Book Review: Bar Menu: 100+ Drinking Food Recipes for Cocktail Hours at Home
For his second book of 2022, Andre Darlington takes a detour from the pleasurable Booze & Vinyl series, taking the dominant focus off making cocktails for a few hundred pages, and examining the possibilities of how higher-end bar food can enhance a proper night in while mixing drinks. Obviously, a few cocktail recipes are included…
Review: Bhakta 50 Armagnac “The Barrel Odyssey” (Barrels 21, 22, and 23)
Spirits mogul Raj Bhakta’s second act has pushed historic age statements into new territory, with most bottles of his Bhakta 50 Armagnac featuring at least some vintage spirit dating to 1868. The rest comes from various barrels dating between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, with the youngest vintage produced in 1970. As such, no…
Review: 2020 Dry Comal Creek Roussanne Texas High Plains
Clean and crisp, you could easily mistake this Texas-born wine for a lighter Rhone valley offering, the wine showing a balanced mix of baked apple, lemon curd, and crushed flowers. It’s those floral notes that endure the longest, with brisk acidity to keep things lively and refreshing — notes of honeysuckle clinging to roof of…
Review: St. George Pear Brandy
Pear brandy isn’t exactly a universal crowd pleaser, but St. George’s expression does plenty with the finicky fruit. A heavily perfumed, linen-laden nose immediately evokes baked pears, with notes of lavender and some cinnamon present. The palate doesn’t stray far, that unflinchingly crisp note of pear balanced by more of that heavy floral quality —…
Review: Michter’s Single Barrel Straight Rye 10 Years Old 2022
Looking forward to Michter’s 10 year old whiskey annual releases? This year you’re getting just one: the 2022 bottling of Michter’s 10 Year Old Rye. As always, this is a single barrel release of sourced Kentucky rye albeit one not bottled at cask strength. The good news is it’s a winning release for the producer,…
Review: Three 2020 Siduri Pinot Noir Wines
Siduri specializes in pinot noir, but from a wide swath of regions — the entire west coast, actually. Today we look at three pinots from the 2020 vintage, two from California and one from Oregon — and all very different. Here’s an instructive look into three very different wines from the same grape and same…
Review: WhistlePig PiggyBack 100% Rye 6 Years Old – Big Papi Edition
There are crazy gimmicks and then there is this special edition of WhistlePig’s PiggyBack 6 year old rye, a whiskey that was formerly most famous for being Dave Pickerell’s final product produced for the Vermont operation. Now, it’s the base for the mother of all stunts: An edition of PiggyBack that is finished with baseball…
Review: GlenAllachie 10 Years Old Cask Strength Batch 7
Chris tasted a bevy of age-stated GlenAllachie expressions back in 2020 when the brand had just begun popping up on U.S. liquor store shelves. The 10 year old, the only cask strength expression in the core range, wasn’t exactly the star of the show at the time, but six iterations later, we’ve been given the…
