Review: Garrison Brothers Lady Bird Bourbon (2024)
Texans love Lady Bird Johnson, but few go so far as to name a product line after the famous First Lady. Garrison Brothers‘ highly limited Lady Bird Bourbon celebrates Lady Bird’s commitment to the environment and Texas wildflowers with its purple wax dip and flower-encrusted bottle band, but what’s inside the bottle is arguably the…
A Tour of Rias Baixas Through 3 Wines, 2024 Releases
Ready to get nerdy on Spanish albarino? Rias Baixas is ground zero for the grape, and today we look at the wine from three different angles, specifically three different subregions within Rias Baixas: O Rosal, Soutomaior, and Val do Salnés. Let’s see what these wines can do. 2022 Terras Gauda O Rosal Rias Baixas –…
Review: Templeton Fortitude Bourbon
Templeton made its modern name in the late aughts with sourced rye, a tribute to the brand’s pre-Prohibition heritage. It wasn’t until 2018 that they began distilling their own whiskeys, including Fortitude Bourbon, which debuted earlier this year as the company’s first house-distilled expression and its first bourbon offering. Named to honor the 352 resilient…
Review: 2021 Booker Wines Harvey & Harriet
We last saw this Paso Robles-born cabernet blend in the 2019 vintage, and two years of time have changed only a little. Though its a budget-priced bottling, the wine pours on layers of dark, black fruit, layered with spices and a late-game apple skin quality that evokes memories of mulled wine. Perhaps a bit thinner…
Review: The Cocktail Collection RTDs, Complete Lineup
Ready for more bottled cocktails? I mean, real cocktails, ready to drink? The Cocktail Collection (“TCC”) uses (mostly) big name brands to serve as the core of its six-product lineup, running the gamut of some of today’s most popular cocktails. There’s no funny business here — like the use of carbonation to make a flat drink into…
Review: Chardonnays of Trapiche and Mascota Vineyards, 2024 Releases
We’ve spent a reasonable amount of time over the 18 months reviewing and investigating all sorts of wines from Argentina, from rose to the country’s flagship varietal malbec and everywhere else in between, and there appears to be no stoppage in the increased velocity of new releases. This time around, we are taking a closer…
Review: Joseph Magnus Murray Hill Club Special Release #4 (2024)
Joseph Magnus’s Murray Hill Club Special Release (aka MHC-SR) line got its start back in 2017, and the company has been trickling out editions ever since. Drew last reviewed the whiskey in 2020. Now, in 2024, a new edition is finally available — only the fourth in the series, all designed to explore the combined…
Review: 2019 Beaulieu Vineyard Rutherford Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon
Without diving too deep into subject matters I am by no means an expert – specifically geography, enology, climatology, and soil sciences – there’s a term that gets bandied about with some frequency: “Rutherford Dust.” On the surface, it seems to be a catch-all for anything emanating from the region, but it turns out there…
