If you’re free for lunch today, tune into Instagram at 1 PM to see Heaven Hill master distiller Conor O’Driscoll tune in and talk about Bourbon.
We’ll ask him all the important questions: about his thoughts the Kardashians, the latest episode of the Real Housewives, and whether he prefers Botox to a facelift.
See you then!
-David Driscoll
One of the most thoroughly enjoyable half-hours of my life in recent memory.
-David Driscoll
If you’ve…
Never tuned into one of our Instagram Live segments before, and…
Been interested in learning more about cigars…
…you should check out this afternoon’s show with Matt Booth from Room 101 starting at 4 PM over at the @missionliquor handle.
Not only is Matt Booth one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met, he’s a true character in every sense of the word. Let’s put it this way: he will not put you to sleep.
Matt’s Room 101 brand and the Shadow Army it has spawned is more of a lifestyle than any one particular business. From rock and roll jewelry (Matt started as a jeweler), to cigars, to clothing, to custom-made knives, to gin, Matt’s entrepreneurial energy knows no limits.
You should check this one out.
-David Driscoll
You know what you need for this weekend’s warm weather drinking session? This bottle in the image above: a light, carbonic red wine made with 100% grenache that belongs in your refrigerator rather than your wine cabinet.
After chilling it down, I housed an entire bottle in about twenty minutes last weekend with the help of my wife, and I’m going back in for more this evening. The 2020 Petrichor Carma Estate Grenache is the sub-$20 bottle of explosive, juicy, mood-lifting party wine you’ve been looking for and it has a story. First off, all of the fruit was farmed by my friend Steve Matthiasson, the most coveted viticulturalist in California right now. It’s 100% organic and 100% carbonic, meaning rather than press the juice and add yeast to start fermentation, the grape clusters are piled into a vat with carbon dioxide and the fermentation actually begins inside the grape itself (like Beaujolais Nouveau wines).
The result is a bright and easy-drinking wine with low levels of tannin that lights up your palate and drinks like a big bottle of alcoholic fruit punch. Trust me, you’ll want one. Get Chinese take out, get Texas BBQ, get Indian food, get Burritos to-go—anything with spice and flavor—and this wine will knock your fucking socks off.
Then, when you’re done with the Petrichor and your Friday dinner, grab one of the new sticks we just received from Room 101 and sit out on the patio with one of the coolest cigars I’ve ever come across. Matt Booth is sort of like the John Glaser of cigars: a guy who got into the business and began making his own non-descript blend of tobaccos with a number of different producers all over the world. You don’t know what’s in it, but since Matt had a hand in it, you know it’s good.
But whereas John Glaser is a buttoned-down, clean cut guy who lives in London, Matt Booth started as a jeweler in downtown LA, making chains and skull rings for rock stars and bikers. Everything about him is edgy, and seeing that I’ve been spending a lot of time on the phone with him as of late, he’s beginning to rub off on me. As an example, this is how Matt describes his Doomsayer cigar:
In light of certain and final doom, I do not offer any solutions nor salvation. I offer you escapism in the form of a value premium cigar. Place gingerly into your suck-hole, ignite and consume. Allow yourself to drift away from the looming clouds of nothingness and psychologically emancipate yourself, at least for a moment – for a price that is more than tangible. You’re welcome.
No specs. No details. Nothing. Either get on board, or get out of the way.
I love Fridays.
-David Driscoll
It’s hot in California right now. And it’s not cooling down anytime soon.
Not only is it hot, it’s dry. There’s no water. Which not only means drier soils and more intense heat, it also means less electricity since a number of California’s grids are powered by hydroelectric dams. That means rolling blackouts in the middle of the summer because we can’t support all the A/C units. Which means—when you really need air conditioning the most—we’re going to be in trouble.
In the wine industry, the drought and the heat present multiple challenges, beyond the annual wildfires that have plagued California wine country for the last decade. As an example, when temperatures rise, wine dies. You leave a case of wine bottles in the car on a hot day and you can kiss them goodbye.
That’s why we’ve activated the weather warning for all shipments currently on the Mission website. Hard spirits can stand up to the heat just fine, but bottles may still leak if left in hot temperatures for too long.
If you can pick up your orders from a nearby Mission location, choosing in-store pick up is the best option under the current conditions.
And don’t forget to stay hydrated! If you booze as much as I do, you need to consistently consume water throughout the day. The heat can turn a foggy head into a full-blown hangover in a minutes, if you’re not drinking H2O.
The scary part is we’re just getting started. Summer hasn’t even really begun and we’ve already hit 100+ on back-to-back days here in the valley, forcing us to adapt our shipping schedule and hold back a number of sensitive packages. As California continues to warm, I fear we’re going to enter a permanent situation that completely eliminates the shipment of wine and spirits for almost half of the year, or places the risk on to the consumer as to whether they want to bite the bullet.
We’re not making things easy on ourselves out here, that’s for sure. I see hundreds of gigantic trucks heading back and forth to the Inland Empire each day, pumping out a gazillion tons of pollution into the already-thick atmosphere. This is the price we are paying for same-day Amazon delivery and the infrastructure required to maintain it.
Yes, California will require more than half of all trucks to be zero-emission by 2035, and all trucks to be zero-emission by 2045. But that’s a long way off. In the meantime, you’re going to see your life affected in a number of ways that move beyond air quality and outside temperatures.
As an example, if you rely on wine and spirits shipments for your daily booze, you’re going to have to start stockpiling in the winter to get you through the summer.
-David Driscoll
At the Pasadena store, we had ourselves a pretty amazing Record Store Day party. Devo’s Gerald Casale was in the house, tasting wine with the staff, signing autographs for customers, and taking photos with fans.
Unlike the real Record Store Day, our event was calm, relaxed, social, and easy-to-navigate.
Meanwhile, at actual record stores, there were lines around the block, scalpers using family members to get around purchase limits, and online queuing systems that forced customers to wait hours for their shot at their record of choice.
I was lucky enough to snag one copy (for myself) of Gerald’s solo release from a store in Chattanooga, TN. Later that evening, I was able to snag a second (for Gerald, who wasn’t given a copy of his own record) after another store in Orange County put their remaining inventory online.
Remind you of shopping for rare whiskey? Because it’s pretty much the same thing. By the end of the day, you could buy any Record Store Day release online for two to three times the MSRP. In that sense, RSD has become almost as profitable for secondary flippers as it has for actual record stores.
We’re living in an era where limited runs of pop culture reference points have become quite valuable; completely changing the intention of those items in the process. The exception has become the rule.
What was once intended as a cool way to reward serious customers and retailers alike has become a capitalistic sport for casual customers who really don’t care about the products they’re buying—which is why I’m generally turned off by both limited edition records and whiskies at this point.
In response, we created a real experience at Mission. No lines, no craziness, just real connections with no limits and no secondary flippers. Just the way I like it.
-David Driscoll
Chosen by yours truly during a live Instagram barrel selection earlier in the year, this nine year old beauty was barreled on 10/20/2011 and selected on 2/28/2021 at 120 proof, giving it more than 9 years in new, charred American oak. Given the 60% ABV, the whiskey wears that muscle well, balanced in its strength with superb richness and a nuttiness that Beam whiskey ambassador Amanda Gunderson referred to as "a pecan bomb" during the broadcast. The name stuck. The nose of this whiskey is simply sublime—robust vanilla, baking spices, and a big bag of pecans—with an elegant sweetness of oak on the palate that finishes with brown sugar and molasses. Very limited, we don't expect this to stick around long.
-David Driscoll
I remember going to Burgundy in 2017 to taste the 2016 vintage and thinking I was stuck in a Twilight Zone episode.
You would ask a producer about his or her wine, and they would invariably say the exact same thing:
“The vineyard does all the work. I just try to stay out of the way.”
Bullshit.
That’s not to say that terroir doesn’t exist, or that non-interventionist wines aren’t good, but rather that winemakers still have to know something about making wine in order to produce something good. More importantly, they have to make decisions about winemaking that will ultimately affect the outcome of their wine’s flavor.
William Kelley touched on this naturalistic fallacy in an article from the Wine Advocate earlier this year, writing: “Winemakers have never been so self-effacing. Discuss their aesthetic ambitions with producers in practically any region today, and typical responses will likely emphasize a desire to bottle the taste of terroir in as pure a state as possible. In formulations such as these, wines are seemingly more discovered than made.”
Why are winemakers talking this way? Because that’s what sells right now: PURITY.
And it goes far beyond wine.
Single barrel cask strength whiskey also equates to purity for many of today’s modern whiskey drinkers. They want it untouched, untainted, and unmanipulated by the hand of man (despite the fact it was completely manipulated by man before it ended up in the barrel). When a single barrel is “chosen,” it’s exactly as Kelley stated: whiskey fans act as if the whiskey was discovered rather than made.
More importantly, a number of them are selecting their own barrels and taking the credit for discovering it! As if that was the hard part! Or worse, the more interesting part.
Where did this now-obnoxious trend begin, you ask? I think it started roughly fifteen years ago with the industry’s push for authenticity, before escalating into a modern-day purity contest. As an example, many of my wine industry colleagues became obsessed with doing things like the French do, and suddenly it became a competition to see who could be more French-like. People started wearing scarves around their neck to work and cooking old school recipes even my French friends won’t eat. Today it’s turned into more of a neurotic obsession than an homage to a culture.
Kelley asks an important question in his essay: “Does the pursuit of purity and “transparency” end in authenticity, or merely in homogeneous neutrality?”
You obviously know how I feel. The latter.
Do you know how fucking boring it is to chase purity, completely ignoring stylistic ingenuity, flavor, and enjoyment? I’m boring myself just writing about it now.
Even beyond the lameness, Kelley’s point is that there isn’t any such thing as a pure wine, anyway. He writes: “The fallacy itself is the notion that wine itself is immanent, existing in some sort of idealized state independent of actual wine production, waiting to be revealed.”
But what absolutely excited me while reading Kelley’s article was his reference to “patina,” a term I only discovered late last year while learning about vintage mechanical watches. Patina refers to the nicks, scratches, and general wear-and tear that gives each watch character. Whereas purists might see these scratches as flaws or reasons to downgrade a watch’s value, others see them as a unique and valuable character, almost like vintage-worn denim or a beat-up leather jacket.
While correlating patina to winemaking, Kelley writes: “The wines that excite me the most, I have come to realize, are all intensely patinated: the creations of strong personalities and clear visions, they are marked by the hands that made them even while they express the place where they were grown.”
In short, the enjoyment of terroir or purity can exist hand-in-hand with individualistic expression. It’s not an either/or proposition.
Like I’ve said repeatedly as of late: the best whiskies I’ve ever had were always blends of barrels created by someone who knew what they were doing. But you also have to start with great ingredients.
-David Driscoll