molasses, malt, chocolate, oak char, oak tannins.  This is full bore rich, dark whiskey.  The combination of sweet and dark gives this bourbon enormous flavor amplitude.   The progression of the palate works like this:  Floral treacle sweet cherry vanilla on the opening at the tip of the tongue.  A big spicy expansion full of mandarin orange, oak tannins, dark chocolate, malt, caramel, molasses and old brandy rancio take sway and never let go.  At the turn robust hyper-detailed oak with darker notes of char joins the endless and continuing rancio and big brown sweet flavors and fade off into the sunset together with the mass of the attack moving across the middle of the palate to the rear in a stately and fully mouth encompassing way.  The mouth feel is oily and thick.  This is a masterpiece.  It's a dark rich spicy pudding.  This is a Bourbon that completely embraces its brown and rich flavors.  Such Bourbon isn't made any more and it makes me want to cry.

Old Fitzgerald BIB 6 year old crockery decanter ("Irish Luck") Spring 1966- Spring 1972 50% abv.

Color: medium amber.  Just a shade lighter than the '59-'66 BIB.

Nose:  similar but a tad drier than the '59-66 BIB.  More citrus and cherry, and less vanilla floral sweetness, dark char and rancio.  It's a year and half younger and you can smell it.

Palate:  Glorious in the classic Old Fitz ways: candy apple sweet on opening with nutty rancio, malted milk, and old preserved cherry vanilla.  Darkly tannic at the turn, big oak dominates the turn and the finish.  The balance seems better here than with the 1959-66, even while the heavy malt and rancio flavors that are so distinctive are less fully emphasized.  Is this Julian's take?  The same instincts leading Julian Jr. to start making Old Fitz Prime leading him to make a slightly younger less malty-funky expression of Old Fitz?  It's clearly the same brand, same recipe and style - just turned a notch down in amplitude.  (Thanks, Mike Jasinski, for the sample).

By 1997, S-W isn't automatic.  The label here specifies that the distillery is DSP-KY-16.  That's S-W

Old Fitgerald BIB, NAS bottle date 1997 50% abv

While distilling ended for Old Fitz at S-W in 1992, Old Fitz continued being made with aging stocks of S-W juice for another five years.  This NAS Old Fitz BIB appears bottled in 1997 or 98.  Given that the whisky in that bottle was laid down in 1992 at the latest, it must have been 5 years old, most likely.

Color: coppery medium amber

Nose: Candy apple, orange compote, orchid flowers, apricot nectar, floor varnish, and hints of pineapple and coconut.

Palate: Big and floral opening - almost perfumed.  Candy apple from the nose meets fruity cherry vanilla. Citrus and florals meet in the mid palate which brings a big dose of fragrant tannic oak.  Darker notes of char, caramel and leather rise up in concert with the oak.  There's a very nice balance to the three aspects - flowers, citrus, and dark oak and leather in the turn to the finish which isn't as long as you'd suspect, but full of the characteristic Stitzel-Weller Old Fitz rounded oaky bitters on the finish.  It's remarkable how it's the same flavor profile as the 1966 stuff, but younger, sweeter, and more dynamic.   It's pretty clear that the Old Fitz product was being bottled younger and maybe was being barreled at a higher proof - but the recipe was the same.  Tasted head to head with the 1966-1972 crock 6 year old version of Old Fitz it is a hair lighter and less malty-rancio rich, but only a hair.  Frankly, I was surprised how close they were.  I could never pick between them blind.

The 1997 date stamp.

Pappy resisted the market forces which led most whiskey makes to offer lower proof versions than Bottled In Bond 100 proof.  Here's a 1963 ad which expresses Pappy's creed on the topic: But when Julian Van Winkle Jr. took over in 1966 the first thing that he did was introduce Old Fitz Prime: 1966 ad announcing the new Old Fitzgeral Prime expression 86.8 proof.

Old Fitz Prime (86 proof) mid 1960s mini (left) and 1970 duck decanter sample

Old Fitz Prime Duck Decanter 1970 43.4% abv.

Color: medium amber
Nose: dusky sandalwood oak, candy apple floral vanilla cherry compote.  Sweet, fruity, dusky, musky oaky, and intense.
Flavor: sweet with toffee, caramel, malted milk balls, a quality of Spanish dark brandy with dark sherry grape and rancio and a dose of floral vanilla on the opening.  Succulent dark cherry joins at the expansion, with notes of chocolate, and even light and sweet coffee.  Just beautiful.
The added bit of dilution in the Primes takes the oak tannin intensity down a notch and opens the palate with more sunny sweetness, but at the expense of a bit of richness of mouth feel.  This is an excellent and classic flavor profile.  Despite the lower proof, one of the tastiest pours of the evening.

Old Fitz Prime Italian Export market 6 year old Bonded 1/10th pint 43% abv - around 1965

For dating, note the two tone (white and gold) painted label and see #4 at:
http://www.ne.jp/asahi/miniature/smallworld/image/BourbonO.htm
The all gold color scheme of the late 50s turned into a gold and white two toned painted label mini like the ones here.  By 1968 a paper label had replaced the painted one.
Not technically a "Prime" at 43.4%, but an export version of the Bonded bottled at 43%.

Color: medium amber
Nose: very similar to the decanter: sandalwood oak, candy apple, black cherry fruit, floral vanilla.
The palate is also nearly identical: toffee sweet on opening with musky malted milk balls, dark cherry, floral vanilla, with a marked minty note as a distinguishing feature.  Lots of fragrant oak.  Really delicious.

The Primes succeed because the added water helps sweeten and mellow the dark tannin oak of the 100 proof BIB.  The trade off is the lighter mouth feel.

Old Fitz 1959-1966 BIB. Look at the color!

There is a remarkable unity in the flavors of the Old Fitzgeralds of the Sitzel-Weller distillery across the decades between the heyday and the end.  It's a heavy and old fashioned style of whisky.  Dark sweet and sherry-nutty were more common attributes among Bourbons of the early 20th century.  It was clearly inspiration for the  first year Eagle Rare 101 from Old Prentice (the malted milk and rancio).  For decades, S-W's whiskies were the only wheated mash bill whiskies around.  So the various wheaters you find now are all descendants of these S-W whiskies.  The crafting and attention to quality for which it is famed is immediately apparent.  S-W Old Fitz is a lush and heady beauty.  Candied, fruity, richly oaked.  (Some would say over oaked).

Old Fitz tastes old fashioned because that's the ideal of whiskey that Pappy had in his mind.  Pappy wasn't going to compromise on anything to do with the whisky - and that whiskey was all he was going to do.  In the end, Pappy stood for something.  He made his stand on the topic of quality Bourbon in the way he understood it - timelessly - to be.  Ultimately his fierce dedication to this inflexible definition of quality left his company too specialized on a type of whiskey that had become nonviable in the market to survive.  It's a shame.  Meanwhile, change is inevitable and isn't only about loss.  You can love a mid-century American car and note that "they don't make them like they used to" while still driving and enjoying a new car - which has certain benefits.  For example, compared to, say, Buffalo Trace's statement wheater - W.L. Weller from the Buffalo Trace Antique Collection, old Old Fitz is distinctive - but isn't unambiguously better.  This shows me that the state of the art isn't necessarily lost.  Although, clearly, something very special was indeed lost:  a culture of the grace of old time Southern gentlemen, the passion of craftsmen, and a sense of commitment to keeping a tradition of excellence - family owned.  Bottom line, Pappy's business was about family.  And that human dimension was the first thing that disappeared into the maw of the culture of corporate behemoths.

Pappy's name and the legend of his whiskey have become a mania in the Bourbon world at the current moment.  People are scrambling for the brands that have become associated with his legacy and don't seem to care when what they are actually buying is a cleverly made Buffalo Trace replica.  Old Fitz is now made by Heaven Hill and doesn't share S-W's lofty reputation among the hunters and the epicures.  (I need to taste the new Old Fitz.  It's not sold in my area - but I do get on the road from time to time.)  My purpose with this post isn't to stoke the mania for S-W further.  Auction prices are through the roof for Very Old Fitzgerald and vintage bottles of Old Fitz.  The hype ship has already fully sailed.  My purpose is to take a moment and remember Pappy's bourbon and try to understand what makes it great.  The distillery tour in "Always Fine Bourbon" tells the story:  Old Fitz was mashed a long time from carefully milled corn, barley, and wheat using a closely guarded old yeast and limestone aquifer well water (that is now no longer safe to use).  It was barreled at a low proof into high quality custom made bespoke cooperage and aged a long time for Bourbon.  It wasn't afraid of tasting rich 'n thick like "Old Man's" whiskey.  In In order to move on we have to know where we've been.  America isn't the same place it was in 1959 or 1965.  That moment in history has passed, but with some passion and some love our best days may still be in the future.

A year ago news came come out that Diageo is fitting Stitzel-Weller to restart Bourbon production there.
http://chuckcowdery.blogspot.com/2013/01/after-more-than-20-years-stitzel-weller.html 
The gist is that they are going to make Bulleit there:
http://whiskycast.com/decision-time-for-diageo-on-stitzel-weller/
BourbonTruth takes a deeper dive into the buzz of activity and the rumors and evidence for why:
http://thebourbontruth.tumblr.com/post/62732920744/whats-going-on-behind-the-gates-of-the-old

So, Stitzel-Weller will soon be making Bourbon again.  But, apparently, it won't be what we know of as Stitzel-Weller Bourbon.  It will be Diageo's replica of Four Roses' expression of Bulleit Bourbon.  And yet, Pappy's ideals are very much alive out there in the world of distilling.

Glenmorangie just came out with its fifth annual limited release.  This year it is titled "Companta" which means "Friendship", which Bill Lumsden, master blender at Glenmorangie, said refers to the ancient (1295-1560) Scottish historic alliance with France against England usually referred to as "The Auld Alliance".  The relationship with France is the central narrative with Companta as this is a red wine finishing barrel management story with wines from the Côtes du Rhône region.  Red wine finishes on single malt whiskies are tricky.  They can impart sour flavors, can overwhelm, and are hard to balance.  "I don't like red wine finishes" is an almost automatic response for some whisky enthusiasts.  But we should all keep an open mind.  This is a red wine finish with a twist - as executed by someone who really knows what they are doing.  I won't withhold the surprise, this one is yet another success.  It can't be as easy as it looks, but Lumsden's annual limited editions have all been interesting and worth drinking in one way or another and this is no exception.  I suspect this one will go over even better than last year's more purist Ealanta.

Red wine finishes are familiar terrain for Lumsden and Glenmorangie.  In the mid-90s he started the mania for wine barrel finishing with Madeira, Port, and Sherry finished expressions. This led directly to the Sauternes finished Nectar D'Or and famous special wine finished editions from Chateaux Margeaux (a Bordeaux) and the legendary 1975 & 1978 vintage Tain L'Hermitage finished bottling made with casks from the Côtes du Rhône region. Later there was a regular OP Burgundy cask finished version and a more focused Burgundy edition that specified Côtes de Beaune cask finishing. That's a lot of history with using casks, or "Barriques", Lumsden specifies with characteristic precision and excellent brogue.

This fascination with red wine hasn't always been well received by everyone and, at a launch event for Companta at New York's Brandy Library, Lumsden alluded to the risks of tartness and possibility of the wine overpowering the delicate stone fruit and floral nature of Glenmorangie's distillate. With Companta, Lumsden has taken two dramatically contrasting wines from them same Côtes du Rhône Burgundy region.
60% of Companta is from a big tart pinot noir "Clos du Tart".  Lumsden took 1999 vinage ex-bourbon barrel aged Glenmo which was 9 years old in 2008 and then aged it for an addition 5 years in Clos du Tart for a total age of 14 years.

Clos du Tart 2004 Burgundy

Then he tempered it by using an older sweeter 1995 vintage Glenmo and finishing it in barriques that held a sweet fortified grenache graped Côtes du Rhône called "Rasteau" for an additional 8 years, totaling 18 years. At the Glenmorangie launch event we were poured each of these.  It was fascinating to taste the wine flavors that contributed to the cask finished flavors.  And the combination of these two contrasting flavors with mature Glenmorangie distillate has produced something greater than the sum of its parts.  It's hard to taste and discuss this without considering the larger issues swirling around lately: NAS bottings, and the use of fancy barrel finishes to hide younger whisky.  Obviously, in this case where the youngest whisky is 14 years old and the rest is 18 that isn't a pressing issue.  This one feels like a real exploration of the flavors for the flavor's own sake: an artisinal effort and not an exercise in covering things up.  I suspect people who don't like red wine finishes will find aspects to the tartness to the object to.  Others who decry the loss of hyper-mature extremely estery glut stock single casks might grouse about the wild showy flavors of Companta as wood management pyrotechnics in the place of the complexities of extremely mature whisky and maybe that's true.  But the wine finish game is Lumsden's innovation and it's a defining aspect of Glenmorangie so if anyone is going to be playing the wine cask finishing game it's going to be Lumsden - and he shows a deft touch here.  If anything he seems to be upping his game year over year.

Glenmorangie Companta 46% abv.

Color:  russet medium amber, with pink, copper, and gold tints.  It's brick red and pink and honey caramel color.  One of the more appetizing colors in the bottle and the glass that you'll ever see.

Companta's color is extraordinary

Nose: Creamy berry tart with darker notes of chocolate dipped raspberry on rich honey malt.  Undertones of forest floor loam, strawberry jam, and earthy sweet and elegant oak.  It's an interesting an involving nose.

Palate:  This isn't a whisky where the nose outshines the palate.  The opposite is true. At 46% there is enough intensity for sweetness and fruity acids to pop brightly on entry.  The entry is full of  milk chocolate, tart raspberry acid-sweet with notes of currant and malted milk with floral vanilla and creamy fudge.  The raspberry tartness deftly evokes the rich acid fruit of the Clos De Tart. There's a good balance between sweet and dry going on.  The creamy vanilla floral raspberry tart fruited entry opens into a taut and elegant mid palate expansion full of darker malt, dark chocolate, cocoa, and black currant fruit notes.  Thanks to the wine tasting portion of the launch event I can recognize the black currant herbal sweetness as coming from the rich port-like Rasteau (which really comes off as a Port that tastes more of currants than of grapes).  In the mid-palate expansion you can clearly taste the nectarine stone fruit flavors of the Glenmorange distillate itself.  Plus undefined additional notes of herbal brush and animal musk.  The finish is medium long with lingering fruit skin tartness, pepper heat, cocoa dust, and tannin that reads both of oak and wine.

Companta needs air to open, and takes water well.  Water increases the estery, sweet, and fruity aspects, and the milk chocolate covered raspberry note even while upping the spicy finish.

Companta is a Valentine.  A red fruit covered in chocolate - a kiss of sweet from a taut lithe body.  This might be the best one yet.  Bottom line - as soon as I saw a bottle I bought it and cracked it.

*****

(Sample provenance disclosure:  The bottle tasted for this review was purchased at Bottle King, Bloomfield, NJ with my own funds.  I had previously attended the launch event as the guest of the BA.)

FYI - the prior 4 limited Glenmorangie editions:

• Sonnalta PX (Pedro Ximinez, 2009), 
• Finealta (kiss of sherry and of peat 2010), 
• Artein (Italian "Sassicaia" Super Tuscan cask finish, 15 years old, 2012), 
• Ealanta (virgin toasted oak - 2013)

I love Michter's.  But which Michter's?  There are two.  There is what we'll call "old Michter's" the Pennsylvania distillery in Schaefferstown that people known as Michter's - and which marketed itself as Michter's but was actually named Pennco for most of the recent past and Bomberger's Distillery before that.  That distillery has been closed since 1990.  It is most famous for one particular 1974 contract run of Bourbon made for a guy named Hirsch and aged for a heck of a long time.  This became the subject of a fantastic book called "The Best Bourbon You'll Never Taste - The True Story of A. H. Hirsch Reserve Straight Bourbon Whiskey.  Distilled in the Spring 1974.  Made and Bottled in Kentucky" by Chuck Cowdery.  This book is a miracle, which somehow tells something profound and universal about the Bourbon business, the craftsmanship, and history by focusing on one particular legendary run of juice.  I cannot recommend this book more highly - it is a sweet and compulsive read and will teach you lessons about Bourbon that any enthusiast must know.  It will also make you crave a taste of A. H. Hirsch's Bourbon - and that's a bit of problem as it is not around except at auction and then at stratospheric prices - dozens of times what it sold for even half a decade ago.

Meanwhile, there is a brand of Bourbon, whiskey, and rye sold in many stores called Michter's which is made by an unrelated company - owned by Chatham Imports, a middle-tier importer/wholesaler.  We'll call that "new Michter's".  New Michter's has extensive distribution for a company producing small quantities - and an excellent reputation for quality offerings at the high end of their line.  You frequently see particular issues highly sought after in the Bourbon enthusiast community.

A few months back I visited the home of New York American whiskey enthusiast Jared Zuckman.  While his newborn son slept next to us, Jared graciously and generously led me through a tasting which spanned such Bourbon stellar bottlings Four Roses Small Batch 125th Anniversary, Jefferson Presidential Select 18, A.H. Hirsch 16 foil top ("old Michter's"), and Michter's 20 ("new Michter's") among others.

Jared Zuckman's bottles of new and old Michter's

My quick notes from that tasting for the two Michter's are as follows:

A.H. Hirsch Reserve 16 gold foil top Straight Bourbon 45.8% abv - 91.6 proof

Dark amber color
A beautiful big rich nose of Vanilla florals, brown sugar, sandalwood oak
The palate is thinner than you'd expect given the nose.  Thinner mouth feel.  Sandalwood perfume, citrus, and toffee bourbon flavors.  In the mid-palate there is a a pervasive but gentle mustiness.  The finish all about astringent oak.

Michter's 20 Single Barrel Bourbon 57.1% abv Barrel 2368, bottle 12 of 220

Hazelnut Chestnut color
Huge nose of dark oak perfume, deep musky loam, rich molasses and dark chocolate.  With air and a drop of water, raw chocolate chip cookie dough and pancake batter notes.
Huge sweet palate with thick mouth feel. Toasted & burnt coconut,  dark roasted cocoa, maple glazed roasted pecans.

In some ways it's not a fair comparison - the Michter's 20 is a barrel proof product.  But there's no point actually denying the fact that the "new Michter's" 20 is a superior pour - for whatever that's worth.  And pretty dramatically so.  Jared would be the first to say so.  He called the Hirsch 16, "historically interesting but overrated".  He called the Michter's Single Barrel 20 "the pour of the year" for him.  I had to concur.  Obviously the A.H. Hirsch is something more than just what's in the glass.  It's a "one year type" - like the 1793 Chain Cent is a one year type - rare and unique as a type - beyond just rare as an issue - functioning as a vanished symbol of something beautiful and gone.  Pennsylvania's demise as a distilling center is all tied up with the death of rye, the death of distilling in the North-East, and the decline of American Whiskey in general in the dark days of glut.  A.H. Hirsch's batch represents the "jewels in the darkness" - which came out of the rickhouses in the 90s as forgotten treasures, like the gold of King Tut's tomb.  More on Tut and Michter's later...  But for all that, what's in the glass (i.e. what you'd taste blind) is vitally important too.  And the takeaway here is that new Michter's 20 is a stunning pour - and a true leading product.

So, what is "new Michter's" and how does it relate to "old Michter's"?  I have my take on it, but here's how Cowdery describes it in "The Best Bourbon You'll Never Taste":

http://chuckcowdery.blogspot.com /2012/09/print-edition-of-best-bourbon-youll.html

"What about the Michter’s bourbon, rye and other whiskeys on store shelves today? What’s that and what is its relationship to the Michter’s Distillery and A. H. Hirsch Reserve Bourbon? After Michter’s closed, the Michter’s trademark was abandoned. A few years later, a Philadelphia company called Chatham Imports re-registered the abandoned mark and began to sell a line of Michter’s bourbons and other whiskeys. None of the whiskey they sell was made at the Michter’s Distillery in Pennsylvania. They are a non-distiller producer, which means they buy bulk whiskey made by one or more of the usual suspects and bottle it under the Michter’s brand name. Because they control rights to the Michter’s name, they can and do claim what is now (as of 2012) 259 years of Michter’s history as their own, even though they have just the name and nothing else that connects them to the distillery in Schaefferstown. Ironically, the Michter’s name itself is only about 60 years old. Over the years, the distillery was known by many different names."

"In 2011 , the new Michter’s announced its intention to build a micro-distillery in downtown Louisville, and they joined the Kentucky Distillers Association. That Michter’s had nothing to do with A. H. Hirsch Reserve and has no further role in its story."

Cowdery, Charles (2012-05-02). The Best Bourbon You'll Never Taste. The True Story Of A. H. Hirsch Reserve Straight Bourbon Whiskey, Distilled In The Spring Of 1974. Made and Bottled in Kentucky.

Everything that Chuck says in that passage is factual and these facts have led some people to be angry at the new company selling whiskey with the brand name Michter's.  But, as I'll explain later on, it's not quite the whole truth.  Yet the anger in some quarters is quite real.  For an example of this angry reaction you can't do better than the anonymous blogger of http://thebourbontruth.tumblr.com/ who writes under the pseudonym "Lloyd Christmas".  He rages at Non-Distiller-Producers (NDPs) like Jefferson's and others.  but he reserves a special vitriol for new Michter's:

"The distillery closed in 1990 for good and when the abandoned name finds its way into the public domain for Mr. “Sleaze of the Year” to take it as if it’s been his forever. The new Michter’s starts releasing Michter’s Rye, Bourbon and Whiskey under a very fake, very dishonest story. Washington’s troops drank it, you say? Bullshit, I say."

"Makes up a bunch of more crap that only a con man comes up with. Obviously this sleaze has never taken — or at least never paid attention in — an ethics class while at Yale, but I bet he aced Lying 101 and Advanced Greed."

"I’ll be honest and say I don’t know if he owns barrels he sourced, aged or if he bought them ready for bottling. What I know is that Kentucky Bourbon Distillers bottled most/all of it and, I believe, supplied the barrels. Many, if not all, are being bottled by someone new, I believe in California."

"To give some credit, there were some older batches of 10 year Rye and Bourbon that were great. Incredible 25 year and first batch 20 year bourbons as well. The rest is stuff you try at a bar and are glad you didn’t get a bottle. Chatham imports is not even second rate but they beat the Michter’s name they adopted from the scrap heap as the gift that keeps on giving."

http://thebourbontruth.tumblr.com/post/41798018064/whisky-sleaze-of-the-year-and-sinking-to-the-bottom-of

Irish whiskey is softer, sweeter and lighter than most Scotches, Bourbons, and other World malts.  It is a breed apart: particularly easy going, approachable, and lyrical.  It generally has a fresh and "green" aspect that conveys Ireland to me beautifully.  And like Ireland, it hides a history alternately ancient, noble, joyous, and also dark - full of pain, loss, and catastrophic death.  Ireland is the birthplace of whiskey.  Irish monks were particularly scholarly and wide ranging - helping to retain and disseminate classical learning through Islamic sources when this knowledge had all but entirely disappeared from the West - providing a vital link between the Classical and Medieval world.  Along with classical knowledge, the monks also brought Islamic advances in mathematics and sciences such as chemistry including the Alembic still in around 1000 AD.  The Alembic had been invented to intensify perfumes and tinctures in the Middle East.  Not surprisingly, the intrepid monks applied the method to barley beer (an art well practiced in Ireland as any drinker can attest), producing probably the first malt whiskies in the world in the 11th or 12th centuries.   Potcheen production became part of agricultural life, hospitality, and medical practice.  This topic is well discussed in Fred Minnick's Whiskey Women.  Ireland produced whiskey for export early as well in the industrial era - and was particularly popular in the US in the 19th century.  Whiskey production in Ireland boomed and there were dozens of distilleries thriving producing grain, blended, malt, and pure pot still style whiskey in the first decades of the 20th century.

Irish whiskey's heyday was before Prohibition. This ad is from 1897.

This 1904 sign says so very much.

But then a parade of disasters struck the Irish whiskey industry.  First Prohibition wrecked the US export market, which had been the largest market, in the teens and twenties.  The Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil war deeply disrupted local industry, agricultural production, and trade in that same period - a vicious double whammy.  Then a series of trade disputes with England following Independence led to the loss of export markets to the British Commonwealth.  As a result, virtually all of  Ireland's whiskey distilleries went bankrupt in the decades between the 1930s and the 1950s.  Ultimately leaving just two:  Bushmill's, in the Northern Ireland, and Midleton in the Irish Republic.

Lately the global whiskey boom has floated boats in Ireland too and there has been a boom in new whiskey brands and plans for new distilleries.  In the past half decade, Bushmill's and Midleton have been joined by Cooley Distillery - John Teeling's resurrection of a native Irish owned distilling tradition dating to the late 1980s.  Cooley proved innovative and ambitious, reviving beloved and vanished brands such as Kilbeggan (and laying the foundation of the reopening of that distillery in recent years - with spirit from there on the way) to creating interesting iconoclastic expressions such as Connemara's Turf Mor - double distilled and peated.  Cooley was purchased by Beam International in 2012.  Other recent projects have started distilling, with spirit on the way, including West Cork Distilleries, Dingle Distillery, Alltech Craft, and Echlinville in Northern Ireland.

Like in the US whiskey market, the explosion of interest and demand has led to a number of companies issuing independent bottlings and using the proceeds to develop their own distilleries.  Examples include Teeling's - a new distillery project planned for urban Dublin, with a brand of whiskey rolling out in the USA on April 1st with juice from Cooley to pay the way.  Tullamore Dew - owned by the Scottish whiskey company William Grant - is selling whiskey from Midleton, but is also building a distillery in Tullamore to re-establish a once proud distilling tradition there.

There has also been a boom in independent bottlers getting whiskey from the existing distilleries - and experiencing a growth in distribution.  Some of these brands include Knappogue Castle, a brand created by Castle Brands, a company founded in the 1980s by American Mark Edwin Andrews (an oil executive and former Assistant Secretary of the US Navy).  Knappogue Castle was initially known for bottling some monster casks of very old pure pot still whiskey from vanished distilleries.  More recently  Knappogue Castle is known for vintage dated independent bottlings of what is supposed to be Bushmills.  My tastings certainly bear that out.  Castle Brands has recently started selling a blend too, called Clontarf 1014.  Another, older, native Irish IB is Mitchell and Son's - which has recently started selling Green Spot and the US (and is also known for it's older Yellow Spot).

In order to get a handle on this activity I've engaged in some tastings.  Coming off of a lot of Bourbon and rye tastings lately, the first thing that really comes home is how light and gentle Irish whiskey, generally, is.  Smooth, sweet, and creamy - Irish has spirit heat but little bite.  Irish whiskey is, generally, constructed from the ground up for this constellation of attributes - triple distillation, malting in sealed kilns, the use of malted and unmalted grain, etc... This balance once led Irish whiskey to be the most popular whiskey in the world and is trending in that way again.  Lightness, smoothness, creaminess, and uncomplicated sweetness are beguiling things for a certain kind of drinking.  But they aren't "kick in the pants" flavor bombs.  This is changing too with cask strength, over-proof, and more complicated offerings in recent years, with varying degrees of success.

Today's post will look at a selection of the resurrecting distilleries and IBs - just in time for St. Patrick's Day.  Happy St. Patrick's Day!  Why do so many whiskey bloggers post about Irish whiskey on St. Patrick's Day?  Certainly it's like Christmas for Irish whiskey brands.  But Irish whiskey isn't just for St. Patrick's day, people.  They are for when you want the green minty flavors of the Emerald Isle on your tongue and shining in your heart!

Mark Gillespie of WhiskyCast enjoys a taste of Teeling

Teeling's Blended Irish Whiskey 46% abv.

The Teeling family's created and then sold Cooley - but grandfathered into the deal an arrangement to
purchase some of the Cooley stuff in an ongoing to way to help finance plans to build a distillery in Dublin.  As a twist, they are doing an Angel's Envy style barrel management scheme where the blended whiskey from Cooley is finished in ex-Nicaraguan rum casks.   The symbol of the phoenix on the bottle represents the resurrection of Irish whiskey.  The Teeling family brought it back to Ireland with Cooley, then sold it to Beam and is now doing it again with Teeling.  Given that Cooley was the most exciting thing in Irish whiskey in a century, I'm kinda psyched to see where this project goes.

Color: pale gold
Nose: Creamy vanilla, honey, malt, and a kiss of pineapple on nose. Floral talcum powder
Palate: White fudge frosting and floral vanilla opening, shifting into malty honey with a kiss of fruit tart acid.  I get caramelized pineapple - but gentle.  This is followed by a dry light tannic finish.  There is a good intensity of flavor here and a very pleasant drinkable balance.  This one works for me.  Expected to hit the US market around $50 on 4/1/14 it seems a tad pricey for blended Irish whiskey - but the wood management twist and higher ABV help take this one to a level where it doesn't seem stupid.

****

Tullamore Dew 40%

The base expression from William Grant owned, Midleton sourced Tullamore Dew - it promises to be in the Powers Gold wheelhouse of flavors.

Color: straw
Nose: Gentle malt, grain bubble gum, floral heather
Palate is unexpectedly firm with a sweet honeyed malt opening.  The mid-palate sees a handoff to light fruity grain whiskey flavors (gum, fruity jellies) and a light mint note.  The finish is short and ends on a slightly young grain note.  The opening is the strength here.  Light, sweet, sippable, and easy.  The grainy finish is common at the price point - and easily rectified by simply sipping more.

It's nice - but high in younger grain whiskey flavors and isn't particularly distinctive IMO
**

Tullamore Dew Phoenix 55%

Knappogue Castle 12 Single Malt 40%

Color: palest gold.
Nose: spring grass, malt, anise seed, fresh mead.
Palate:  Creamy sweet grassy mash.  The expansion hits with the green and minty note that screams "Bushmills" at me loud and clear.  This is a lot like the Bushmill's 10 single malt expression.  There is spirit heat and some gentle oak on the turn to the finish, which is exceedingly gentle and brief.  A delicate, acceptable Irish single malt, but without a distinctive angle.  It shares the strengths, and in my opinion, the weaknesses of Bushmill's Single Malt 10, with whose price point it shares, but brings a freshness and a bit more fruitiness to the flavor signature.  I'd take this over Bushmill's 10, but I definitely prefer the others in the line.

***

Knappogue Castle 14 Single Malt 46%

Color: Gold
Nose:  Grassy sweet aroma of heather, white frosting, some distant dried yellow flowers.

Palate: a sunny golden malt sweetness opens.  It's a beautiful moment.  Then the expansion waxes with the note of mint and the green flavors of Bushmills.  There is some greater density of flavors here than the 12.   Some citrus notes and wine gums.  Two years more in the wood, plus a finishing turn in sherry cask - and bottling at 46% all work in its favor. The turn to the finish is warming, with more oaky bitters flavors.  The finish is a longer too - but still fairly brief.  Yet it's a pleasant finish with tannin bitters fading amid lingering mint and wine gum sweets.  This is a pleasant and drinkable example of a Irish single malt:

***

Knappogue Castle 16 Single Malt Sherry Finish 40%

14 years in bourbon barrels, 21 months in sherry casks.  4500 bottles total.
Color: light amber.

Nose:  Grassy fresh, but joined by a bit of vanilla, citrus, fig, and notes of oak and sherry cask.  It's a light and pleasant nose - with distinctly more going on.

Palate:  The opening is more gentle than the 14 (40% as opposed to 46%) but the sherry finish actually shows up.  Sweet with some vinous raisins and fig on the opening.  The minty green shows on the expansion.  The turn to the finish shows oak spice and tannin spiciness which warms with clove-like heat.  But the shelved down intensity of 40% leaves me wanting more.

***

Knappogue Castle 17 Single Malt (1994-2011) Sherry Finish 40%

15 years in bourbon barrels, 21 months in sherry casks.  Bottle 4278 of 4500

Color:  light amber.

Nose:  Again, grassy and fresh with gentle hints of vanilla, raisins, lemon, and fig.  It's a soft and gentle nose.  In direct head to head nosing with the other Knappogue Castles it is distinctly darker and oakier than the others - but only in a relative way.

Palate: sweet and distinctly figgy on the opening.  The expansion gives a greater sense of sherry cask - but the minty green aspect of Bushmills is still readily evident.  No surprise, given that most of the maturation takes place in ex-bourbon casks and the sherry finish is for the last 21 months of maturation.
The extra time gives a bit of added richness - but this is still impressively light and fresh.  The main sign of the extra maturation is more oak in the nose.

****


Clontarf 1014 Blended Irish Whiskey 40%

From the cut sheet:  "Clontarf 1014 is  triple-distilled, filtered through Atlantic Irish oak charcoal, and aged four years  in bourbon barrels: ten percent is pot  stilled single malt whiskey; the rest of  the blend is a combination of pot stilled  and column stilled grain whiskey. The  whiskey comes from Dublin."

Color: light amber.
Nose: heathery, light talcum, honey, bubble gum, and distant iodine.
Palate: sweet vanilla fudge on opening, but immediately complicated by salty sea air, firm malt, and some lovely sweet chewing gum grain whiskey notes.  Soft and easy drinking, with a short sweet finish.  This has some complications and twists pretty unusual in a $20 bottle of blended whiskey in the form of those iodine notes and sea breeze.  In a head to head between Clontarf 1014 and Tullamore Dew the similarities are more apparent than any difference.  I give Clontarf the slight edge because of the complexity of salt and a bit of iodine.  But Tullamore Dew's gentle uncomplicated take on the same set of flavors might be more pleasing to some.  Personally I'll take this any day.  Enough going on to be worth sipping and cheap enough at $20 to be used heedlessly.

***

Green Spot Pure Pot Still 40%  

A classic triple distilled pure pot still (malted and unmalted barley whiskey - an unblended whiskey) from Midleton (Jameson's).  This has a long history - a contract production for a Dublin grocer.  The brand has a long history but Green Spot only began importation into the USA a few weeks ago.  This makes it part of the expansion story for me.  FYI, my pal Steve Zeller just reviewed this on his blog The Smoky Beast and has more background on why it's called "Green Spot":
http://smokybeast.blogspot.com/2014/03/review-green-spot-single-pot-still.html

For a deeper dive into the history of this brand, check out Peter Lemon's post today on The Casks.  Peter writes history beautifully:
http://thecasks.com/2014/03/17/green-spot-irish-whiskey-circa-2010-review/

Color: dark old gold with light amber tones.
Nose: cream caramel, honey, heather, light sherry tones of fig, and leather.  Underneath is fruity sweet floral tones.  Nosing deeper, you get more sweetness and complexity. For 8 year old whiskey this is pretty rocking.
Palate: big sweet creamy opening.  White fudge, honey vanilla cream, then mint, faint sherry notes of black raisins and figs.  The expansion has the green and minty flavor signature of Jameson's - so very Irish!  There are some light grainy alcohol notes at the turn, but malt and grain and seeds dominate the finish.  This one has a buttery aspect that takes it into a different level than most blended Irish whiskies.  It's a visceral creaminess - a textural thing - to go with the creamy flavors so characteristically Irish.  This is of a piece - and yet clearly something special.   It's been released at $45.  Definitely worth a taste at that level.

****

Yellow Spot Pure Pot Still 12 year old 46%

I've seen this in some exclusive stores in the USA (Park Avenue Liquors) but this is from a 700ml European bottling shared by my friend Eric Sandford (thanks, Eric!)

Extra aging to 12 years and higher proof at 46% are the edge here.  Yet, the extra years add wood and oak tannins, spice and heat and fruity intensity.

Nose:  Cream caramel, and honey malt made mellow by rich oak and fruity wine gums.  Figs, gooseberries, and something tropical (mangoes and papayas).  Nosing deeper, I'm getting some butterscotch.  Nice.  Really nice.

Palate:  Buttery, creamy, sweet, and candied on the opening.  Lovely viscosity in the mouth.  There is a big expansion of flavors after that sweet dessert-like opening: sherried and madeira'd flavors that include tart acids and lots of tropical fruits - creamy mangos, gooseberries, thimble berries.  Underneath is clearly the minty green of Jameson's and Ireland, but the tartness and fruitiness really put on a show.  Plus there is a big oak presence.  The turn shows this oak growing, but a goji-berry sweet-tart quality hangs on.  This fruity and oaky quality yields a fairly long finish.  This is a Red Breast 15 like presentation, but more fruit forward.  Pretty stand-out stuff.  Is it $100 stuff?  Tough competition from top Scotches at the price - but this is definitely a contender in the pure pot still style at a bit under.  I would definitely seek this out.

*****

Full disclosure of sources:  My bottles: Tullamore Dew, Tullamore Dew Phoenix, Knappogue Castle 17, Green Spot.  Teeling's Sample graciously poured for me by Jack Teeling at a tasting I was invited to by the Baddish group, PR.  Knappogue Castle 12, 14, 16 and Contarf 1014 samples also provided by Laura Baddish - of the Baddish Group, PR.  Yellow Spot sample provided by my friend Eric Sanford.

A few days ago Davin De Kergommeaux, Malt Maniac, leading Canadian whisky blogger, and noted author of the most significant book on Canadian whisky, wrote a piece in whiskyadvocate.com called "A Revealing Chat With WhistlePig’s Raj Bhakta" that contained the information that "the makers of WhistlePig rye were finally ready to “come clean and confirm that the whiskey they bottle is from Canada"
http://whiskyadvocate.com/whisky/2014/03/19/a-revealing-chat-with-whistlepigs-raj-bhatka/
It also had the bombshell that Whistlepig will be a vatting of 5 different rye whiskies in the future (the Alberta Distillers it has always been bottling, plus "We are growing our own rye on site and contracting whiskey from three distilleries in the U.S. and two in Canada." Although Bhakta corrects this by stating that all the whiskey out now - and in the near future is the same Alberta Distllers only whisky it has always been since the brand launched in 2010.  The 5 origin stuff is aging and will on the shelves somewhere down the road.

Why come clean now?  Maybe it had something to do with the shock and outrage that followed upon Raj Bhakta's comments (more like a cavalcade of completely wrong, dishonest, and false statements) on Bloomberg TV February 13th:
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/whistlepig-whisky-ceo-what-i-got-from-donald-trump-1QJTcwVrSRGRibswOGYdLw.html

In the brief television spot, Bhakta says that Whistlepig is the only "aged" rye on the market at 10 years old.  An interviewer point blank asks him about Sazerac and Michter's (who market rye whiskies aged 18 and 25 years old respectively) and Bhakta doubles down.  Later he reiterates the lie that Whistlepig is American and that it's patriotic American thing to drink it.  This is a howl because it's a Canadian product lock stock and barrel.  All Bhakta's crew does is rest it and then bottle it.  He also says that only aged (i.e. older than 6 to 7 years old) ryes are sufficiently aged and worth drinking.  As someone who loves younger ryes like Thomas H. Handy 6, Russell's Reserve Rye 6, Willett's Family Reserve Single Cask ryes as young as 3 and 4 years old, etc... I can attest that some of the finest ryes you can drink are quite young.  Rye's herbal spice, like peat's fiery kick, is fresher and fiercer in young whiskey.  Aged rye picks up lovely mature flavors at the expense of the herbal kick and heat.  Thus choosing a fine younger rye to get that freshness and power is a totally defensible epicurean choice.  Pretty much every word that came out Bhakta's mouth in that spot was wrong.

The weird thing is that Dave Pickerell was perfectly honest about the whiskey being Canadian - even back as early as 2011:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iTYpw1l26c

Although, certainly, in most of the interviews, Pickerell side steps the issue of origin and just talks about the whiskey - often leaving the incorrect impression that he's actually make it and that's an American made product.  But the fact that Pickerell plainly publicly told the truth for years explains why the true story was so widely known.  One wonders about why the lack of transparency sometimes and not others?  Certainly Whistlepig's label itself is part of the deception.  "Hand Bottled at Shoreham, Vermont" appears on both front and rear labels but not a word is there about where the whiskey was actually distilled.

The controversy is good in that it has brought the truth out and is a lesson for others who would hide the truth.  Other examples of this kind of thing, Templeton Rye, Michter's, Widow Jane have similar trajectories.  Some people will boycott because of the lack of honesty.  I can understand that, but I'm more interested in whats going on in the glass - particularly if you can't source the juice from the original distiller as is the case here - in the USA market.

A fascinating detail of De Kergommeaux's interview is the story that Pickerell had a line on a supply of extremely good aged 100% rye whiskey from Alberta Distillers and was in search of a a vendor to buy it and bring it to market.  Pickerell then found Bhakta who had a farm and was looking for a whiskey project and the WP thing was born.  This would explain the apparent paradox of a brand new company suddenly putting out richly flavored fantastic rye whiskey on day one.  And, make no mistake, the whiskey is certainly good.  In 2012 I did a double blind head to head of a number of Canadian 100% ryes bottled in the USA - a group that included Masterson's Rye 10, Jefferson's Rye 10, and Pendleton 1910 Cowboy Whiskey.  Thomas H. Handy and Old Potrero were also in there - not as blinds because they are so distinct.  In the finale, the Handy won overall, but of the ones that playing on the same level of proof I found Whisltepig the winner.

Dave Pickerell tells the story of the Frenchman asking Raj "Have you seen the Wheeestlepig?" at Bottlerockets Liquors in New York

A few months ago I caught up with Dave Pickerell at Bottlerockets Liquors in New York where he was introducing a new limited edition version of WhistlePig called "The Boss Hog" that consisted of hand selected casks that were allowed to mature an extra couple of years.  The results were bottled at full cask strength.  The whiskey was interesting and I signed up for a bottle, but the critical reviews upon its release were mixed with complaints about cost and flavors.  I couldn't tell if it was a question of barrel variation (it's a single barrel product and a number of barrels were bottled) or just a question of people being able to handle the power and flavor of the product.  After having tasted a few of the barrels (6, 8, and 9) I'm leaning towards thinking it's the latter interpretation.

The Boss Hog  Barrel 9 12 3/4 years old 134.5 proof. 67.3% abv.

Color: golden coppery amber.

Nose:  floral honey, dusty cut yellow flowers, herbal lavender, cilantro, ivy, and oregano.  Plus there is a salty acidic note.  Sku describes it as "pickle juice".  It's hard not to see it that way after hearing that.

Palate: POW!  Honey sweet in the first seconds and then, rapidly, a huge expansion chock full of toffee-caramel roundness, cut ivy, alfalfa, cilantro, briny pickle squirt and floral herbals attack with abandon.  The mouth is completely filled.  The turn to the finish is marked by sweetness fading into complex herbal bitters with lingering anise-seed sweetness and nuttiness.  The finish is medium long on oak and herbal bitters all the way home.

This is the pure rye flavor profile on steroids.  It has a vividness and intensity that is all but unique.  Thomas H. Handy has the rye flavor profile at the same level of power, but with a mash bill that expertly melds in the toffee citrus of corn.  I give the nod to Handy overall, but as the pure essence of rye, this is pretty special.  That said, it's herbal, bitter, intense, and hard to take.  It takes water well, hanging on to a little bit of a darker richer note than the usual 10 even at comparable dilution - but the difference is slight.  Given the high cost (between $130 and $175 - the former at Shopper's Vineyard, the latter at Park Avenue Liquors) this is too expensive to justify the slight difference between this and the 10 at comparable dilution.  What you're paying for is the thrill ride of having it neat.  At full power this is intense stuff.  The Stagg of Pure Rye.

*****

Given the news that Whistlepig is changing the formula in future batches, this might be the statement expression of the pure Alberta Distillers stuff.  If you are a fan of this flavor profile it might help justify the long green for you.

Whistlepig 10 - 50% abv.

This is very close to the same stuff all around - just taken down to a more humane 50% abv.  It's rich delicious heady whiskey and has been among my favorite ryes for years.  The nose is dramatically muted by comparison.  Everything is dramatically muted by comparison.   Still, this is redolent of dust, preserved citrus, and light florals. The entry is sweet with jammy citrus, spicy on the expansion with complex herbal ivy and cilantro notes. Well balanced tasty oak and herbal bitters on the finish.   Still one of my favorite ryes, but it steps aside when the Boss is on the same table.

*****

I've been drinking and thinking about Old Ren quite a bit lately since my blog post a couple of months ago and something has begun to bother me.  Is it possible that professional magician and founding-father of Texas IBM magicians Ring 15, Ren Clark, could have slipped an adulterating flavor into Old Ren as a parlor trick of some sort?  Well, banish the thought, Old Ren was bottled in bond in a government supervised and bonded warehouse - right?  But nosing and tasting Old Ren I have a very clear sense of vanilla extract riding on top of some good bourbon.  Vanillins are a natural flavor component of bourbon because of the requirement that bourbon be aged in new charred American white oak.  American white oak, in particular, is loaded with vanillins.  This fact would make the addition of vanilla extract a really great prank to play on bourbon drinkers.  The vanilla would hide exceedingly well, produce a remarkable flavor profile, and make a real conversation piece.  However, in one of the few blog posts out there that describes bottle maturation using references to peer reviewed scientific papers, Whisky Science's article about bottle maturation specifically mentions a build up in vanillin over long periods of bottle maturation:

Look at those colors again...

"Most phenols oxidize slowly, usually forming polyphenols, resulting in diminished astringency and probably less peaty whisky over years of bottle storage. An exeption in the phenol group is vanillin, which increases slowly independently of the oxidation/reduction state." (emphasis mine)

"Independently of the oxidation, tannins and antocyanins form bigger molecules, which stabilize the colour and usually turn reddish colours into orange, bricklike hues. Oaklactones tend to partially transform from trans- (spicy, incence) to cis-isomers (coconut, vanillin) in the bottle."

Later on it adds:

"Most likely the bottle maturation of whisky is more reductive than oxidative, producing more fruity, aetheral, peachy, vanilla, petrol, rubbery and metallic notes and less phenolic, bitter spicy and citrus notes. Rancio flavours might arise from pentose sugars derived from caramel colouring and/or a very extractive charred cask."

However New York lawyer and whiskey enthusiast Dan Zimmerman retrieved old copies of Title 26 of the Internal Revenue Tax code (26 USC Sec. 5233 (1964) and 26 USC Sec. 2903-2904 (1940)) which governed these things back in the day and has performed a close reading and it seems that the Bottled In Bond act provisions trump those distinctions. Here is Zimmerman's close reading of the older statutes directly quoted from his e-mail. I'll find a way to post images of the old legal statutes (probably as image files) later:

"(1) The Beverage Alcohol Manual (BAM) that Steve links in his blog (tracing through my link above) states that the TTB (formerly ATF) views the "bourbon" designation as precluding coloring or flavoring additives. http://recenteats.blogspot.com/2011/08/whiskey-wednesday-bourbon-law-for.html I agree with Steve's statement that the BAM is an agency interpretation, and this restriction does not seem to appear on the face of the regulations in 27 CFR. Going farther, I am not aware of when this interpretation was adopted and it is possible that in 1944, when the Old Ren was bottled, this restriction would not have been interpreted the same way for non-"straight" designated whiskey, as noted above in connection with the 1955 ruling. The BAM is at: http://www.ttb.gov/spirits/bam.shtml

(2) The coloring and flavoring regulations now in 27 CFR 5.23 and 5.29 would, by their literal reading, allow up to 2.5% of "harmless" colorings and flavorings, except for "straight" whiskeys. These were in section 5.22 and 5.38 (1961); and 5.21(g)(5) and 5.38(c) and (d) (1938). The language of these provisions does not seem to have changed substantially over this period. However, as noted below, the BAM interpretations restrict some flavoring and coloring additives that a literal reading of the regulations suggest may be permitted. In the past, the interpretations may have been different, but such informal interpretations can be very difficult to research, as noted above.

The present regulations say, in relevant part:

§5.23 Alteration of class and type.

(a) Additions. ...

(2) There may be added to any class or type of distilled spirits, without changing the class or type thereof, (i) such harmless coloring, flavoring, or blending materials ... if such coloring, flavoring, or blending materials do not total more than 21⁄2 percent by volume of the finished product.

(3) “Harmless coloring, flavoring, and blending materials” shall not include (i) any material which would render the product to which it is added an imitation, or (ii) any material, other than caramel, infusion of oak chips, and sugar, in the case of Cognac brandy; or (iii) any material whatsoever in the case of neutral spirits or straight whiskey, except that vodka may be treated with sugar in an amount not to exceed 2 grams per liter and a trace amount of citric acid. [However, the BAM interpretations above also preclude additives for "bourbon", even if not straight, so this statement is not interpreted with its literal meaning.]


§5.39 Presence of neutral spirits and coloring, flavoring, and blending materials.

(b) Coloring materials. The words “artificially colored” shall be stated on the label of any distilled spirits containing synthetic or natural materials which primarily contribute color, or when the label conveys the impression that the color is derived from a source other than the actual source, except that:
...

(3) If no coloring material other than caramel has been added, there may be stated in lieu of the words “artificially colored,” the words “colored with caramel,” or a substantially similar statement, but no such statement is required for the use of caramel in brandy, rum, or tequila, or in any type of whisky other than straight whisky. [However, the BAM interpretations above also preclude additives for "bourbon", even if not straight, so this statement is not interpreted with its literal meaning.]

(3) Straight Bourbon. As you note, the straight bourbon requirements are in 27 CFR 5.22(b)(1)(iii) presently and were in 5.22(b) in 1961 and 5.21(b) in 1938 (copies attached, these are the two closest dates I found to the 1944 bottling date). On their face, the "straight" regulations for bourbon are generally an age requirement, since the current BAM interpretations extend the prohibition on coloring and flavoring to bourbon generally, not just to straight bourbon.

(4) Bottled in Bond. The bottled in bond regulations and statutory provisions, on their face, seem to preclude any flexibility that could be gained by removing a "straight" designation.

Current 27 CFR 5.42(b)(3) sets out requirements for bottled in bond labeling. Chiefly:

(i) Composed of the same kind of spirits produced from the same class of materials;

(ii) Produced in the same distilling season by the same distiller at the same distillery;

(iii) Stored for at least four years in wooden containers ...;

(iv) Unaltered from their original condition or character by the addition or subtraction of any substance other than by filtration, chill proofing, or other physical treatments (which do not involve the addition of any substance which will remain incorporated in the finished product or result in a change in class or type);

(v) Reduced in proof by the addition of pure water only to 100 degrees of proof; and

(vi) Bottles at 100 degrees of proof.

This provision tracks statutory provisions that appeared at 26 USC Sec. 5233 (1964) and 26 USC Sec. 2903-2904 (1940) (copies attached). I have not exhaustively searched, but it looks like this requirement has been moved out of the tax code and into the TTB regulations in the past several years. In any event, all of these provisions substantially express the common understanding of the requirements imposed by the Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897. In particular, additives should be prohibited."

Smooth Ambler has been selling Old Scout Bourbon for a couple of years.  It's Bourbon sourced from MGP/LDI and is generally available in 6 and 7 year versions.

I originally reviewed Old Scout Batch 1 - a 5 year old, a year and a half ago:
http://www.cooperedtot.com/2012/10/smooth-ambler-old-scout-very-old-scout.html

Last year a 10 year old version came out.  It sports LDI's high corn 75% corn, 21% rye and 4% barley malt mash bill. I encountered it when I volunteered to pour at the Smooth Ambler at Whisky Fest NYC.  I didn't do that purely out of the goodness of my heart.  I couldn't afford the ticket at the time and working the show was a way to get free admission.  When the show was over I took a 1/3rd full heel bottle of the 10 year old with the idea that I'd do a head to head with the bottle of Old Scout 5 I had bought a year earlier at Park Avenue Liquor.  Here it is.  The younger Old Scouts have LDI/MGP's high rye mash bill with 60% corn, 36% rye, 4% barley  Full disclosure - not only was this bottle of 10 year old Scout given to me by John Little, I also poured it for others at Whiskey Fest.  When I was doing so I described to people how John Little is distilling his own wheated Bourbon and white spirits in West Virginia but, while that matures, is also selling sourced Bourbon and rye from Lawrenceburg Indiana's LDI/MGP in a special brand "Old Scout" so that it is immediately apparent which of Smooth Ambler's whiskies are sourced.  I also talked up John Little's excellent palate in selecting casks.  This is particularly apparent in the VOS (Very Old Scout) bottlings, but it's clear in every sourced whiskey in the Old Scout line.  John Little knows his Bourbon and rye and picks good barrels to sell.

FYI - the 5, 6, or 7 year old versions of Old Scout street for around $35 in the NYC metro area.   The 10 year old goes around $50.  

FYI - by way of insight into the fairly mysterious distillery in Lawrenceburg, IN; the other day author, journalist, and photographer, Fred Minnick, posted a photo essay of what it looks like inside the MGPI distillery:
http://fredminnick.com/photo-essay-inside-mgpi-distillery-lawrenceburg-indiana/

Smooth Ambler Old Scout 10 year old - 50% abv Batch 5 6/11/13 (bottled by Sarah)

Color: medium amber with coppery glints.
Nose: musky loamy earthen notes melded to floral (marigolds and lilacs) fruity (sunny peach and citrus) and rich umami protein quality with a dose of salt.  There's also some darker Maillard reaction caramel notes in there underneath.  Like my other encounters with Lawrenceburg Indiana bourbon I'm put in the mind of roasted peanuts, cooking peach jam and marmalade in the midst of lilacs and gardens.

Palate:  Sweet and honeyed on the opening with a strong attack of stonefruit compote, acetone, oak and char on the quick expansion.  Vanilla floral - tangy zippy - a brief flash of mint, and then lovely oak char.  This is bigger, deeper, and has more flavor amplitude than the regular Old Scout.  Or so it seems.

A few drops of water opens this one up beautifully.  Like VOS bottlings I've tried, older Lawrenceburg, IN bourbons are swimmers and become more honeyed, vivid, and fruited with a bit of water.  The nose becomes even more earthy, farm-like, and fruity-floral.  The palate opens more gently and more floral.  The mid-palate's citrus melds with the sweet and dark to take on an old-cognac-like rancio note.  This is very nice bourbon with a drop of water.

The 10 year old is a bit darker than the 5 year old.

Smooth Ambler Old Scout 5 year old - 49.5% abv. Batch 1 10/27/11 (bottled by Nikki)

Color: light amber with golden and coppery glints.
Nose: sawn oak leads, with citrus compote, floral lavender.  Peanuts and violets again - but much lighter and lyrical.

Palate:  Sweet and floral on the opening which waxes more floral and fruity on the expansion.  It's all the same flavors: vanilla floral, tangy fruity notes of the stone fruit variety.  But the honeyed sweetness of the opening carries all the way through the mid-palate and into the turn to the finish.  The finish, when it arrives is more about herbal bitters fading away, with a bit of oak tannins and char in the distance.  Youth is an ally here: with sprightly honey, fruit and estery floral aspects dominating the darker notes that bourbon gathers with age: caramel.

With a drop of water the nose becomes, if anything, more salty, solventy, and fruity.  The palate become a bit more delicate, however.  Lilacs, peanuts, citrus and herbs gain in vividness, but the bourbon becomes more delicate and less gutty.  I'd skip the water on this one.

Conclusions: The younger Old Scout has some of the charms of youth: a more fruity and floral nature.  The older one has more caramel and a bit more density of flavor.  They are both good and good values for the money in today's market place.  Tasting them side by side I'm more struck by their similarities than their differences, given the disparity between them in age and in mash bill.  They are clearly close kin.

Single Cask Nation (http://singlecasknation.com/)  is a private members-only independent bottling business which is part of the Jewish Whisky Company founded by Joshua Hatton and his partners Jason Johnstone-Yellin and Seth Klaskin about 3 years ago.  Hatton is also a whisky blogger at http://www.jewmalt.com/ - a very impressive whisky blog.  Johnstone-Yellin is also a whisky blogger at the perhaps even more impressive  http://www.guidscotchdrink.com/

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of tasting the Single Cask Nation line with Josh Hatton (@jewmalt) and a group of very welcoming Jewish gentlemen in New Rochelle, NY.  This wasn't my first time tasting Single Cask Nation's line.  I had had parts of it at Whisky Live last year and at Single Cask Nation's second Whisky Jewbilee last autumn - their phenomenally impressive fledgling whisky show.  This time, however, with a smaller room and more intense focus I finally got it.  I had always wondered about single cask clubs like this.  "Why bother"?  You can buy single cask bottlings from independent bottlers like Gordon & MacPhail, Cadenhead, Wymiss, and a host of others.  Why do I need to join a club?  But with Josh Hatton walking us through the selections I finally understood.  It's not just that each selection is bottled at cask strength in a minimally fussed with way.  (Although this is real difference from a lot of single cask bottlings you find from IBs.)  It's that the selections each have a story - a particular angle on the flavors of that distillery.  This has to do with the palate of the people doing the cask section.  When you join a club like this you are putting a bet down on the palate of the people doing the cask selection.  The idea is that the payoff will be interesting whiskies worth drinking with the risk involved in making selections substantially reduced by the pre-selection going in.  This isn't just marketing talk.  It involves people you can meet, talk to, drink with, and come to trust;  a palate you respect.  It's not, as is the cask of, say, Gordon and MacPhail, a series of contractual relationships that give them access to rare distilleries you cannot get via an OB bottling.  Rather it's that only special casks that really impress the bottlers are chosen at all.  It's a curatorial thing.  You're joining someone on their whisky journey.  Obviously this only works if the selections speak to you.  Here I found each selection a cat and mouse game where there was a twist on some aspect of what you'd expect.

Joshua Hatton is a compelling presenter.

Arran 12 54.8% - Spanish oak pinot noir cask.

Color: pale amber
Nose:  Lush sweet floral rose, vanilla, and turkish delight (fruity with powdered sugar on it).  Rancio, figs, and sherry lurk beneath and some earthy loam and mineral dust beneath that.  Layers and layers in this nose.
Palate:  Sweet honeyed malt on the opening, with a rich beautiful expansion that brings out dense layers of nectarine fruit, fig jam, lemon candy, green apple, sherry, estery floral melon and yellow fruits, vidalia onion, sweet oak and sandalwood perfume.  The finish is long and gently spicy with tannin heat.  Layers and layers of fruit, wax, flowers, malt, tannins, heat, spice and oak.  This is a 12 year old?  This is an Arran?  And extraordinary cask.  It's more complex than any other Arran I've yet tasted.

With a drop of water things get more meaty on the nose, with animals and minerals more in evidence.  But things open up with more richness on the palate.  The mouth feel becomes more silky and the spice is enhanced.  This is a rich mouth filling experience balanced between unctuous fruity florals and black pepper spices and dark toothy oak.  This shows Arran squarely hitting mainstream Highland Scotch flavors (while, granted Arran is an Island malt), and achieving flavor density and balance in the process.

*****

Glen Moray 7 58.8%  Full maturation in a Fino sherry cask

Color: medium amber with coppery glints

Nose: Iodine, vanilla, oak.  The lingering note of iodine speaks to the youth of this dram.  If you let it air out a lot, it retreats and more mature aromas of figs and bourbony charred oak come to dominate.

Palate: sweet vanilla opening, sherry rancio fig expansion, turn has smoke and earth and rising oak.  The finish brings back the young note of the nose with a touch of iodine, lingering oak tannins with some sandalwood oak perfume.  Tartness and fruity sweetness vie.  With a drop of water there are white grapes and strawberries on the opening.  But the expansion is darker with complex spice, caramel, fig cake, and brown betty flavors in the mid-palate but the same drying finish.  Big - nay, hugely flavored with elements of wine cask, old oak, and some of the iodiney flavors of youth too.  This very young Speyside whisky turns most everything I thought I knew about maturation on its head.  Normally only peated drams are bottled this young in carefully selected single cask bottlings.  But this is not a young hot peat monster.  It's a young complex, sweet wine drenched dram that alternately tastes young but then very mature indeed.  Fino was an interesting choice here.  Fino is dry.  Indeed, this doesn't come off as sherried.  It comes off as fruited and regal.  Tasted blind I would be hopelessly confused.  It doesn't really taste like any recognizable genre of Scotch.

****

BenRiach 17 53.2% abv. 2nd fill ex-Bourbon barrel

Color: pale gold

Nose:  Putty, clay, peat, medicinal bandages, honey heathery meadow.  Deeper there are herbal vegetal notes.

Palate - opens sweet and lemony and then glows in to rich earthy peat.  This is superficially Caol Ila or even Port Ellen territory, but the lemony here waxes into a more fruity profile with air and time.  There are layers of tart apple,  pineapple, and quince  and white melon underneath.  The expansion shows a smooth, clean, earthy and warming peat.  This is a mature Highland malt whisky that drinks like a good Islay malt of decades past.  Tasted blind this would fool a lot of people.  BenRiach is known for its peated expressions.  Somehow this doesn't taste quite like any of them.  It's hard to say what this tastes like.  It's pretty unique.

****

Dalmore 12 46.1% 12 years in refill bourbon barrel then 10 months finish in PX Spanish oak cask.

Color:  Medium amber with gold tints

Nose:  A dry nose of sun baked earth, dried flowers, bresaola, alfalfa, and fragrant sawed yard aged oak belies the explosion that awaits.

Palate: a titanic blast of treacle sweet honeyed figs, fig cake, fig newtons and fig compote leap out a the opening and just get bigger through the expansion where notes of rancio, more black fruits and baked figs with port add up.  At the turn the oak asserts - lovely old oak.  The finish is long and sherried and oaken.  Wonderful.  This is 46%?  This is a true cask strength experience.  Why aren't all Dalmores this big?

A drop of water ups the air cured meats in the nose and adds an herbal undercurrent.  But the palate is sweetened and enriched further.  This is a lush, succulent, over-ripe candy-sweet dessert dram of high order.  This is a 12 year old?  An inspired cask selection.

*****

Laphroaig 6 57.8% 

Color: straw

Nose: Lemon, fresh grass (hay), putty, some fresh ocean air.  With more air, some goats in the distance.

Palate: big soft gentle lemon-cream chiffon opening, with some pointed grassy sugars and fruity acid that adds zing and salivation. After the soft creamy opening there is a strong expansion with heat and peat that shows you this is cask strength.  The peat is a clean earthy peat reminiscent of Bruichladdich's Port Charlotte.  Earthy, and burning, but not the usual cigarette note encountered on young Laphroaigs.  The turn is marked by the creamy lemony quality driving through the peat's gradual turn to ash.  The finish is long and gentle, alternately malty, ashy, and slightly herbal.  

Josh challenged us to some blinds later on.

Tasted blind I would guess Port Charlotte, Kilchoman, or perhaps a young Port Ellen.  I would never guess Laphroaig.  Unusually clean and pure and lemony for Laphroaig.  A really special cask.

Water amps up the animal and clay and putty of the peat in the nose.  But it adds a richness to the mouth feel and a honeyed aspect to the palate opening that are vital.  With water it's more herbal and creamy on the opening, bigger and spicier on the expansion with a peat that has become more polite, but also richer, with more spice less burn, enriched by a delicate chamois animal skin flavor.  Rich and ashy on the turn with a finish that lingers even longer on road tar, blowing ash and soft herbal bitters.  A grand slam.  With water this is drinking almost like a mid 1970s example of a young Port Ellen.  Powerful, yet poignant.

*****

Kilchoman 4 58.2% - Buffalo Trace ex-Bourbon barrel

Color: straw

Nose:  coal tar, road dust, sweet cream, a hint of mint.  Underneath there is some broth and some oregano.

Palate: explosive, sweet and instantly herbal with effusive licorice, verbena, and lemons.  The lemons wax towards the end of the opening, becoming creamy and sweet with white chocolate and buttery graham cracker smores.  The expansion to the mid-palate is big and prickly, with plenty of lemon acid, sweet cream, and a growing surge of peat heat that smolders with earth and clean anthracite.  At the turn the peat is turning to clean ash and herbal bitters with lingering black licorice, lemon pith and rind and a soft creamy aspect still carrying through.  This is classic Kilchoman - but with the intensity of cask strength.

Water brings up animal skins in the nose, like the Laphroaig before it.  But here it's more about the herbals and licorice and coal tar on the nose.  Water amps up the sweetness of the opening and adds viscosity to the mouth feel.  This is rich, creamy, lemony, and aggressively peated stuff with real Port Charlotte PC7-like anthracite coal notes in the peat.  This is high praise coming from me.  Rich, cerial sweet and creamy on opening it rapidly transitions to peat monster burn and then turns to ash, lemons, and burning earth at the turn.  The finish is long with ash, tar, licorice root and wormwood.  Sophisticated and rather august.  This drinks like one of the cask strength monsters of Islay - which, indeed, it is.

*****

Conclusions:  Impressive.  Each selection epitomizes something and also plays a twist on the expectations you'd have for each distillery.  A host of things jump out at me.  Most of these whiskies drink way older than their chronological ages.  Some, like the Glen Moray play with your head, exploding your notions about maturation.  They also tend to belie the usual flavor profiles for their distilleries or even their regions.  But the bottom line for me is that they are all good - really good.  I'm sold.  Indeed, I was sold.  I became a Single Cask Nation member that night.

Part of the excitement with the Jewish Whisky Company are the special bottlings associated with Jewbilee.   http://whiskyjewbilee.com/  Last year there was a 15 year old Heaven Hill single barrel bourbon that is extraordinary.  You can see the bottle to the right in the image just above and in the image at top.  We tasted it (and I have a bottle I bought at the Jewbilee last year).  It's very special.  Rather like you might expect an Elijah Craig 18 or 20 might be at full cask strength if they offered such a thing.  There were 87 bottles and they sold out instantly.  This year there is a special unique blend from High West that features rye whiskey vatted with an oddly flavorful oddity called "Light Whiskey".  We got to taste it too (blind).  I guessed it was a mature 6-8 year old rye finished in Sauternes cask.  I was wrong.  New society-only bottlings include a 2 year old single barrel rye from Cacoctin Creek in Virginia, as well as a 20 year old single barrel Scotch.  There is an effusive creativity and an American perspective going on with Single Cask Nation, beyond just some good Scotch whisky palates.
Disclosure: Josh Hatton generously gave me samples of each whisky so that I could leisurely write formal tasting notes at home.  However I purchased a membership on the spot with my own money.

Robin Robinson of Compass Box with The General This was on most people I talked with's highlight list.

Whisky Live continued to grow in 2014.  Packed, loaded, full of life and personalities and loaded with likely and potential drams to taste.  As the years go by I find I'm more excited to see the whisky people.  OK, maybe I'm still pretty excited about the whisky too.  There's always something unexpected and something new at a big show like this.

Here are a blizzard of some of my impressions of the show associated with small pictures.  If you click on one you can see them bigger.

Robin Robinson poured Compass Box The General.  Butterscotch with intensity - particularly after a drop of water and a little time.  Rich and strongly oaked.  Floral, fruity, complex and long finished.  This was on many people's lists to try to get a taste of and I heard it on many people's highlight lists.

Chris Riesbeck is elegant pouring Gordon & MacPhail

Emily Ross Johnson pours WT I usually see her running the Astoria Whiskey Society.

Part metal, part punk, and very Scottish.

Chris Riesbeck, brand ambassador of Gordon & MacPhail, and a wonderful man, poured Glen Scotia sherry cask 21 yo and this year's stunning batch of Caol Ila Cask Strength.  'I could sell ten times what we get allocated' he states flatly.  Sweet, grassy, honeyed, and intense with a beautifully rich clean peat hit.  G&M's cask strength Caol Ila is lovely peat monster.

I was delighted to see Emily Ross Johnson - who I normally encounter as the cocktail brilliant person responsible for The Astoria Whiskey Society's amazingly fun tasting events and signature cocktails - behind the table pouring Wild Turkey and  Russell's Reserve.     Bernie Lubbers was delightful pouring Heaven Hill.  I had a nice draw of Henry McKenna 10 yo Bottled in Bond.  When you talk about bottled in bond whiskies with Bernie Lubbers he might show you his tattoo - which is utterly fabulous and makes his feelings about BIB bourbon abundantly clear.  I also had a nip of the new batch of Elijah Craig Barrel Proof.  This one is bottled at 66.6% abv.  That's a good Satanic accident - and the flavors on this batch are richly redolent of cherry, leather and tobacco after a moment of air.  Really lovely.

Bernie Lubbers & H. McKenna 10 BIB

Lubber's BIB tat is definitive.

New batch spotted:  Elijah Craig Barrel Proof at 66.6% abv. Satanic!  Devilishly good, actually. Cherry candy leather tobacco bomb.  Maybe the best yet.

Brandy Rounds and friend from Drydock liquors of Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Brandy Rounds, of Drydock liquors in Red Hook, Brooklyn, organized a block of tables for smaller entities (like Van Brunt Stillhouse, and Cacao Prieto).  She is a raging torrent of good cheer and fun.

Daric Schlesselman of Van Brunt Stillhouse

Van Brunt Stillhouse American Whiskey Oddly drinkable for a baby craft whiskey.

Mark Gillespie interviews Daric Schlesselman

Like most recent shows I've been to, Chip Tate's Balcones dominated the American craft whisky scene with top pours of the night.  This included astounding tastes of French Oak finished Texas Single Malt and the Redemption Cask finished Texas Single Malt.  Rich, complex, and stunning.  A great moment was when Dave Pickerell came by and the two big bearded bears embraced like brothers.

The history of American whiskey is full of stories with all the human drama of Shakespeare's plays.  There are triumphs and tragedies; tales of creation and destruction.  There are also skeletons in the closet.  This is one of those stories.  It's the story of a murder - but not the murder of a person; the murder of a historic brand of Bourbon.  Like in most murders the motive is mundane, indeed prosaic.  It is simply greed.  The general outline of the story is simple.  Old Cabin Still - a venerable brand originally from William LaRue Weller came, via Pappy Van Winkle, to Stitzel-Weller and was a respected brand for decades. Then a huge food corporation, Norton Simon, that had been clumsily dabbling in Bourbon found themselves in a jam with a bunch of bad whiskey they couldn't sell so they bought Stitzel-Weller so they could gradually dump the boondoggle failure whiskey into their bottom of the line Old Cabin Still brand.  This ruined the whiskey - effectively murdering the brand.  When United Distillers dumped 70 brands to Heaven Hill in 1993 (who immediately dumped a bunch to Luxco) with Old Cabin Still listed among them, it fell away into the mists of obscurity.  Currently the brand name "Old Cabin Still" doesn't appear on either Heaven Hill's or Luxco's web site nor does it appear to be currently distributed except, apparently, in Europe.  It's all but dead, while plenty of other brands with less excellence in their histories are still plugging along.

A word about the brand's name.   Originally "Old Cabin Still" It gradually dropped the prefix "Old".  It
started in the 1950s - with the word getting smaller and sometimes being replaced by "Weller's", until it fully
disappeared sometime in the 1970s - apparently after the sale to Norton Simon.  I'll attempt to use the appropriate name for whatever historical period we are discussing.

Old Cabin Still was one of William Larue Weller's brands when Pappy Van Winkle joined the firm.  It wasn't one of the brands registered in 1905 and 1906, implying that it was previously registered - one of the really old brands.   Pappy clearly liked it.  He had A. Ph. Stitzel produce some as medicinal whiskey during Prohibition.  A nice bottle and photograph appear on http://www.historicbottles.com/miscellaneous.htm They appear as follows:

"Here is a quite interesting - and quite rare and historically fascinating - early machine-made whiskey bottle with the label, original box AND is still fully sealed with around 85%+ of the original contents - all of which date prior (barely) to National Prohibition! The fully intact tax label (covering the cork stopper) notes that the whiskey was "made Spring 1915" and "bottled Fall 1919" - mere weeks before Prohibition was fully in effect in January 1920 (though most liquor was already off the market by early 1919)."

In the years between the Repeal of Prohibition and the first years after World War II there were a number of advertising campaigns in the USA that emphasized camaraderie between men, and possibly carried a hidden marketing message related to homosexuality as well.  These ad campaigns were not limited to a single company or a single brand.  I will highlight three separate brands of whisky (and one of gin) in this post.  My point here isn't to point to particular ads and say "this ad is 'gay' but that ad is not 'gay'." Such an exercise is necessary fruitless and loaded with bias.  However, as the ads I'll present below will make clear, there is potentially a real topic here.  And it must be understood in the context of the laws concerning homosexuality in the USA.

Prior to 1962 engaging in homosexual sex was a felony in every single State in the USA - punishable by lengthy criminal sentences including hard labor.  In 1962 Illinois decriminalized consensual homosexual sex in the home - but it was a decade before any other State followed suit.  As recently as 2002, 14 States still carried such anti-sodomy laws on their books.  The 2003 Supreme Court decision "Lawrence v. Texas" finally struck down all these laws and ended this shameful period in American history.  During the long period of homosexuality's criminal status, gays communicated to each other in code out of necessity.  In some areas certain articles of jewelry, clothing worn a certain way, or sometimes even ways of speaking (check out the "Polari" dialect).  Certain thematic elements appear again and again in these ads - particularly the trope of a younger, more athletic man in a pool or ocean in a bathing costume and an older man in a robe or suit watching or greeting.  Others are more innocuous: a come hither look or a quiet domesticity.  Each ad on its own is easily disregarded as simply promoting friendship between men.  Viewed together, they begin to look like a concerted campaign aimed at marketing a particular type of whiskey to the US homosexual market segment.

 I say a particular type of whiskey because the three brands depicted here all have something in common: they were blends.  In the USA that means that they consist of some whisky and a generous amount of grain neutral spirits.  Blends were marketed extensively after Repeal as a way to stretch meager stocks of aged whiskey.  This became a necessity during WWII and immediately afterwards for the same reason - American distilleries were converted to producing pure industrial high proof alcohol for war production needs and aged American whiskies became scarce.  Some ad campaigns used a war-rationing fairness angle (e.g. Imperial, the subject of a coming post).  But the eventual successful angle ended up being promoting their "lightness".  None of the ads that follow make a point of the lightness of the blends (indeed the first one makes a point of mentioning that Penn Maryland was the most whiskey-rich blend at 51% 6 yo whiskey content).  But it's striking that bottled-in-bonds weren't marketed this way; only blends.  It makes me wonder whether blended Bourbon was popular in the gay community, or whether marketers felt that gays might prefer a lighter whisky (insert joke about mid-century perceptions of gays being "light in the loafers" or something of that nature here).

Have a look at the following 5 ads, spanning the 30s and 40s.  Each on their own is fairly innocuous. Together they seem to suggest that the subject of a man in a bathing suit and a man in a robe or suit together might constitute something more communicative than simply a random happenstance.  It appears to be a real theme; a secret "tell" to gay readers of the time:

Young bathing men and older men in robes or suits watching them:

Penn Maryland  1935 ad - the year after Repeal. Older man in robe prepares drinks with a young man in a bathing costume at the beach.

Hiram Walker gin, late 1930s.  Older man in robe watches bathing men pool-side.

Kinsey Blended Whiskey ad - mid 1940s - detail.  Poolside highballs.

Old Sunny Brook blended whiskey ad - 1947. Older man in a robe greets a younger man in a bathing costume.

Old Sunny Brook blended whiskey ad, 1949. Bathing man in pool signals to a rather eager man in a suit.

The subject of secret gay-themed mid-century advertising was a topic of a post on Ad Week magazine's site in June of 2013:

"the gay subtext is a matter of opinion—or perhaps, perception. Consider a 1943 ad for Cannon towels portraying a company of soldiers skinny dipping somewhere in the South Pacific or a 1945 ad for Faultless pajamas showing three handsome young gentlemen getting dressed after an apparent sleepover. “It’s all in the eye of the beholder,” says Bruce H. Joffe, professor of communications at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Va., and author of A Hint of Homosexuality?: “Gay” and Homoerotic Imagery in American Print Advertising. “A straight person who looked at these ads in Time or Life magazines would just turn the page and not think anything, but someone with a gay sensitivity would say, ‘Oh my God, look at that!’”

Joffe attributes the obvious camp in these ads to what he calls “a kind of chuckle in the eye and pen of the illustrator”—a case of a gay artist slipping something past his oblivious, straight boss. But Joffe doesn’t rule out a bit of subconscious targeting. “Do I think that ad agency or client said, ‘We need to reach the gay market’? No. But by the same token, there was a gay community with its own language and symbols, some of them appearing in these ads. There’s just no question.”

http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/gay-advertising-s-long-march-out-closet-150235

Kinsey's Quiet Domesticity Campaign:

Men together playing parlor games, gardening, reading, making cocktails:

Kinsey blended whiskey - 1945 ad.  An "unhurried" summer day.

Kinsey blended whiskey 1946 ad.  Doodles and cocktails by the beach.

The coded doodles theme in this ad seems a pointed double entendre about using a symbol to convey a hidden meaning - an analogy for the whole business of communicating homosexuality in coded cues.

Kinsey blended whiskey ad 1948 (detail).  Making cocktails from the Kinsey recipe book. One of the men wears an apron, holds the book, and eagerly awaits the conclusion of the other on how good the drink is.  A butch / femme dynamic?

Kinsey blended whiskey 1945 ad.  Victory garden theme.

Old Sunny Brook's "come hither" expression ad series.

I'll limit myself to two (I know of 3 more) because this is getting long.   These gentlemen are inviting you to a drink, with a look in their eye that suggests maybe a bit more than "just a drink"...



I don't know if these ads were a concerted campaign to capture the homosexual market, or were a stealth game by some creatives - or were nothing at all.  Perhaps I'm just seeing phantoms in the changing values of our society.  If you have any information or perspectives please comment below, or email or message me (see the About page for address).  I suspect there is some additional scholarship on this topic beyond the brief mention in Advertising Age.

Update: Steve Urey (of http://recenteats.blogspot.com/) just posted a link to some old Chuck Cowdery blog posts with pictures of ads very much on this theme.  This one from Bellows titled "Partners In Pleasure" dating from 1966 is incredible.  Check out the vignette of the two guys in the lower right hand corner.

The 19th Century: Minstrelsy

http://black-face.com/minstrel-shows.htm

William H. West's Big Minstrel Jubilee "The Golf Crazy Coons" minstrel show advertising sign. http://www.authentichistory.com/diversity/african/3-coon/1-history/index.html

1934 through the 1950s: Blacks as Servants - accessories to class.

"Advertising images consistently show scenes of prosperity, material comfort, even luxury well beyond the conditions of life of most Americans. The advertising industry prefers to picture the world that consumers aspire to, not the one they actually inhabit."
Joseph R. Peebles & Sons. Co 1840 Cabinet Whisky Cincinnati, OH, USA. Via Pullman_compartment_cars_and_through_trains,_Cincinnati,_Hamilton_&_Dayton_Rail_Road_advert 1894.

"The "Coon" persona mitigated the low status accorded African-Americans by whites by feigning near-idiocy in order to frustrate whites by ironically fulfilling their low expectations (the "Tom," by contrast, is praised by whites for his good work and loyalty. A parallel racial caricaturization of black men by whites, the "buck," is the repository of their racial and sexual fears, and still can be seen in blaxploitation movies of the 1970s and, more recently, in the "gangsta" rapper)."

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0275297/bio

1934 Four Roses Repeal Thanksgiving Flaming Pudding Ad.   The text begins "It's your first Repeal Thanksgiving - so celebrate it right!   Over a lit plum pudding..." The simulated flames seem to endanger the servile black man bringing it to the table - but he doesn't seem to mind at all.  In fact, he's appears as happy as a clam. He, too, is a vision of an ante-bellum house slave.

1937 Hires Root Beer ad. "Yassuh... it's Genu-wine Hires".   The black servant entertains while he promotes - with his goofy minstrel-y mannerisms and speech. 1938 Pabst Beer Ad. This young bellhop is bringing the beer - but more than that - s/he is bringing  the "servant gaze" - approving how the good choice in suds shows "These sho am Quality Folks".  So white folks get waited on, and get a load of social approval as well.

mid 1930s Paul Jones whiskey ad. "Seems like they all calling for a DRY whiskey"

1940 Cream of Kentucky ad signed Normal Rockwell More house slave action from the master of the American icon.

1955 Walker's Deluxe Whisky Ad.

1960s-1970s Black Men As Sexual Hunters

In the end, it's amazing - shocking really - to see how neatly the three eras of blacks in whiskey advertising correspond to the three major racist pidgeon holes blacks had always been put into by whites:  "Coon", "Tom", and "Buck".  The 19th century minstrel style was the era of clownish idiotic "Coon" characters.  The 20th century from Repeal to Civil Rights was the "Stepin Fetchit""Tom" character.  And the post Civil Rights 'sexual hunter' was classic "Buck".  Really, over the entire century and a half the basic script never changed.

But that was years ago.  How far we have come, right?  Maybe?  I must say, I haven't seen many blacks in whisky advertising at all in recent years.  Have you?  Here's how a black man was depicted in a Kansas Spirit Whiskey ad last year:

Maybe we still have a ways to go yet...
(There's nothing racially wrong with the last ad - except that the whiskey isn't any good.  That's the whiskey snob subtext here.  Meanwhile, most of the racist advertised whiskies shows above (but not all) are excellent or even legendary.  Half the bottles shown above would bring 4 figures or close at auction now.  Thanks to MAO,  http://myannoyingopinions.com for pointing out that this joke wasn't obvious at all.  So what does that say?  Marketing and the whiskey itself are two totally separate things.  Remember that).

Given the arc of the historical reviews of how stigmatized minorities appear in whiskey advertising in the USA on this blog over the past week, it's probably no surprise that my topic now is women.  It's a rich vein and I've decided to address the major themes in whiskey advertising about women spanning over a century - so this will be a long post.  In it you'll see reflected the major historical trends affecting women like a mirror in ads for whiskey that were primarily aimed at men (except fascinatingly, the few times they weren't).  It will probably come as no surprise that women were objectified through much of America's whiskey history and that they emerged as loci of power with the rise of the women's movement.  You might be surprised, however, to find that the return of whiskey's popularity is associated with advertising themes that are about pretending the women's movement never happened.

19th Century part 1: Women as Goddesses and Nurturers

In the 19th century women in public art tended to be depicted as classical allegorical figures (i.e. women who represented an embodied ideal).  As such women were depicted everywhere, often in classical dress (or nakedness) representing abstract ideas.  For example we had women on coins (and the iconic Statue of Liberty) as Liberty herself.  In front of the courthouse a woman wore a blindfold and held the scales of justice.  Given the agricultural roots of whiskey production it should come as no surprise that some early whiskey labels depict a a female who evokes the classical representation of Ceres or Demeter, goddess of grain:

Bininger's Bourbon circa 1860 Library of Congress

Roman Goddess Ceres 1852

Roman carving of Ceres - Goddess of Grain.

In the Clark's Pure Rye advertisement depicted at left the assembled drinkers hail a Gibson-girl dressed respectable woman who is labelled "Miss Peoria".  She is an allegorical depiction of the city of Peoria, Illinois (the city where the popular brand "Clark's Pure Rye" was made in the 19th century up until Prohibition shut it down and ended Peoria's run as one of the biggest whiskey producing cities in the world.  Another clue to her allegorical status is that, like the Statue of Liberty, she towers over the men.

Such allegorical depictions could be salacious too (and often were).  Allegorical figures were often depicted in the nude - as the image of naked female bathers here in this ad for Old Sunny Brook (shows below).  The nude bathers are depicted in a way that evokes the classical and Renaissance depictions of the 3 graces:






Other, more chaste depictions of women in the 19th century whiskey advertising centered on the perception of whiskey as medicinal and women as the mothering, nursing, care givers who administered whiskey as a domestic curative:

 

On the left, Mom administers Duffy's Pure Malt Whiskey as medicine to Grandpa.  Duffy's was a famous case of snake-oil like lie-filled advertising.  Malt whiskey was presented a nutritional powerhouse cure-all of disease.  Food and drug legislation got its start in the outcry against such exaggerated claims.  On the right, Deep Springs Whiskey makes a huge Confederate patriotic play.  General Robert E. Lee salutes astride his famous white charger "Traveller" while being hailed by Grey-coat Confederate troops waving the stars and bars.  In the foreground a field nurse administers a libation of Deep Springs Bourbon from a freshly opened case to a felled soldier with a bloody bandage on his leg.  These depictions show women in the classic role of nurturing care giver.

19th Century part 2: The Saloon Culture of Prostitution

However, in a Madonna/Whore dichotomy, women were also depicted as sexually loose seductresses in 19th century whiskey advertising as well.  As Fred Minnick makes clear in his masterful history of the subject, "Whiskey Women", a growing synergy between prostitution and whiskey drinking in the exploding saloon culture of the Wild West and later 19th Century culture of the East was becoming both culturally and economically ascendant:

"During the Gold Rush, taverns, brothels, and casinos popped up all over California, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming, and they all employed women to “please” men and sell whiskey. In what Wild West historian Cy Martin called the “Great Whore Invasion” of 1850– 51, 3 California bar owners ordered prostitutes from Chile, China, Mexico, and France. More than 2,000 women arrived in San Francisco in 1850... Once they arrived at their employer, depending on the establishment, the women became waitresses to serve prospectors working the streams and mines with gold to burn. The average waitress/ prostitute earned $ 15 to $ 25 a week, but she also made a commission on selling whiskey. At San Francisco’s Bella Union, thirty “pretty waiter girls” worked in the upper and lower sections of the casino and encouraged men to buy liquor, while arousing them. The more they drank, the more she earned. One French prostitute earned $ 50,000 in a year, likely thanks to her ability to keep men drinking. Collectively , the income of these women probably exceeded many states’ gross revenue. ... In 1857 New York, sex-hungry men spent more than $ 7 million at brothels or “nearly as much as the annual municipal expenditure of New York City.” Visitors spent nearly as much on wine and liquor, $ 2.08 million, as they did on the prostitutes, $ 3.1 million. 5 The liquor and prostitution business rivaled any moneymaking venture of its time. If a tavern did not offer sexual services, it stood to lose customers."

Minnick, Fred (2013-10-01). Whiskey Women Potomac Books Inc..

Whiskey advertising of the period showed this aspect of the relationship between whiskey and women:

Old Crow Ad card depicting prostitutes smoking - 1870.  Library of Congress

This ad (left) for Belle of Nelson Bourbon (1870s), depicts women in an oriental harem.  Such depictions were extremely popular in the orientalist artistic traditions of the latter half of the 19th century.  An example of a late 19th century orientalist painting by Hungarian popular artist Gyula Tornai is shown below.  Such images represented an immoral sybaritic sexual free for all - code for the saloon brothel culture referenced by Fred Minnick in "Whiskey Women".  However, by placing this in a cultural reference to a remote region referenced by art and literature it, like allegorical art, could bypass the prudish prohibitions against the exhibition of the female body and be acceptably publicly displayed.

"In The Harem" - Gyula Tornai late 19th century

Evoking both the harem and the saloon bordello, this tin painted sign "A Nightcap of Wilson""'That's All'" (left) depicts two women partaking of shots of Wilson's Rye Whiskey (in the era before it became a blend).  The standing figure is wearing a gauzy nightgown that makes it clear she is virtually naked.  In the late 19th century the meaning of such a depiction would have been clearly sexual.

The 1903 advertisement for Red Top Rye - a Kentucky rye distributed through Cincinnati OH (right across the Ohio River) shows a pair of free spirited women apparently dressed as Can Can dancers.  Their wild spinning dance evokes the head spinning drunk of imbibing alcohol.  Their red flowers, exposed legs and wild abandon clearly communicate the sexual abandon of the saloon culture as well:


However the wild abandon of the saloon culture would become its undoing and would usher in the cultural backlash that culminated in Prohibition.  Fred Minnick, in "Whiskey Women" describes this movement thus:

"... towns across the country were filled with wives losing husbands to liquor and brothels. The country’s mood toward the saloon became a “social evil” where wild women forced men into intoxication and adultery.  ... it was much easier for society to blame the women, often forced sex slaves, and the whiskey than to hold the men accountable for their actions. When answering to their wives for their infidelity , the men would say, “The whiskey made me do it.” This growing concern led to cities cracking down on prostitution and passing prohibitive liquor laws. In 1892 time, it was much easier for society to blame the women, often forced sex slaves, and the whiskey than to hold the men accountable for their actions. When answering to their wives for their infidelity , the men would say, “The whiskey made me do it.” This growing concern led to cities cracking down on prostitution and passing prohibitive liquor laws. In 1892 the San Francisco City Council passed a law prohibiting liquor sales in theaters, effectively destroying Bella Union’s ability to attract clientele . Newspapers ran front-page editorials, calling prostitution a “parent of evil . It is not only a social evil, it is a sanitary evil, and is even becoming a political evil.”

"The best governmental fight against prostitution was temperance. Stopping the saloons and the ladies of the night became the battle cry for the temperance movement. It was also a marketing point for the suffrage movement, with the Woman’s Journal calling woman suffrage a cure for prostitution."

Minnick, Fred (2013-10-01). Whiskey Women (p. 61). Potomac Books Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Repeal - Women As Evidence of Class, Not Objects of Sex

In the aftermath of Prohibition, advertisers were careful to steer clear of any representation of sexuality.  Women generally hardly appear on any adverting for whiskey from Repeal until the advent of the sexual revolution in the early 1960s.  Men are depicted drinking, either alone or in clubby groups.  The few exceptions show women as chaste respectable companions in party or dinner environs that emphasize high class and good manners.

 The classy Manhattan cocktail - as presented in this National Distiller's advertisement of 1934, the year immediately following Repeal:  "At the fashionable places today, the Manhattan cocktail is again the correct apertif, just as it was in the days of Martin's Sherry's, and the old Beaux Arts when it was made with authentic Spring Garden Rye.  Aging for you through all the slow years in charred white oak barrels, this fine whiskey now comes to you in a mellow blend which has taken on added character and distinction.  Penn-Maryland Company, Inc. William Street, New York"
The women are shown as classy accompaniment for the handsome well dressed men.  This is also the case in the 1930 English ad for Dewar's White Label shown below.  The tag line hints give us their conversation - turgid and snobby as it is, given their extreme high class and well-dressed for dinner-ness (white tie for him).

 

The 1950s Fleischmann's Blended Whiskey Campaign: Early Signs of a Coming Sexual Thaw.

The 60s and 70s: rise of the Feminist Movement and the Sexual Revolution.

With the advent of birth control ("The Pill" was licensed by the FDA in 1960) social norms about sexuality transformed extremely rapidly.  Old notions about saving one's virginity for marriage quickly seemed outdated.  Advancing notions of women's liberation became conflated with sexual freedom.  This movement ended up represented in film, literature, and advertising.  Ads began to show men and women in close proximity with clear and present sexual tension.  Women were now sexually available, which was awesome - but they were empowered - which was confusing.  And, increasingly, they didn't want to be drinking whiskey at all.  The huge demographic shift away from whiskey towards white spirits which proved so devastating to the whiskey business world-wide began, seemingly, as soon as women became empowered.

The sexual subtext of whiskey advertising in this period is made textually explicit in this 1968 ad for Old Bernheim's I.W. Harper (left - with the DSP-KY-1 designation proudly shouted out right below the product's name on the ad).  The ad features a photo of a delighted attractive woman looking straight into the camera.  The tag line screams "Make It With Harper".  Presumably the girl's name is Harper and "Make It" refers to the sexual act.  Or am I just reading too much into it?  Overt and inappropriate sexuality was the centerpiece of the Imperial blended whiskey "Imp" ad campaign too.  The tag line was the text "it brings out the imp in all of us" at the bottom of each ad in the series' block of text.  But the photo, with the woman wearing a choker with a devilish imp medallion, shows that the imp is the sexually available woman herself.  The clear implication is that plying the modern sexually liberated woman with whiskey will produce some kind of love slave that "he can call his own".  It's an inversion of feminism's appropriation of sexual liberation into a kind of sexual slavery or ownership on the part of the male reader who, presumably was feeling a little defensive about this feminism stuff.  It's worth noting that this was the last national ad campaign for Imperial - a venerable Schenley brand - before it disappeared into the world of ultra-bottom shelf well whiskey where it has languished ever since.

Late 1960s-Early 70s - White Horse Pretends To Be Feminist to Get Men Laid.  But Empowered Women Might Not Be Whiskey Drinkers.

Hyper-futuristic 70s whiskey?  Yes Seagrams attempted to deal with the rampant turn to white spirits by attempting to float the early Repeal era category of light whiskey.  It was a rapid failure.  We can see the feminist subtext in the body English here as well.  They are unisex - in identical jump suits.  But she sits in poise and power - appreciating the majesty of the Universe.  He is a dork with his back to the show, nervously attending her.

All of these women's liberation period whisky ads reek of the stink of failure.  The whisky industry attempted to equate feminine power with the masculine choice of drinking brown but it didn't work at all.  Women led the charge towards white spirits and utterly crushed the whisky industry... like a bug.

But this inversion of sexual power dynamics didn't last for long.

(Update - these last two sections have been re-written to incorporate the perceptive analysis Susanna Skiver Barton provided in the comments.  Thanks to Susanna for taking the time to engage.)

The 80s through today - Women As Sexual Prizes To Be Won.  And finally just disposable faceless aspects of male self-affirmation. 

In an odd way it's like a full circle.  The Evan Williams beauties are like allegorical figures - beautiful embodiment of the whiskey itself like the farm girl reaper of 1860 was the embodiment of Ceres - goddess of grain.  But it's just another step away from women being depicted as real people.  It, thus, wouldn't be long until we dispense with any shred of personhood for the woman at all.  With this late 2000s ad campaign from Jim Beam we have faceless tight cropped image of female sexuality posing with the whiskey.  Sexuality accents the product like it would in a fashion ad.

A fashion ad?  Yes - like this notorious Dolce & Gabbana pseudo rape ad.  It's all about male power and the woman is a silent victim - robbed even of her power to shock or evoke pity because she so damned fashionable and immaculately put together.  Male power is hot and female submission is a style decision - like whether to wear leather.


In this cultural environment it's not hard to see how we might end up here (on a recent Dewar's spot)... on a dark road late at night with our protagonist being saved by the Baron.  Then ending up in a bar where this lady comes walking up:
Oh NO!  It's an overweight, and thus horribly unattractive woman!  She is clearly not at all a part of the century long narrative of female beauty so carefully constructed over decades.  That's unacceptable!  Who will save our poor male protagonist now?

Oh, yay!  It's the Baron!  Here he has diverted the overweight woman away from our protagonist; "fallen on the grenade" in the parlance.  This grotesque: the cruelty to depict the potential affections of a an otherwise attractive person who who happens to be overweight is what drove this ad over the line as politically incorrect discrimination.

The controversy over this spot was well documented on Grub Street:
 http://www.grubstreet.com/2013/12/dewars-meet-the-baron-ad.html


Later we get to see that the Baron and the protagonist share the reward: a date with the "Swedish bikini team" of ultra-hot blondes.


The whole campaign is "hosted" by the lingerie and fur clad woman you see at right.  In a series of object lessons (the spots), this lingerie-clad hottie is going to teach you to be a real man.  Hint: it involves disrespecting women and embracing some very antique notions of behavior.  That socialization lesson is underscored by fashion and facial hair cues taken from the Victorian period.  (For more on this pulled campaign read this fawning piece:  http://www.theruggedmale.com/dewars-the-drinking-mans-scotch-claire-forlani/).

Now, thanks to Johanne McInnis (The Whisky Lassie) that particularly offensive ad campaign from Dewars was pulled - but that it was even produced and then released shows that our Zeitgeist is at least partially here:  Feminism took whiskey away; whiskey's return means feminism's negation. Women in this ad campaign have no autonomous reality.  They are just affirmation for the men in these ads.  Meanwhile, in the real world,  women are becoming an important market for whiskey.  Yet, much of the whiskey marketing feels like it's giving life lessons to sadly clueless men.  Significantly, women in these recent ads are not about - as they were in the 30s-50s - class, or - as they were in the 60s-70s - immediate sex potential.  Now they have become accessories to male empowerment.  The point here isn't that women will have sex with you if you give them whisky.  It's that women will let you be in the dominant position - as if the women's movement of the 60s and 70s had never happened.  Whiskey is presented as a cultural vestige of a time before feminism - and a magical way to transport you there.

We end with this 1998 Jim Beam ad: "Get In Touch With Your Masculine Side".  I.e., as a man, connect with lust, objectify women, and drink your Bourbon as if feminism had never happened.  Viewed from  a woman's perspective, drinking Bourbon is being like a man.  I.e. a woman drinking Bourbon is like a woman wearing a man's shirt or his underwear.  Sexy cross-gender dress up.  Bottom line, whisky is still depicted as utterly male.  A woman drinking it is surrendering her sex and choosing to subjugate herself to maleness.

Socially, "we've come a long way, Baby" but we still have far to go when it comes to depicting women in a mature way in whiskey advertising.  The last century and a half has seen tremendous advances, from suffrage through the women's rights movement.  But women are still paid pennies on the dollar compared to men and women are still depicted as objects and accessories and symbols of sex, rather than actual people.  They are still shown as feminine visitors to an exclusive male enclave of whisky which ignores the fact that women are a real and important growing market for whiskey.  In real life, women are empowered in the whiskey world - but they have not found a voice in the way whiskey is advertised yet at all.  Whisky, of course, isn't a magical elixir that puts women in a traditional role.  It's actually a tasty drink that women largely invented (at least according to Fred Minnick's Whiskey Women).  I wonder when it will start to be sold that way?

Left to right: the author, his father, Robert, his sister, Rhea, and his son, Ben.

I was raised by my father, Robert. My mother, Baila, died of cancer a few days after my 8th birthday and my sister, Rhea, six years older than I graduated from high school within a couple of years and left for college. My father taught me to cook, and to use tools to build. He taught me to love art and culture and history and beautiful things. My father taught me to love beauty. He also taught me to love science and learning and to put things to empirical test. That's because my father is a scientist.

My father is a technically a medical doctor, and actively saw patients through his professional life - but that was always on the side of his first love: research. He researched diabetes, but much of his life was dominated by researching medical methods themselves - how hospitals run and how this impacted the HMO model. He started doing this research in the 1960s with the father of the HMO concept itself: Sidney Garfield; the man who invented the concept of opt-in prepaid health care on the LA Aqueduct and Grand Coolee dam projects in the 1930s.

Robert Feldman, MD and Sidney Garfield, MD in 1972

My father brought this love of experimentation into the home and into our culinary life together. We made pickles in the refrigerator, cooked together inventions of our own. These were often amalgams of traditional Eastern European Jewish foods that my father learned from his father, Jacob. Jacob's wife, Rose had become sick and was in a hospital for years when my father was a boy. My father lived and cooked with his father - without a mother as I did.

My father married a my mother, a woman who became an artist and a painter, and they built a beautiful home in the Berkeley, CA hills. They filled it with luminous art and beautiful rugs and plants. They traveled and explored, both physically and intellectually, the cultures of the world. Later, my father and I continued this sense of aesthetics and appreciation. We had trips to France, to Italy, to Spain and Canada, Austria, Switzerland, Germany and more. We went to cathedrals and monasteries, castles and museums. We went on the pilgrimage of Santiago de Compostela. Along the way we had fantastic food, wine and spirits. We ate at 3 star restaurants on occasion. At home we participated in the Berkeley born nouvelle cuisine revolution. I was taken to Alice Waters' restaurant and given a salad of baby greens and warm goat cheese while still an adolescent - a formative experience.

My father and I collected together. We purchased, loved, and shared Persian rugs, Japanese Imari porcelains, and coins. Coins and medals, numismatic lore and passionate shared study, research, investment and labor dominated years of our time. Another pathway into cultural appreciation and tangible connection with the wider world.

Thanks, Dad. You have taught me love and lust for life! On this Father's Day I raise my glass to you with the finest drams. You took the raw new make that was me and aged it lovingly in a series of well seasoned casks and made of me a spirit worth drinking.

(originally posted June 17, 2012).

11 Years of Old Weller Antique from 1998 (left) to 2008 (right).

We, however, tasted them blind - self poured from these flasks marked only by a number.

1940 BIB (photo from Bonham's)

The brand, "Old Weller" harkens back to Pappy Van Winkle's original employer, William LaRue Weller who started his famous whiskey company in Louisville, KY in 1849.  The legendary inventor of the wheated whiskey mash bill (where wheat is used instead of rye as the flavoring grain, above a corn base and bit of malt to add enzymes).  Stitzel-Weller sold the wheated mash bill in a number of expressions, notably Rebel Yell, Cabin Still, and Old Fitzgerald.  Sam Cecil (in The Evolution of Kentucky Whiskey) reports that "Old W.L. Weller" (along with Mammoth Cave and Cabin Still) were brands that Pappy Van Winkle bottled after W. L. Weller's death in 1899 and before partnering with A. Ph. Stitzel during Prohibition using whiskey sourced from the Stitzel Bros.distillery in Louisville and the Old Joe distillery in Anderson.  Looking over old auction records I see the Old W. L Weller Special Reserve expression at 100 proof (as a Bottled In Bond expression) in the Repeal era (see photo at left taken from the October 2013 Bonham's NY Whiskey sale).  The "Old Weller" brand name doesn't seem to appear until the gold veined paper label incarnation apparently born in the early 1970s.  The earliest ad I could find showing it is from 1979 (below):

Ad from 1979 talks about the gold veining. The word "Antique", however, is absent.

Mike (right center) and Claire Doorden, (left center), welcome guests

Josh Camerote pours himself a blind.

Jo

Old Weller Antique 7 yo. 53.5% abv. 1998 Stitzel-Weller.  Blind #4

Color:  medium amber
Nose:  Honeyed, fruity, oily, mossy, flinty.  Hint of tobacco.
Palate:  Sweet, fruity honeyed.  Maple, treacle shoo fly pie.  Cherry, citrus.
My score:  87  Mike's composite score:  87.

Old Weller Antique 7 yo. 53.5% abv. 1999 Buffalo Trace.  Blind #9

Color: dark medium amber
Nose:  honey toffee, cherry, cola, juicyfruit, oil, sandalwood.
Palate:  Intense sweet sandalwood and rancio.  Chewy mouth feel and long sweet oaky finish
My score: 91  Mike's composite Score: 92

Old Weller Antique 7 yo. 53.5% abv. 2000 Buffalo Trace.  Blind #1

Color: Dark amber
Nose: maple syrup juicyfruit.  Brown sugar toffee
Palate:  honey, malty toffee.  Cornflower, apricot bark.  Cherry, root beer
My score:  92  Mike's composite score: 92

Old Weller Antique 7 yo. 53.5% abv. 2001 Buffalo Trace.  Blind #8

Color:  dark amber (darkest yet)
Nose: Beautiful nose, floral cardboard
Palate: Honey, ripe cantaloupe, Turkish delight. Candy oak perfume
My score: 89  Mike's composite score: 88

Old Weller Antique 7 yo. 53.5% abv. 2002 Buffalo Trace.  Blind #2

Color:  dark amber (a shade darker than blind #1).
Nose light dusty musty oaky malt cherry cocoa.  Trace of iodine.
Palate, sweet cherry cola, char, tannin bitterness.
My score: 87  Mike's composite score:  87

Old Weller Antique 7 yo. 53.5% abv. 2003 Buffalo Trace.  Blind #11

Color:  dark medium amber
Nose:  Cardboard, malt toffee rancio brown sugar
Palate: Candied, toffeed, sandalwood perfumed glory.
My score: 91  Mike's composite score: 91

Old Weller Antique 7 yo. 53.5% abv. 2004 Buffalo Trace.  Blind #6

Color:  dark amber like 3
Nose: floral sandalwood, cherry, cardboard
Palate: Sweet, cherry, toffee, char and oak tannin.  Longer oaky maple finish with a bitter edge.
 My score 86 (bitter finish knocked it down)  Mike's composite score:  87

Old Weller Antique 7 yo. 53.5% abv. 2005 Buffalo Trace.  Blind #3

Color: dark amber, shade darker than 2 and 1
Nose: Oily, char. A little meaty
Palate: Fruity.  Tiny bit sour
My score: 88  Mike's Composite score: 88

Old Weller Antique 7 yo. 53.5% abv. 2006 Buffalo Trace.  Blind #7

Color: dark medium amber
Nose: Cardboard cherry juicyfruit
Palate:  honey, cherry toffee juicyfruit.  Oak tannin
My score: 88  Mike's composite score: 87

Old Weller Antique 7 yo. 53.5% abv. 2007 Buffalo Trace.  Blind #10

Color: almost as dark as 8/3
Nose: Cardboard, dark, sweet toffee, char, a hint of mildew
Palate: Sweet, cherry, cocoa, dark malt, cocoa, root beer.  Fruity, dark brown and delicious.  Char & edge of bitter char on finish.
My score: 90  Mike's composite score: 89

Old Weller Antique 7 yo. 53.5% abv. 2008 Buffalo Trace.  Blind #5

Color: light medium amber
Nose: Linseed nose, honey, yellow flowers
Palate:  honey, treacle, mint notes, honeysuckle,
My score: 88  Mike's composite score 87


Conclusion:  The Stitzel-Weller in the group wasn't the highest rated and it wasn't apparent to me at the time that it was the Stitzel-Weller one.  I like to think I can see some of the tell tale signs in my tasting notes and that if I were really paying attention I might have caught it.  Coulda Woulda Shoulda.  The bottom line is that it's all delicious Bourbon - with some significant variation between a dark and malty rich variety and a lighter amber more floral and fruity variety.  These varieties don't seem to correlate with year at all.  I suspect it's about barrel variation and rickhouse location.  While my 3 top rated ones were all dark and rich, the lighter ones were excellent drinking in their own right.  And notice that the Stitzel-Weller one was one of the lightest ones.

It makes a lot of sense to compare these experiences of tasting an extensive group of dusty Old Weller Antiques against the stuff you can buy today.  It's extremely popular and lauded.  So popular, however, that it has gone on allocation (i.e. a rationed limited supply to distributes).  It can still be readily found - particularly earlier in each month.  It's the same Buffalo Trace stuff, just now without an age statement.  Does that matter?  I tasted the bottle of Old Weller Antique that I have open at the moment (purchased late 2013) the following day at home - in the open (i.e. not blind).  This was a completely different tasting.  But just one day later the flavors of the paper label OWAs were fresh in my mind.

New Old Weller Antique 107 - no age statement.  53.5% abv. Bottle purchased 2013

Color: Medium light amber
Nose:  Vanilla, floral, hints of mint and lilac.  Light linseed oil/cardboard note.
Palate:  Opening is hotter and less malty than any of the examples tasted at Mike's.  It is grassy sweet with corn and apricot-citrus and cherry fruity notes along with some acetone notes.  The mid palate turns to oak and char, but with a more bitter presentation.
My score: 82

Conclusion.  It's still a wonderful Bourbon for the money, but it has lost a measure of depth of flavor, malty richness, and candied intensity.  With youth it has gained floral, herbal, and fruity notes - but the overall balance is thinner and less lush.

Phil Simon checks Mike's treasures

Phil Simon brought treasures of his own too.

The after party to this event was epic.  Major events included Phil Simon bringing a bottle of the legendary Hirsch Rye 13.  This epic bottle will be the topic of it's own post soon, but for the moment here are quick tasting notes taken at the event (when my palate was, admittedly, a bit toasted):

Hirsch 13 rye 47.8 % Medley bottled for Priess by Julian Van Winkle

Color: Dark coppery amber
Nose: caramel toffee, soft lanolin, cut daisy, cilantro flower
Palate;  Gentle, effervescent, malty, caramel, brown sugar, rum rancio, herbal, cinnamon.  Complex, rich, and superb.

Hanging out on the Internet Bourbon forums you meet and befriend a lot of interesting people.  I love meeting these people in real life.  I've met Reuven Weinstein - a master dusty hunter out of New York - a number of times, but recently I had the great pleasure of spending the whole afternoon with him and his lovely wife Ilana (who was his public face of Facebook for a long time) at his home in Rockaway Park / Belle Harbor.   Ostensibly a house warming - the house has a real story of destruction and rebuilding.  The Weinsteins just recently moved into it.  There was a ton of delicious home made salads, hot wings, and world class smoked BBQ brisket.  Just delicious.  And there was also whiskey - lots of it.  The very best stuff.  Because Reuven is a master whiskey hunter.  The pictures and tasting notes below speak for themselves - but they aren't the reason for the post.  Not at all - but that will come later.

FYI - a different take on this smorgasbord was written up by my friend (and partner in crime) Steven Zeller, The Smoky Beast here:
http://smokybeast.blogspot.com/2014/07/rock-rock-rockaway-beach-tasting.html

Reuven is well known in the American whiskey world.  He is a prodigy - a talent at entering neighborhoods that others wouldn't bother with and somehow coming out with a trunk full of absolute treasures from the liquor stores there.  As Reuven toured us through a small portion of the fabulous whiskies he has collected I was amazed time and again by both the fabulous range - from dusty bourbons and the rarest issues to fabulous single malt - with a focus on spectacular and hard to find silent distilleries - and also by our hosts tremendous generosity.  What we tasted that day is not to be forgotten.  And it was but a peek into his fantastic collection.  Which only underscores a curious and oft remarked on fact: Reuven doesn't drink whiskey.  Nope.  He enjoys nosing it.  He produced a 1984 vintage single cask Yamazaki which he particularly enjoyed nosing.  I must concur - it had the most remarkable nose:  a complex and evolving aroma that started with dark cocoa with a hint of anthracite coal combustion (just a hint) and then moving into rich fig pudding baking in rum, and then on to a rich earthiness made farmy by a bit of animal skins.  I could nose that thing all day too.  But ultimately I want to take a sip.  I suspect Reuven will too, someday soon.  I can see the curiosity burning in him.  Meanwhile, his personal code and clean habits keeps him holding back. After Reuven and Ilana served a killer spread of sweet smoky BBQ brisket and lovely home-made sauced hot wings, with homemade slaw, potato salad, green salad and all the fixings,  I made the fatal error of pouring an award-winning Cotswald village Sloe Gin as an after dinner apertif.  Wrong stuff for that crowd!
But, before that happened a lot of whisky got tasted

When I encountered the spread of whiskey on the table my eyes lit on two things right away.  One The Parker Heritage 27 year old legendary PHC2 which I had never tried before.  And right next to it was a 1980s vintage octagonal Wild Turkey 8 year old age statement 1.75 Liter handle.  NOW WE'RE TALKING!  Parker Heritage 2nd edition 27 year old is a legendary statement product from Heaven Hill.  2008 Malt Advocate Magazine's American Whiskey of the Year.  I had tried and enjoyed a Wild Turkey 101 8 yo octagonal handle from the early 90s with Mike Jasinski a little while back.   Lately I've been going deeper with Wild Turkey, and there's a strong argument for the 8 year old WT101 of the 70s-90s as being one my favorite primary expression (i.e. not barrel proof) bourbons.

Parker Heritage 27 48%

Color:  Dark amber
Nose:  Rich rancio malt, sweet sherry nutty rancio, mead honey, deep iterated bourbon vanilla pods: sweetness.  Then tempered by buttery notes and oak incense.
Palate:  Sweet honey malt opening. Waxing into acetone-citrus with ripe cantaloupe, salted caramel with tannin spiciness on the finish.
Light texture on the mouth feel but big spicy finish.  This stuff is a lot like really old cognac with its darkly vinously sugared and oake loaded luxury.  Among the darkest, richest, most indulgent Bourbons I've ever tasted.  A really memorable pour (tasted both at the event and with a 1oz sample tasted at time of writing).

*****

Wild Turkey 101 8 1987 - Octagonal handle 50.5%

This is excellent Bourbon that I've been tasting in a number of contexts.  Here, it's a clear object lesson in the dangers of drinking something you really like immediately after an epic, world class whiskey.  Let's just say, the right time to enjoy a WT101 8yo age statement dusty is NOT immediately after tasting PHC2 27 yo.  Sweet and spicy as decently complex as WT101 was back in the day, it can't hold a candle to the glory cask selected wonder of that PCH2.  It's an unfair juxtaposition.

Color: medium coppery amber
Sweet and comparatively gentle stuff.   Nose:  warm and malty with herbal wafts and a oak sandalwood essence undercurrent.
Palate:  malty juicyfruit opening with both magic marker and candy dish notes.  The mid palate expands into brown sugar, herbal rye spice, warm honey, and sweet alfalfa turning into rye herbal spiciness and then a gentle oak tannin grip with a moderately long finish. Decent density in the mouth.  A perennial favorite, but completely shown the door in that head to head.

****

Lombard Jewels of Scotland Brora 22 50%

Distilled 1982, Bottled 2004, 22 years old.

Color: Gold
Nose:  Heather, honey, waxy
Palate:  Intense honey, turkish delight (powdered sugar, fruity, nutty)., paraffin, heather florals, meadow grass.  Not peaty or farmy.  Lightly tannin spicy finish is the only hint of age.  A heathery honey highland beauty.  With the waxy floral notes this came off like a Clynelish.  Light and beautiful - but oddly not complex considering it's age and method of manufacture.   I could sip and enjoy this one all day.  A true "session Scotch".  This bottling is all about the sunny, floral, honeyed beautiful side of Brora.  Missing is the earthy farmy animal manure aspects, the peat, smoke, and darkness you often see with that distillery.  I greatly enjoyed it.

****
(borderline *****)

Highland Park 25 48.1% abv.

Color: light medium amber with coppery glints.

Nose: Heathery wild meadow florals open up for rich malty rancio riding on dusky animal farmy warmth and some underlying peat and sea coast.  Fig cake and old sherry and leather notes play in the middle where the rancio lives.  As it opens, safflower oil and then marigold yellow florals join the heather, sherry, coastal light peat aroma show.

Palate: Sweet and rich on opening with black raisins, stewed black figs and malt sugars tempered by a whiff of brine.  The expansion brings vinous dark sherry notes of purple fruits and leather and tobacco.  It waxes into rich dark oak a satisfying warmth of gentle well integrated coastal peat and tails into a long, sweet, spicy finish with wood and smoke wrapped around the herbal tail of the malt and the lingering sweet of sherry rancio.  This is a full bore beauty of significant complexity and fills your mouth with a tour of the wide gamut of Scotch Whisky flavors - all of them.  Floral, honeyed, sherried, peated, and coastal all combine to make this beautiful spirit.  Like the 12 and the 18 - but with the darkness and intensity cranked up with maturity.  What a beauty.  Impressively, this stood up to the competition on the table with aplomb.

*****

Hirsch Single Cask Canadian 12 53.1%

The rear label only says Candian Whiskey * Single Cask * 12 years old * Lot 98-1 Bottled by Hirsch Distilleries Lawrenceburg, KY for Priess Imports, Ramona CA and bears a sticker in Japanese for sale in the Japanese market.  Rare and interesting as the odd-man-out bottling in the brief but now legendary association of Julian Van Winkle III's bottling operation with Priess Imports which had taken over the A.H. Hirsch lot of 1974 Bourbon from Michters and had started picking up odd lots and bottling those without the "A.H.".

Steve Zeller toasts w PHC2. Anthony Colasacco, right.

Color: light gold.
Nose: honey, herbal cedar with pencil shavings and mineral flint.
Palate, sweet and lean and honey-floral on entry.  Light and clean on the expansion where herbal spice, light clean mineral, and  a bit of grapefruit fruit and also pith astringency take over.  It tastes like a good Canadian blend of a corn base and rye flavoring whiskey.  I wonder what it actually is and which of Canada's distilleries it came from.  My guess would be Alberta distillery.  It has some of those Alberta Premium whiskey flavors.  Very refined for what it is.  Nicely balanced.

****

This somewhat legendary odd-ball bottling was a housewarming gift of Anthony Colosacco who is best known for his utterly fantastic whiskey bar in Mt, Kisco:  Pour Mt. Kisco.  It's the kind of bar where you can get a flight of Pappy Van Winkle Family Reserve - or all 3 Rittenhouse 21, 23, and 25.
http://www.pourmtkisco.com/


Pappy was well represented on the table with a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle Family Reserve 15 from 2006 and also a 2006 or prior (pre-laser stamped) bottle of Van Winkle 12 Lot B that Ari Susskind had been involved in locating.  Great guys and a great whiskey.  Soft and gentle Stitzel-Weller wheater flavors: mellow cherry root beer sandalwood incensed oaky loveliness.

Ari Susskind (left) Reuven Weinstein (right)

As the party was winding down, our host brought out nicely full glencairns with a mystery blind.  The aroma and flavor were clearly in the lightly sherried highland Scottish malt category.  Steve and I bothed initially guessed a  Macallan dusty.  I had to pull a chair aside and really focus.  My quick notes read:

http://img2.thewhiskyexchange.com/l/cvlob.1977v1.jpg

Color:  amber
Nose, floral incense, hard candy, fig cake, sherry, leather

Palate. Intense (50+% abv) Honeyed, minted fig melon candy black plum with some apple skin waxes into big oak and spicy heat.  Hint of clean highland peat or just big oak tannins.  Maybe some active Spanish or French oak going on?  Inchgower?

That intense perfumed floral candy aspect of front, combined with a some of that unripe apple tartness put me in the mind of Inchgower - but also An Cnoc, Balblair, and Tomatin.  Yet this particular whisky clearly wasn't any of those.  I was purely stumped.  Later that evening Reuven texted the reveal:  It was

Convalmore 36 - 1977 Diageo office 2013 realease 58% abv.

(notes above) *****
A retail listing of this whisky at TWE (where the picture is linked from):
http://www.thewhiskyexchange.com/P-22036.aspx

Convalmore is one of the legendary silent stills of Scotland, founded in 1893 and closed in the glut days of 1985.  The story is well told on Malt Madness:
http://www.maltmadness.com/whisky/convalmore.html

When I got home I had to put it up against  this 10 cl sample of Connoisseur's Choice Convalmore 17 40% Gordon & MacPhail 1981-1998 (bottled by Van Der Boog, Holland - and brought to a recent tasting by my friend Bram Hoogendijk - thanks Bram!)

Convalmore 17 40% Gordon & MacPhail Connoisseur's Choice 1981-1998

" I'd say it is most likely from the wood given that it's a mix of european and american oak aged for over 36 years. At that sort of age you can definitely get a certain amount of phenolic extraction from the wood which can come through as medicinal/spicy/smoky/menthol in varying degrees. I doubt that Convalmore had any regular or meaningful peating level during the mid-late 70s. The ones I've tried from that time reveal it to have a spicy/herbaceous quality which I feel is very much part of the house style and derives more from the distillate. Anyway, I'm very much in agreement about the 36yo, it's an absolutely stonking dram!"