Review: Paul-Marie & Fils Pineau des Charentes, Tres Vieux Fut #3
You may be looking at that headline and saying, damn that’s a lot of French. What the hell is Pineau des Charentes, and what is a tres vieux fut? The easy one is the latter part: Tres Vieux Fut is “Very Old Cask,” and this is the third release from Paul-Marie & Fils of this…
Tasting Report: Wines of La Mancha, Spain, 2011 Releases
Thanks to Don Quixote, just about everyone has heard of La Mancha, but where is it? And what about the wines? It’s a wide area that encompasses the dead center of Spain, and as the largest winegrowing region in the nation, it is home to a large variety of wines. 75 percent of the grapes…
Review: Kilchoman Spring 2011 Release
Kilchoman’s quarterly Scotch whiskey releases continue with this Spring 2011 release which is just now hitting our shores. It is a vatting of 70% three-year-old whisky from first-fill Bourbon barrels plus 30% four-year-old whiskey from first-fill Bourbon barrels that has been finished in Oloroso sherry barrels for five weeks. Bottling strength is 92 proof. The…
Tasting Report: 2009 Vintage Port (and Beyond)
The schedule has gotten in the way of transcribing my notes from a solid half-dozen wine events of late, so over the next few weeks expect a flood of wine tasting reports. I’m starting off with this dispatch from Fladgate’s 2009 Vintage Port event, in which the company poured not just samples of the newly…
Review: Demitri’s Bloody Mary Seasonings
You know at a glance that Demitri’s is not your everyday Bloody Mary mix. The color and thickness of A1 steak sauce, Demitri’s is not a “just add vodka” mix. You need tomato juice (and lots of it): A mere 2 ounces of the mix will flavor a full quart of tomato juice or V8.…
Review: Buffalo Trace 2011 Experimental Collection – 1989, 1991, and 1993 Rediscovered Vintages
Buffalo Trace is a monster distillery, with 150,000 barrels of whiskey in inventory at any given time. 1,500 of those are “experimental” — wild stabs at genius from whomever’s manning the still that day — and every now and again Buffalo Trace sifts through the ricks to see what’s out there. Sometimes they even sell…
Review: Craft Distillers Low Gap White Wheat Whiskey
The white whiskey craze continues to rumble along, and artisan producers keep driving the trend. Our friends at Craft Distillers offer this spirit, distilled from Bavarian hard wheat (wheat with a higher protein content) and fermented to an 8.8% alcohol beer. It’s then double-distilled in a copper pot still and bottled at about 90 proof,…
Review: Burnett’s Whipped Cream Vodka
You read that right, and now you have proof that, yes, anything and everything short of asparagus has been used to flavor vodka. Burnett’s is not exactly an artisan, Square One-style producer of delicately-flavored organic vodkas. It’s a mega-bottle shop best known for its pre-mixed cosmos and mojitos. Now, for its whopping 24th vodka flavor…
