What Do You Want Out Of This?

When it comes to a bottle of Bourbon, I know what I want:

  • I want it to taste good, even great if possible

  • Generally, I like it somewhere between 46% - 54% ABV

  • I don’t want to pay more than $50

  • It would be nice if the company that made it is the company I’m buying it from, rather than paying extra for a brokered whiskey

When it comes to New Riff Distillery in Newport, Kentucky (a stone’s throw from downtown Cincinnati), I get exactly what I want from every single bottle of whiskey they make. It’s a big part of what draws me to the brand and makes me such an avid supporter: a complete commitment to pure drinkability. Granted, you could say that most bottles of Buffalo Trace, Wild Turkey, Heaven Hill, Jim Beam and Four Roses meet the same qualifications, but the key point for me is this: not all of them do.

What motivates people to spend more than $100 on Bourbon today? It depends on what they want out of the bottle. Some people just want to fit in with the collective mindset of today’s passionate Bourbon aficionados. Others want to appear rich or affect good taste. Some want the affirmation of other hobbyists on social media. Others take comfort in the authority of a big brand name, no different than buying a shirt that says Gucci on it because it says Gucci.

All cynicism aside, New Riff speaks to me as both a whiskey drinker and a marketing professional because, as a company, it almost completely eschews the tenants driving today’s whiskey consumerism. As a brand, it’s forcing customers to make a qualitative evaluation completely on their own, without age statements, high price tags, or the pervasive and often forced collectability that makes consumers foam at the mouth. Almost all of their whiskies are between 4-5 years old, and there’s nothing over $49.99 at Mission.

So how do you know if it’s good? You taste it. That’s it. The rest is up to you.

That’s what Vic and I did last month when we visited New Riff and selected a private barrel for ourselves. If you missed the post from our trip this past August, we selected this cask only six weeks ago and it’s already bottled and in our possession! At four and a half years of age, this little workhorse Bourbon has the most wonderful aromas. I can’t stop nosing and nosing it, over and over again. Sweet caramel, cola, toasted oak, hazelnuts, fruit, baking spices, fresh sawdust, and more are waiting for you each time you bring the glass up to your face.

While the nose is pure elegance, the palate is a punchy little number, bringing the spice at 107 proof and fleshing out the finish with stone fruits and brown sugar galore. It might as well be a white peach dusted with C&H!! It’s like licking the batter as a kid.

New Riff Mission Exclusive Single Barrel #9514 107.3 Proof Cask Strength Kentucky Bourbon $49.99

I can’t promise you’ll like this single barrel of New Riff as much as I do, but I’m fairly confident most Bourbon fans will find something to sing about. Again, however, it depends on what they want out of their bottle. The only thing you can brag about here is the fact that you got a delicious Bourbon for a great price. That’s not always enough for some folks.

We’ve also got new batches of the standard New Riff BIB Bourbon and Rye back in stock, along with new non-exclusive single barrels at various proofs. You can see the full selection here.

-David Driscoll

Single Barrel Wheater

Most of you likely know the story of Greg Metze and Old Elk. Greg was the master distiller for MGP Distillery in Indiana for 38 years, dating back to the old Seagrams days, and was the company contemporary of the great Jim Rutledge. Before moving over to Colorado’s Old Elk, he made sure there was enough MGP Bourbon to get them through the early years and that brings us to today’s single barrel. 

We picked out this 6 year old wheated Bourbon almost a year ago and it’s finally here! MGP’s wheated Bourbon recipe uses 51% corn and a shockingly high 45% wheat component in its mash bill, so it’s a fun side-by-side taste experience with some of your other favorite wheaters. The nose of this whiskey is charred oak with fruit tea, the vanilla bringing up the rear. At 112.8 proof, you would expect a nice little punch, but the initial experience is sweet and mellow, just like a wheated whiskey should taste. The heat makes itself known on the finish as the richness fades and the grainier components of the Bourbon come to light. All in all, it’s a nice alternative to cask strength Maker’s Mark, especially since Maker’s doesn’t do a straight single barrel release. Having just tasted it again while writing this, I can still taste the baking spices and the fruitiness of the whiskey minutes later. It really does taste like a spiced fruit tea!

-David Driscoll

Terre Rouge: The Best California Wine You Don't Know About

This past Sunday, while visiting in my parents in Modesto, I took mom and pop with me for a little trip to the El Dorado Hills and one of my new favorite California producers: Terre Rouge. Started by the Rhône Ranger himself Bill Easton, along with his wife Jane O’Riordan, the wines from Terre Rouge have become something of an insider’s secret among California’s wine professionals, and for good reason. While other winemakers are selling you their most recent vintage, whether the wine is ready to drink or not, Terre Rouge is holding back its bottles until future notice; they’re not released until Bill and Jane think they’re ready to drink.

To give you an example, we’re selling the 2020 and 2021 releases across the board for most California producers right now. Yet, Terre Rouge’s current release for its beloved Tête-à-Tête rouge is from 2015. The French call it élevage, meaning “to raise the wine,” but Bill just calls it common sense. Why would you allow a customer to drink your wine before its peak?

Granted, that was a rhetorical question I just asked, but I’ll tell you the honest answer: American winemakers don’t practice élevage with their wines because it’s not cost effective and most customers won’t know the difference anyway. Why hassle with aging the wines yourself? Let the consumer deal with that burden. However, given that 95% of American wine drinkers wouldn’t necessarily know to age a $16.99 bottle of Terre Rouge Tête-à-Tête for seven years in order to get the best out of it, one could argue that holding back the wines until they’re ready to shine is a pretty good strategy in our pop-and-pour wine culture.

Indeed, what better marketing is there than an incredible wine that tastes amazing at first sip?! Given that we’ve sold more than 90 bottles of the Tête-à-Tête this month in our Pasadena store alone, we’ve seen that marketing work first hand, day after day, week after week. What makes the Terre Rouge so good besides the élevage? The soils. Terre Rouge translates to red earth, and that’s exactly what you see when you step into its hillside vineyards near Fiddletown: dusty and compressed granite soils, combined with volcanic stones, giving way to 60-80 year old vines that produce concentrated berries with fantastic flavor.

Bill was there to meet us at 11 AM on a beautiful California morning, wearing a big smile and excited to talk about the history of the vineyards in the area. We piled in the car and followed his lead past abandoned gold mines and 100+ year old vineyard sites, with Bill telling the stories behind each location. In the photo above, Bill is leaning against a Mission vine planted in the 1870s that’s still going strong today! Reminiscent of the gnarled old vines that often appear in photos of the Rhône Valley, those same varietals have thrived in the California foothills: Grenache, Syrah, Mourvedre, and so on. The Tête-à-Tête is a classic GSM Rhône blend and it really captures the essence of its muse, along with the ripeness of pure Golden State produce. It was amazing to walk the vineyards and taste the fruit right off the vine!

My parents were equally impressed. As veterans of the California foothills wine scene, this was their first trip to Terre Rouge and we actually left with a collection of their white Rhône expressions in hand: Viognier, Roussanne, and Marsanne! Even with the California heat, these high elevation sites are still cool enough to preserve the acidity in both white and red varietals and frost has actually been an issue for Bill. In some of the deeper crevasses, entire vineyards lost their fruit earlier in the year due to freezing. When you’re at 3200 feet elevation, you’re at the mercy of the temperature swings, but you’re also getting real mountain fruit, which has better structure and potential for again.

If you want to see for yourself, grab a bottle of the amazing 2015 Tête-à-Tête and see be amazed. Seven years of bottle age, 60-80 year old vines, mountain fruit, made by a veteran winemaking duo, and it’s only $16.99. Find me a better California wine for that price with the same level of complexity, and I’ll be impressed.

-David Driscoll

Dashing Into Fall

With Fall just around the corner, it’s time to start thinking about heartier reds and fuller-bodied California classics. The somewhat cooler weather this week in Los Angeles saw our wine team dipping into new expressions from some of our favorite in-state producers and no wine impressed us more, dollar for dollar, than the new 2021 vintage of the Dashe Vineyard Select Zinfandel at $17.99.

For the uninitiated, Dashe Cellars is a husband and wife winemaking team of Michael and Anne Dashe, whose combined 40-plus years of experience at Château Lafite-Rothschild, Ridge Vineyards, Cloudy Bay, Far Niente, Chappellet, and Schramsberg Wine Cellars should immediately grab your attention. Drawing on this wealth of experience, the Dashes create vineyard-focused wines that capture the complexity and character of top vineyards throughout Sonoma County and beyond. The wines are usually organic, biodynamic, or sustainably farmed at the very minimum. With a focus on older vines, steep hillside locations, rocky soils and stressful growing conditions, they work closely with their growers to ensure careful vineyard management and low yields. 

The Dashe’s experience working at Ridge stood out to me when tasting the new 2021 Vineyard Select Zinfandel because it's absolutely reminiscent of Ridge Zinfandel. It has the same elegance and concentration, along with a similarly-styled blend of 78% Zinfandel, 15% Teroldego, 7% Tannat, each fermented separately before assemblage. If you even remotely like Zinfandel, you owe it to yourself to try this bottle. Due to fires in Northern California over the last two growing seasons, it’s the first time this wine has been made since 2018, so the demand is high. 

With most stores in California at $24.99, Mission’s price of $17.99 is fantastic. You’re getting top quality organic fruit, curated and blended by two masters, aged 14 months in French Oak, for less than $20 a bottle. It’s a juicy and supple Zinfandel, but with ample structure and complete grace: dark red berries, hints of richness front the oak, but restrained at 14% ABV.

Again: think Ridge Zinfandel, but for less than half the price.

-David Driscoll

Clydeside Arrives!

As you may have noticed on our Instagram site yesterday, one of our favorite whiskies from this year’s Scotland trip is finally available at Mission: the Clydeside Stobcross.

If you need a refresher on Glasgow’s premier Scotch distillery, check out this post from early May. The Stobcross is a young whisky, and unfortunately we couldn’t get it into the U.S. at the $59 mark I was hoping for, but it’s a fantastic preview of what’s to come from the Morrison family’s latest enterprise. The sweetness of the malt, the purity of the distillate, and the freshness of the flavor are unrivaled by many of the younger malts I’ve tasted in my career.

As you can see, I loved the whisky so much I bought an entire barrel for myself!

-David Driscoll

Curado

As we talked about in last week’s blog about consumption, there’s a day of reckoning coming for real Tequila given the shortage of agave and the fact that much of it is being wasted on diffuser brands with artificial sweeteners, coloring agents, and chemicals. There’s also a huge gap with current aged stocks, with some brands looking at 2024 and beyond until their reposado, añejo, and extra añejo labels come back online. 

Some brands, like G4, are considering blending the añejo they have left with current blanco stocks in order to create a volume joven label that can sustain them over the next year. Other brands, like Ocho, are coming up with interesting and exciting new expressions like these three new Curado Blanco Tequilas.

I already know your first query: If these are blanco Tequilas, why are they golden in color? 

Great question! Here’s the answer: two of the most respected names in the real Tequila industry—Carlos Camarena and the late Tomas Estes—decided to collaborate on one of the coolest new creations I’ve ever witnessed as a professional. 100% blanco Tequila distillates, distilled from blue agave, but infused with the cooked piñas of other agave varietals. 

Here’s how it works: Agave Azul from Arandas, Espadín from Oaxaca, and Cupreata from Michoacan are cooked and then transported to Jalisco where they’re placed into cotton bags like tea leaves. From there, they’re dipped into the stainless steel tanks at Ocho distillery and infused with 55% ABV blanco Tequila for five days. 21 kilos of agave are used for every 1000 liters of Tequila (for all you tea nerds out there).

The result is three different expressions that use the same base Ocho Tequila distillate, but a different infusion: Agave Azul, Espadín, and Cupreata. Each of them has a certain sweetness of fruit that somewhat mimics the weight of a reposado, but with the vibrancy and spice of a classic blanco. The Espadín and Cupreata expressions translate some of the smoke as well from the roasted agaves, sort of hinting at mezcal. All three are outstanding and priced right at $45.99. You’re going to want them.

Two of the biggest names in unadulterated Tequila have created the only “adulterated” Tequila I'm interested in drinking!

-David Driscoll

William Grant's New Showstopper

I know many of you have long graduated past the standard Glenfiddich 12 year, but earlier this May in Scotland, along with at our rooftop cigar event with William Grant this summer, I drank copious glasses of the flagship malt and I was pretty damn impressed. Given that the average boutique vodka or gin these days costs $30, to get the quality one finds in the Glenfiddich 12 for $34.99 is damn right incredible. I don't think anything else comes close.

This week, however, the kind folks at William Grant have upped the ante.

For an extra five bucks, you can now get 12 years of cask maturation PLUS an Amontillado sherry cask finish, and—let me tell you—that little enhancement takes this whisky to a whole new level. It still has all the maltiness of the classic 12 year in its core, but the mid-palate and finish are like biting into a flourless brownie that's been dusted with cocoa. And it's just $39.95 on our ad special right now. The question you need to be asking yourself now is: can you afford NOT to buy a few bottles of this?

Glenfiddich 12 Year Old Sherry Cask Single Malt Whisky $39.95

-David Driscoll

Eddie's Pick #1

If you're a Wild Turkey fan, then today is going to be a very good day for you at Mission! Not only do we have the first of numerous Russell's Reserve single barrels for you today, but also a hot deal on the W.B. Saffell that has eluded other California retailers until now. No worries, however, as we got a fantastic price that I think you'll all appreciate.

First thing's first:

Russell's Reserve Mission Exclusive "Eddie's Pick #1" Single Barrel 0669 55% ABV Kentucky Bourbon $69.99 (LIMIT 1)

Yes, we could have waited until we actually visited Wild Turkey last month to pick out our single barrels in person. But that would have meant another 5-7 months before those barrels would have hit our shelves. Knowing that my friend Eddie Russell can be more than trusted to select a few honey barrels on our behalf, we let him do the selection for us and—BOY OH BOY— did he knock it out of the park. Of the three casks that are going to be released over the next few weeks, I'm not sure which of them I like the most!!

Let's talk about Barrel 0669 though.

Dumped just two months short of its 10th birthday, this whiskey is everything we love to love about Wild Turkey in a glass: a big candy corn and caramel nose, lush sweetness on the palate balanced by rye spice and barrel char, candied orange, creme brulée, you name it. I wish I could let everyone buy five of these because you're going to want five, but I can only offer you one. Also this cask only offered 60% of the volume of a normal barrel, so it concentrated down. You're all going to love it.

The fun doesn't stop there, however! Grab some W.B. Saffell, made with 6-12 year old Wild Turkey Bourbons for the hot price of $39.95! This half bottle of deliciousness packs a gorgeous richness and delicacy for the dollar.

W.B. Saffell 107 Proof Kentucky Bourbon $39.95

No limits on these guys for the moment, but like the Russell's Reserve single barrel all the inventory is in Pasadena, so use the notes if you want to pick up at another Mission location.

On a side note, our new warehouse is not available as a pick up location for the moment, so there's no way to order pick up for items that are on the web, but unavailable in the stores. Soon as we get a fix for that, I'll let you know.

-David Driscoll