Review: 2017 Trapiche Medalla Malbec Mendoza
Trapiche’s Argentina-born wines are invariably built around value, and this Mendoza malbec is no exception. Pushy up front with extracted, densely black fruit, this wine can be initially off-putting, so give it some time to evolve in the glass. Over time, a brambly character, laced with baking spices, emerges, but there’s so much tannin here…
Book Review: Making Bourbon: A Geographical History of Distilling in Nineteenth-Century Kentucky
A few months ago, we reviewed Karl Raitz’s Bourbon’s Backroads: A Journey through Kentucky’s Distilling Landscape, which provides a thoroughly detailed and data-intensive look at the context during which bourbon came to fruition. Raitz made the hard stuff look effortless: weaving together a narrative involving transportation, government affairs, topography, geography, engineering, architecture, and nearly every…
Review: Filibuster Single Estate Bourbon
We previously encountered Maurertown, Virginia-based Filibuster only briefly back in 2017, when we saw a trio of the craft distillery’s bourbons in a MashBox sampler kit. Now we’re diving deeper into the whiskeys of Filibuster with this unusual offering, a limited edition release billed as a Single Estate bourbon. Per the company, that means “one…
Review: Glen Ranoch Special Reserve Highland Single Malt
Let the record show I have absolutely no problem with going to the budget shelf, nor does anyone else on this staff. Through countless samples of flavored vodkas, beers, gins and whatever else comes our way, we have zero problem venturing forth into anything with a good-faith taste test. Our tongues are not so frail…
Review: Old Fitzgerald Bottled-in-Bond 9 Years Old Spring 2020 Edition
For its latest installment in the twice-a-year Old Fitzgerald Bottled-in-Bond series, Heaven Hill is stepping the age back from 15 to 9 years, its age now in line with the fall 2018 release. This limited edition bottling of the wheated Old Fitzgerald recipe hasn’t disappointed yet, and this first 2020 release — though we’re…
Review: Vegas Baby Vodka
No, it’s not a baby vodka from Las Vegas, silly. It’s Vegas Baby Vodka! Like, you know: Vegas, Baby!!! Moving on. This product is produced by Las Vegans Jennifer Higgins and Megan Wilkes, designed with a particular destination in mind: The hordes of drunken, Strip-wandering gamblers looking for a little hooch. It’s a distillate of non-GMO…
Review: Old Carter Bourbon Batch 5
Earlier this year we reviewed our first Old Carter whiskey, an impressive 12-year-old single barrel Kentucky bourbon released in 2019. We haven’t seen any single barrels from the Carters yet in 2020, but several batched whiskeys have hit the shelves in Kentucky, California, and D.C. We got our hands on the latest bourbon, Batch 5,…
Review: Maker’s Mark SE4+PR5 2020 Limited Release
Maker’s Mark may have been late to the special whiskey release game, but the distillery is finally kicking out the jams and making limited edition bourbons an annual thing. It started with last year’s Maker’s Mark RC6, and it continues in 2020 with what is formally called Maker’s Mark 2020 Limited Release. I guess the…
